My News and Thoughts

Although I get at least one message like this a week, and sometimes as many as three, I sometimes don't have explicit permission from the message's author to post it, or I'm sometimes too tied up in other work obligations to do so. Luckily, this following message's author made clear that I could share her story, and it came to me on a week when I had a second to transfer that story to this public space.

I make it available to you for the same reason she made it available to me, and for the same reason other such messages are here: in other people's stories of their struggles with eating, weight and body image, we find some comfort, some encouragement to keep working to make ourselves better and a community of sorts.

"Dear Mr. Bruni,

Thanks to a full-time job, small freelance positions, and a deep commitment to a long distance relationship, I hadn’t read a book since the summer of 2009—a choice I didn’t necessarily make, but rather it just happened. A former English major, this is the longest dry spell I’ve ever been through. For some reason, no one ever tells you that 23 is intense and chaotic, though I’ve found hard work and tremendous tenacity yields moderately rewarding experiences. At any rate, I picked up my first two books in over a year over this past Labor Day weekend—two beautiful memoirs about coming of age with some sort of mental debilitation. They were John Elder Robison’s Look me in the Eye and your own exploration of adolescence, family, friends, ingestion, and mental maturation.

"I wanted to genuinely thank you, Mr. Bruni. To be honest, I came to my own conclusions about my relationship with food just recently, without any actual help from you or your book; but your writing—the elegant prose and quirky anecdotes that recall struggles similar to my own served as much needed confirmation that I’m not alone in this over-indulgent world. Yes, you can suffer from an eating disorder of the mind and test your own “food science” and obscure theories without formally not eating; yes, you can feel an extreme disjoint between your brain and your stomach; and yes, although you never become unaware of a partially great, albeit partially awkward, relationship with food, you can return to a sense of normalcy. All of this, as you write, takes both care and candor. But you know this already.

"Like you, I come from a family who appreciated food long before Dunkin Donuts became ultra calorie-cognizant. I like to think that my only true affiliation with my Jewish heritage is my appreciation for holiday meals equally for the company and for the cuisine. My greatest memories? Fall evenings when my dad returned home from work at his small-town chocolate store just five minutes from the house, promptly at 6:00, when my mom would serve my (much) older brothers and I golden chicken cutlets—meagerly blotted of their oils—and a hefty bowl of bow-tie pasta with Canadian bacon (bad Jews, I know) and pine nuts. Winters when my mom figured out how to continue to barbeque succulent sirloins from the butcher shop of my favorite restaurant, Bryant & Cooper—my preference over Peter Lugers for the simplicity of the salt-and-pepper seasoning and their exclusion of a cloying butter glaze. Even I had my limits. Butter on beef was one of them.

"During my middle school years I truly believed that the higher the calorie count, the better, if only to piss off my home-economics teacher who practically fainted when we were told to bring in the box of our typical breakfast to learn about nutrition. She scorned me for using two packs of frosting atop a single cinnamon roll, though I wasn’t sure what was so horrible about 700 calories a serving at the time. I was a growing girl! Plus (and I’ll give you a preemptive warning and request that you don’t slap me for this) I was skinny. A twig of a girl growing up, thanks to my family’s speedy metabolism.

"And we were lucky—because, while other indulgences didn’t trail far behind, chocolate was my weakness, of which we had an endless supply at all times. My dad is the 3rd generation of a 4th generation chocolate store, my brothers representing the latter era. So sugar was just part of my blood. Nut patties, dollops of fresh and homemade caramel, radioactively green marzipan enveloped in both milk and dark chocolate—I was impartial to what or how much I ate. For a while, it didn’t matter either.

"It wasn’t until I hit the years in which women inevitably grow out instead of up that I recognized the possibilities of weight gain. The outcome wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. While I’m not sure I have the capacity to quite balloon out, I could look great, or I could veer to the mushy side. College, with the delicious offerings of Ann Arbor, like craft beer, deep fried breakfast potatoes, post-football burritos, and, oh yeah, late night chicken ziti rolls to cure the drunk munchies, I certainly got mushy. The typical freshman 15, no doubt. The next four years would be a struggle to figure out how to find balance, and living abroad in Prague for four months, frequenting fried cheese sandwiches and pork knuckle, didn’t help.

