Today Virginia is chatting with Helen Rosner.

Helen is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has been covering food for more than a decade as a writer and editor, and won a 2024 James Beard Award for her weekly restaurant-review column, The Food Scene. She is an expert on sandwiches and many other important subjects.

And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Helen last month at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (hi Emma Straub thank you so much for having us!!), at a live event to celebrate the paperback release of Fat Talk. (They should still have a few signed copies in stock if you need one!)

We talked about the book, of course, but we talked about so many other fat- and food-adjacent topics, that I knew I wanted to bring it to you as a podcast episode.

(Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!)

If you find today’s episode valuable, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!

Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)

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Disclaimer: You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.

FAT TALK is out in paperback! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies.

Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism.

You’re listening to Burnt Toast!

I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is the great Helen Rosner.

Helen is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has been covering food for more than a decade as a writer and editor, and won a 2024 James Beard Award for her weekly restaurant-review column, The Food Scene. She is an expert on sandwiches and many other important subjects.

And I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Helen last month at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (hi Emma Straub thank you so much for having us!!), at a live event to celebrate the paperback release ofFat Talk. (They should still havea few signed copies in stock if you need one!)

We talked about the book, of course, but we talked about so many other fat- and food-adjacent topics, that I knew I wanted to bring it to you as a podcast episode.

(Bear with some imperfect audio, since we weren’t recording with our usual set-up — but Tommy worked his magic as usual so it’s still highly listen-to-able!)

Guest interviews are always free on Burnt Toast, but paid subscriptions enable us to pay guests for their time, labor and expertise. (This is extremely rare in the world of podcasting, but key to centering marginalized voices!)

This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! You’ll find all of the links aggregated here.

Episode 180 Transcript

Thank you Kim Baldwin for this cute pic of the livestream!

Helen

I was telling Virginia backstage—and this is true—I read a lot, but I'm a really bad nonfiction reader. I tend to feel like nonfiction books—I shouldn't say this in a bookstore, all nonfiction books are great. You should buy all of them. But I think there's a tendency for nonfiction books to have one really, really good idea and then say it over and over again for 300 pages. It’s like, this could have been a tweet. But I read every single page of this book in total joy. Actually, a lot of it was anger, but it flew by. It is such a great book. It’s funny and smart and so rigorous and has exactly the right kind of anger that is also transmuted into exhortation and action, and it made me feel really good about myself and hopeful by the end. I think that’s the best thing any book can do.

Virginia

Where were you when we were getting blurbs? Because that was amazing. Thank you so much. That really means a lot.

Helen

It’s really exciting for me to be talking to you about this. I’m a newish parent. I don’t know at what point I just call myself a parent instead of a new parent? I have a two year old.

Virginia

I think you’re getting there.

Helen

But this came out right on time for me. Shortly after my daughter was born this was sitting in my stack of prominently placed books in my living room, and my mother was visiting. She just sort of touched it and looked at it. It was like watching a deer approach—

Virginia

Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it.

Helen

Don’t look right at it. My mom, who was born in 1952 and who eats four almonds as a snack, literally. And it happened! Like, it happened. This is a great book, but it is also such a good passive aggressive prop.

Virginia

I really thought about that a lot in my cover design. How will this look on people’s coffee tables when their moms come over? And I think it’s eye catching with the yellow so you want to pick it up, but then you see “fat,” and you’re like, oh my God, what’s happening.

It brings up a lot for the moms. But I’ve heard this story a few times, and it gives me a lot of hope.

Helen

I assume it had a good impact. I mean, we haven’t directly discussed it.

Virginia

No, no. No one’s saying that has to happen.

Helen

One of the things that was really striking for me about this book that I want to talk to you about is the fact that it is a parenting book. I assume everybody is here because you are on some fundamental level interested in the concepts of body liberation and fat activism and the notion of the inherent dignity of the body, and how do we untie the knots of garbage that have prevented our society from allowing that to just simply be.

Virginia

That’s just the baseline. Everybody’s there? Good.

Helen

So what is the function and what is the effect and what does it do to frame that as a conversation about parenting?

Virginia

I love this question.

