My conflict with food began before I was born. According to family lore, I couldn’t be sated, even in utero. I consumed everything, apparently putting my twin at such risk that we were delivered prematurely. There are even stories of me climbing into my twin’s crib late at night and stealing their milk bottle, swapping it out with my empty one. I’ve always felt hunger, but I soon learned to associate “want” with shame.
In 2020, I started working on a novel about mother and daughter cannibals, who lure lost souls to their rural forest homestead and bake them into pies and stews. It wasn’t a conscious choice to write about women with a carnal desire to feast, but slowly, deep into drafting – which is a very physical act for me because I write by longhand – I realised that my relationship with food and consumption was changing. Exposure to these women, who binged without guilt or inhibition, forced me to confront my fraught relationship with food, and in turn, eventually, heal it.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been hungry. Unbeknownst to the adults around me, I was a child with undiagnosed autism and ADHD, which meant my behaviour around food was inherently complex and difficult. At a sleepover, I remember coveting my friends’ unopened Advent calendar. It was on her windowsill, filled to the brim with sweet, delicious things that didn’t belong to me, but she’d had the impulse control to keep it fully intact before December began. I reached and pulled it from the windowsill and while the other girls forged the early bonds of lifelong friendships in the front room, I slipped under her bed and ate every single chocolate. I stayed there, hidden beneath her mattress. The guilt set in, but teeth aching and lips sweet, there was only one thing I knew for certain: I wanted more.
Food became more complicated as I grew up. Not only did I want things I wasn’t supposed to, I started having opinions and rituals around food. I became the worst thing a little girl can be (apart from greedy): fussy. I had systems for my food, orders in which I ate things, specific temperatures I needed my food to be, and textures I loved and loathed. I counted out the chips to make sure they were exactly the same in size and number as my twin’s portion.
Sometimes, I would sit at the dinner table for hours on end, staring at a full plate of food, watching it go cold and congealed, unable to eat because it wasn’t the way I wanted it. My behaviour often resulted in being sent to bed with no tea and an empty belly. For being greedy. For answering back or being fussy. For midnight snacking when I was hungry after lights out. My identity was becoming shaped around my relationship to food.
I was a girl with no friends and a hole in my chest that couldn’t be filled. At that age, you begin to see the world differently. Suddenly, you feel an impulse to be thinner. Smaller. To take up less space and be self-conscious in every way you possibly can. But you’re not sure why, because you haven’t learned terms like patriarchy or body dysmorphia or eating disorder yet. You just feel it inside your body – that calling to be smaller in every way you can possibly make yourself.
I vividly remember floating between friend groups in the school cafeteria, having no real gravity and desperately wanting to be accepted by someone. Anyone. So that place, where people came together to eat their lunch, became a space I felt lonely and empty.
I spent most of my free time in the school bathroom where I’d throw up all that hunger. It felt good because whatever that bad feeling was inside my body, it was gone. The hunger had been sated. Food felt like a means of bargaining – taking back control and autonomy when I felt powerless.
For years I bounced between binge-eating everything I could see, and starving myself. I even convinced myself it was healthy. In fact, it didn’t just feel healthy, it felt good to have the illusion of control. It wasn’t until I became more politically engaged in my 20s that I realised what I was doing to my body. In hindsight, I wonder if my autism played a role in my unhealthy obsession with the numbers. The calorie counting. The number on the weighing scale. The measurements of my clothes.
But even then, I didn’t realise my relationship to food was not unique, and that controlling girls and women through food-related coercion was not only commonplace, but entirely encouraged through advertising, media and popular culture. It was beneficial to be thin, and it was valuable to be small. It was not only revolting, but humiliating to be fat.
When I reached my early 20s, my body experienced another shift. This time, my girlhood was buried in wide hips, a jiggly belly and slightly flabby under-arms. My childhood body was fading and there was nothing I could do to preserve it. In this moment, when a woman’s body stops looking young, everything changes. Her social currency falls to nil. People stop noticing or listening to her. When a woman’s body changes in this way, when she becomes bigger and takes up more space than she did before, she becomes lesser in the eyes of the wider world. Almost invisible.
During this time, I lived paycheck to paycheck. I was deep into an overdraft I thought I’d never be able to climb out of and had credit-card debt that felt like a tidal wave. Every year, I remember thinking I’m too big, I’m eating too much, and then I’d later lament, looking back on the very same body a year later thinking God, was I blind? I looked great. I couldn’t afford healthy food to stay nice and thin; instead I was living on a diet of 5p noodles and toast and my body was getting bigger. And this became my steady normal. The number in my bank account impacted the food I put in my body and the state of my complexion. I couldn’t afford any of the miracle cures that capitalism and the beauty industry seemed to offer up on a silver platter. If you drink this supplement drink or eat this diet food, you’ll be thin and beautiful. If you use this ridiculously overpriced skin care or make up, you will be Photoshop perfect – and therefore valuable. My relationship with my body was broken.
When I started writing, viscerally describing issues of body, autonomy, femgore, worth, food and hunger, I had a strangely food-related ritualistic writing process, too. I’d constantly be surrounded by food, and used it as a means of hitting targets. I’d hold my stomach hostage. I let it have its fill if I met my goals and let it starve if I didn’t. But by the end of the writing process, that changed. I didn’t hold myself hostage any more. I’d become entirely conscious of my relationship to food, so much so that my relationship to even meat and consumerism was fundamentally altered. While writing so intimately on the tastes and textures of human flesh, I had extreme feelings of anxiety while consuming meat. It became clear to me that I’d been using food as a currency and that my infatuation it had scarred my relationship to my body (the size and shape of it, how I treated it, and how I let others treat it, too).
By letting myself slip into the minds of these cannibals with curiosity and empathy, I understand now why cannibalism is having such a moment in our culture – particularly with women. For me, cannibalism (in stories such as Yellowjackets, A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G Summers and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata) becomes a place for people to unpack how truly starving they feel. Catharsis for every meal skipped or for every time they’ve made themselves small in a room they deserved to take up space in; for every time someone’s autonomy has been stripped away from them. Cannibalism narratives are a rejection of not only the beauty standards of mainstream culture, but also a symbol of autonomy and defiance against that system that uses food (something fundamental to our survival) to police and control bodies.
I won’t be stealing anyone’s Advent calendar chocolates any time soon, but I write this comfortably indulging in the cheesiest mac and cheese you can possibly imagine. And guess what? It feels great and I am happy work-in-progress. In my post-cannibal era, I am greedy and fussy in abandon.
The Lamb by Lucy Rose is published on 30 January by W&N at £16.99. Buy a copy for £14.44 from guardianbookshop.com
If you have been affected by any of these issues, contact Beat or Mind