"Ten pounds chunkier than healthy and twenty pounds beyond what I ideally wanted to be, I embarked on a journey I wasn’t prepared for. It lasted from the summer of my Junior year until I graduated, and it happened during a time that also entailed a terrible break up from a boyfriend/best friend, the loss of a close friend’s mom to breast cancer, and the daunting task of graduating and finding a job in this economically depressed city. I was sent into a whirlwind of consumption contemplations, because weight was something I needed to control. I should add that my mom and brother have ulcerative colitis, the Eastern European stomach affiliation which causes severe weight loss. Was it wrong to compare myself with the sickly-thin?

"Without boring you with too much detail and sounding like every other girl striving for a svelte figure, I can sum it up with the message I tried to relay in a personal essay I wrote for my English class during Senior year. I was unhappy with myself. The ultimate representation of myself is and always will be my body, which I had a rapidly deteriorating relationship with. But ultimately, I wasn’t starving for food—I was starving for stability.

"When life spirals out of control, I think that the most insightful of individuals are able to at some point find a clearing—a space in time when you can look down upon yourself and reflect. In so many ways, running was just this. It was, I like to think, a mix of endorphins and the chance to be alone with myself in nature, in the city, with music, in silence. It was my time, not anyone else’s. Beginning with a mile or two at first, I didn’t see any changes. One affliction women suffer is that it takes an enormous effort to drop five pounds, let alone ten or fifteen, whereas a guy can switch to Bud Light and run for the bus and drop a pant size. You saw it yourself—you could fluctuate somewhat easily if you put your mind to it. I started with coming up with my own comparable ideas about food, and how to eat it in order to lose weight. I tried things (though I hate the word things, I’m using it to refer to much of what you talked about) I’m ashamed of, though it didn’t last long. I now run between 3-6 miles, 5 days a week whether the air is humid or frozen. I do yoga. It’s my time, and it proved worth it in the end. I found mental and physical stability in just an hour a day.

"Like you conclude, there are relapses. There are self-doubts. There are good days, and then there are not-so-good days. To me, the strongest person can simply recognize this and admit to both the positive and negative, the good and the bad. It’s about awareness more than anything, which is why I have permanently iked on my hand as a reminder the Yiddish words ich bin, which translates to “I am.” You can fill in the blank from there in an effort to be mindful of every decision in life. You can be happy, tired, fat, skinny, purple, if that’s what you choose. Just be it, and be it really well.

"Your book, your writing, and your story unequivocally helped me not to close a chapter of my life but to reflect on it enormously."

A mother who is apparently familiar with my story, perhaps because she read "Born Round," recently wrote:

"My seven-year-old son eats constantly. He is growing (out as well as up) but, to be honest, he just loves food. I dont want to give him a complex but what do you do when he is begging for a snack 30 minutes after supper? What could your mom have done differently, if anything, to ward off your eating?"

Because a lot of parents face the challenge of a child who eats too much and is gaining weight in a way that's unhealthy and could wind up causing the child unhappiness, I thought I'd share much of my response to her:

"I don't know that one answer fits all, or what would have been better for me . . . You could tell him that you feel bad that he's hungry so soon after dinner, and suggest he eat a bigger dinner to avoid that, and then make the expanded portion of the dinner something relatively healthier and lower in calories than the snack would be.

"You could tell him in a very non-appearance-related, non-judgmental, flat tone that you think that so much snacking isn't 'healthy,' without using the word 'fat,' and say that in your interest to encourage healthier eating, you'd like to strike a deal with him whereby if he wants a snack within two hours of the end of a meal, it has to be x, y or z: stuff that doesn't include ice cream, cookies, etc.

"What I think you must NOT do is ban those things from his life entirely and demonize them. You can try to make clear that this isn't about the intrinsic evil of those foods or about their caloric load; it's about the importance of balanced, healthy eating. I think language is key, and it's vital to frame the goal as healthier eating, not eating that will avoid excess pounds and help him look better per se.