There are a couple things that made it end up being a parenting book. One is, when you are a writer who is a mom, people then assume you’re a parenting writer. So it was a path I was on a little bit, somewhat reluctantly.

But the bigger thing was: There are so many important voices in the fat activism space. There’s Aubrey Gordon, there’s Sonya Renee Taylor, there’s Ragen Chastain, there are just so many people who I’ve been learning from for years.

So when I thought about what can I contribute to the conversation—you know, I am a multiply privileged white woman. I’m a small fat woman. There are many parts of this conversation that I should not be centered in, that I do not own, and shouldn’t be taking up space in.

But there wasn’t a book about how to talk about anti-fat bias with kids, how to think about this issue as a parent. And because I was writing in a lot of parenting spaces, and because I am a parent, I knew that this issue is something parents are terrified of and really deeply struggling with.

So I felt like, well, this is the place I can contribute to the larger work of body liberation. I can take my background as a health journalist and parenting writer and all of that, and bring it into this space.

And my book editor—who’s here!—also doesn’t really love parenting books. So this is something we talked about a lot, is not necessarily wanting to be a parenting book, but how do we help parents. But the really beautiful thing that’s happened since the book came out is that I hear from a lot of folks who are not parents who read it and say “This is helping me reparent myself around these issues.”

So I think just framing the conversation as, how would we talk to kids about this? How would we advocate for children about this? that helps people start to think, “Well, what didn’t I get as a kid? Who didn’t stand up for me? Who didn’t advocate for me?”

That gives you permission to start really dealing with some of that and sitting with some of that. That’s been the the cool thing. It is a parenting book, but I think it doesn’t have to be. You can be parenting yourself, and that’s part of it, too.

Helen

This is maybe the big and unanswerable question. But I feel like this is cover-to-cover just chock full of irrefutable scientific studies and rigorously researched and peer reviewed data that shows that raising kids in diet culture is massively more harmful to them than whatever physical effects, primary or secondary, being overweight might do to them. So why is this still even a conversation?

The whole focus in contemporary parenting—I assume this is always with the focus in parenting, but the way that the internet and our cultural trajectories have have allowed things to really become so filtered and focused, this obsession with optimization, right? Like, “I want my kid to have the perfect toy, the perfect book,” like…

Virginia

The best preschool.

Helen

Everything has to be the best. Here is this abundance of data showing how to create someone who is best set up to be emotionally healthy, physically healthy, psychologically healthy. And then our entire society is like, nah, fuck that. Like, what? How do we reconcile that?

Virginia

I mean, it’s money, right? What you just said doesn’t make pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. Raising children to be emotionally and physically healthy and feel safe in their bodies—that’s not the economy of Denmark. Novo Nordisk is. So that’s the bottom line. Weight loss has always been an incredibly profitable business model. Not a successful business model, right? Like, people lose some weight, but then they regain it. But that’s the profit.

Helen

Well, the business is successful.

Virginia

Yes, the business is successful. The weight loss is not successful, which is what makes the business successful.

So that’s what we’re up against. And it’s really frustrating because to do this book, I talked to so many mainstream obesity researchers, so many doctors, so many people who really do I think in their hearts—not all of them. Not the Novo Nordisk guys—but in their hearts, I think a lot of people are like, “We’re really concerned about children’s health. We’re really concerned about raising rates of diabetes.” And they think they’re approaching this from the right place. Because they just haven’t drilled into the fact that most of the science getting done on this, is rooted in anti-fat bias and capitalism.

So until our entire healthcare system is open to a major reckoning where they look at that, that’s not going to change. We’re always going to be slamming against that brick wall.

Helen

One of the tensions I feel like you try to navigate throughout this book is the relationship between what we can do as individuals, within our families, within our friend groups, and what we can’t do, because there is a system. We can want the system to change, and we can work on our way for the system to change, but the system is much greater than we are.

So as a parent, but also as a person who is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world probably about this whole thing, where does that leave us? Is it really going to make a difference if I have a fat child, if my child grows up to be fat, if I say all of the right things and create exactly the right space for her, and then she still goes out into a world that is equipped to make her feel like crap?