"We're such an appearance-conscious society that whenever anything gets framed in terms of staying slim or staying attractive, then the impulses prodding us toward actions in conflict with thinness and conventional physical beauty get suffused with so much anxiety that we can go off the rails.

"Beyond all of that, are you setting an example for him by not snacking a lot yourself, by exercising with apparent enthusiasm and enjoyment, etc? And, without making your home an ascetic, fraught environment that makes him crave 'forbidden' foods even MORE, are you making sure there's a preponderance of healthy alternatives around? It stands to reason--and experts say--that children emulate their parents' eating and dieting and exercising behavior as they do so much else. My story suggests that: Mom's eating adjustments were often odd rituals and fad diets. And thus mine were too."

I want to add a few quick things that, in my hurry to make sure I sent her a response before getting sidetracked by other tasks, I didn't put in.

She notes that at 7, he clearly loves food, really loves it. I'm assuming she means in part that he has a big appetite, but also that food exerts a sort of special pull on him. If that's so, I wonder--an open question--if making food a BIGGER part of his life, and not in terms of quantity, might be constructive. Let me explain: I found that when I started writing about food as a critic and hunting down the best this, that and the other, it was a bit easier (though still not easy!) to restrain the sheer volume of my eating than in the past, because I'd channeled my food obsessions in a different direction. I was fixated on food quality, food adventures, etc. Discernment replaced a purer, more banal gluttony, and in that way, I think I moved a bit closer to the Western European attitude about, and approach to, food. As I describe in "Born Round," it helped that I turned this corner in large part while living in Italy and observing how quality trumped quantity there.

Can that logic and dynamic be applied to a child? If a food-fixated kid is encouraged to help shop for the food and cook the food and try this and that and the other, can the "one more cookie please please please" requests be diminished?

Did you catch the front page story in the New York Times on Saturday about Thomas' English muffins?

On the surface, it was a tale of corporate secrets and intrigue, and a good tale at that. But what I loved about it--and why I bring it up--is that it was also an affirmation that a very particular aspect of an otherwise ordinary food can make it magical, irresistible, addictive. It showed how much the details count, and how specifically and painstakingly the details are sometimes achieved: exact dough composition, exact baking temperature, etc., etc.

In other words it was a tribute to food obsessiveness, in terms of both the making and the eating. (Here's a link to the story, by the way, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/business/07muffin.html)

I've always liked Thomas' muffins, and I've liked them for those very nooks and crannies that their maker lords over rival muffin manufacturers. (The Times story was about how carefully the Thomas' folks guard the recipe that gives rise to the nooks and crannies.) Can the topography of a muffin half really matter so much? Oh yes. It makes the textural experience of a toasted Thomas' unique, but more than that it governs an uneven butter distribution that's the real clincher. Butter spread on a hot Thomas' muffin slides down a jagged edge and gathers in what looks like a minuscule tidal pool, and when your bite takes in that pool, you get a rush of liquid richness more intense than you'd expected. The decadence takes you by delicious surprise.

Am I mooning too much over a mass-market muffin? Maybe. But it's probably good to remember, at a time when we're exalting all things artisanal, that "mass-market" isn't always and necessarily awful. At least not from a gustatory (as opposed to ethical) perspective. Like Hellman's mayo and Heinz ketchup, Thomas' muffins are mighty impressive for what they are. And like Hellman's and Heinz, they engender fierce, fierce loyalty. That was one of my thoughts as I read the Times piece, and it was another prompt for this post.

The tight lid that the makers of Thomas' muffins keep over the recipe and production process reflects the tight allegiances that we as eaters form with our preferred foods. When I was a kid, if one of my brothers or my sister or my father opened the bread drawer in the morning to discover that my mother had for some reason purchased an English muffin other than Thomas', a groan went up. Maybe even a wail. A hope had been dashed; an anticipation of a particular and dependable pleasure had gone unrewarded. And in the Bruni family, no letdown was as painful as a food letdown.

Speaking of letdowns, I had a lobster roll over the weekend. I was by the sea, and there were seafood shacks lining the road, and it seemed criminal not to stop at one at some point and have both a lobster roll and some fried clams.

The fried clams were fine, mainly because they weren't strips, but rather whole clams, bellies included. Belly inclusion is crucial. (Can I get that stitched onto a throw pillow?)

The lobster roll, though, was a bust. Instead of chunks of lobster meat, there were thin, stringy strands of it: it had been shredded, more or less, before being mixed with similarly shredded cabbage and celery and the like. The result was a braid-cum-mash that made it impossible, visually, to see exactly how much lobster was there. (That was the goal and point, I think.)

As I registered the lobster roll's general blandness, I realized that two out of three times, I regret getting a lobster roll, and that the lobster roll, like the street-vendor pretzel, is one of those foods that's usually more pleasurable in theory than in practice. The idea of the lobster roll most often trumps the reality of the lobster roll.

Those of us who love great lobster and have tried at least a few dozen lobster rolls in our lives have eaten some sublime ones, with tender HUNKS of flavorful lobster meat that weren't diluted with too much dressing, too many sidekicks. We got lobster, glorious lobster, without work, in big mouthfuls. And the memory of that keeps us going back for more.

But the serendipitous lobster roll, ordered and chosen at a random place, without prior research or reliable recommendations from discerning friends, typically disappoints. And it disappoints at a high price point: insult upon injury. It's as if many purveyors of lobster rolls figure that a smattering of lobster, a buttery roll/bun and an iconic phrase are enough. No real effort or merit necessary.

The fried clam, in contrast, never bums me out as much. It's cheaper. And whatever else it does or doesn't have going for it, it's fried.

Usually I use this site and these posts to talk about food-related or weight-related matters.

But why not talk about family here?

The book is, in large measure, about that. Uh-oh. Should I use the words "large measure" in connection with "Born Round?" Is it a phrase too freighted and, um, weighty? Let's say the book is "in significant part" about family. That's better, safer.

I spent much of last weekend in Sunapee, N.H., where my older brother, Mark, and his wife, Lisa, have a house in the woods near the big lake. Lovely. But the setting wasn't the best part. The best part was, really, getting to know his three kids even better than I already do. They're 13, 11 and 9: little adults, almost. And I find myself pulled toward and invested in and protective of them in ways I can't even explain.

It's amazing, isn't it, the sort of primal tug one can feel toward family, at least--or especially--if one's experience of family has been a relatively positive one? It makes me understand tribalism, tribes being extra-large families of a kind.

The tug I'm talking about seems almost to be encoded in my genes or something. It feels that fundamental and visceral and automatic. I love the three little people my brother and his wife have produced, and I want the best for them. And, yes, maybe a big part of that is because I've been taught and conditioned to feel these feelings, by the rituals and the articulated values of my family through time. But that doesn't fully explain my sense of connection to them.

I certainly see their weaknesses, their faults. Sometimes they're very entertaining, but sometimes much less so. None of that shakes my commitment to them, which runs deeper than any of that, and which isn't, I'll shamefully admit, expressed through time spent with them. Six months can go by between our visits, though four is more likely. Doesn't matter. I'd be with them in an instant if one of them really needed that.

Where does that come from? And why does simply looking over at them as they watch the end of a Yankees game or as they take their last bites of dinner provide such gentle contentment?

I don't want or mean to romanticize family, which can make demands, be inconvenient, be disappointing. In a family acrimony bubbles up quickly and comes easily to a boil; injustices are perpetrated, feelings overlooked, insults inflicted.

Even so, there's a peace and a sense of belonging. There's a bond that transcends a moment's circumstances, and that doesn't even need to be nurtured much by physical contact or frequent communication.

The other day a cousin came over to my apartment for what was supposed to be a brief visit and for a specific purpose. She ended up staying for 90 minutes as we chatted, wine glasses in hand, with an ease and candor that suggested that these chats of ours happened all the time. In truth we hadn't talked like that in many, many years.

But she was family. I felt that in my very bones.