Virginia

The world will tell our kids all of these terrible things. The world tells all of us these terrible things about our bodies. But if you can have this foundation to come back to, and for kids, if they can know that home is a safe space, it does make a difference. Your daughter will know you’re never going to expect her to change her body. And that just gives her more options.

And like, I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I had in the ‘90s. It’s not what I had as a middle schooler and as a high schooler. It was like, “No, obviously, change your body.”

Helen

I can’t believe I’m about to use a sports analogy, because I don’t do that.

Virginia

I’m uncomfortable that we’re going there, but okay.

Helen

I’m also probably going to get the terms wrong. But you know how professional swimmers shave their entire bodies right before the actual meet? But they do all their training with their body hair. So they’ve trained with drag and then when they go out in the world, they’re super strong, and they’re ready to go.

Virginia

Yes! I thought that was a beautiful metaphor for the book, and for the experience it gives you navigating this.

Helen

Walking with weights? I don’t even, I don’t know. So I read this when it first came out, when I was a brand new parent, like I had a seven pound potato.

Virginia

I’m just impressed you were reading at that point.

Helen

I don’t know how much I retained.

Virginia

I was just watching a lot of Gilmore Girls reruns at that stage of my parenting.

Helen

And then I reread it, a month or two ago now, as the parent of a toddler, and it’s been interesting for me to trace the arc of my own relationship to my body, becoming a parent.

I sort of optimistically was like, “It’s not going to change me. I’m just going to poop out a baby and I’ll continue being me.” And it’s not the pregnancy that changed me, or the parenting even that changed me. It’s that there is now a person where I am acutely aware at all times that I am the model. And I share that modeling with my husband. But like, I am a model. And I thought I was really good at not doing negative self talk. And now I’m acutely aware of it. Oh my God, it’s everywhere. Like, I hate myself. What has happened? I didn’t realize how much of this was there. Like, I get Botox, but then I stopped getting Botox because I was, like, she’ll know.

Virginia

Two year olds being famously good at spotting Botox.

Helen

The level of self-parenting that reading parenting books has asked of me has been really healing and exciting, and also a little bit annoying and terrible.

Virginia

That seems right.

Helen

Have you had an arc of change in the two years since the book has been out? Your relationship to the book itself, or the way that you feel like people have reacted to it?

Virginia

I mean, I said to you backstage that I didn’t want to talk about Ozempic because I’m tired of it. [To audience] Don’t worry, if you have Ozempic questions, it’s fine we can do it in the Q&A. But obviously, the big thing that happened in the two years since the book came out is that Ozempic has really dramatically changed the way diet culture and weight loss gets talked about.

So what I will say is that I think it has made two things clear to me. One is what we’re up against, and that this is, again, a multi-billion dollar industry that is relentless. The fact that they’re marketing these drugs to kids, that they’re testing them on six year olds now—it’s very clear that the priorities are not health. The priority is how do we make as much money off these drugs as possible. And that is something I can see and talk about, and that’s fine.

The second thing is more nuanced, but the more I thought about what body liberation means and what we’re fighting for here, the more I realized we have to hold space for the fact that everyone gets to make their own choices about Ozempic. And if that drug is the right drug for you, if weight loss of any kind feels necessary for you, then you will never hear me say that that was not the right choice for you.

And I think I had to start talking about the book and talking to people about the book to really get to that level of nuance. Because what I started to understand is how much we all live with anti-fatness in all these different ways. It shows up in our lives in so many different ways. And so I don’t get to say, you should all be okay with living with this amount of anti-fatness. Until we can fix it for everyone, we all have to put up with this. Because I don’t know everyone’s individual lives. Often weight loss is necessary for fat folks to access medical care or to access clothing or an access job opportunities. And that’s because we’re talking about a systemic set of barriers.

So I think that’s the nuance that I now bring to it. How do we talk about this as a system? How do we critique the system? How do we not critique individuals? That nuance, I think, is something I’m still finding and wrapping my brain around.

Helen

That’s a really tough one because the system, while it exists as its own self perpetuating entity, is created and maintained by individuals, right? They’re not abstract, faceless people. We all contribute in our own ways to all these little systems and then there are the big, horrible architects.

Virginia

Well, it’s like what you said about not wanting your two-year-old to spot your Botox. I so get that, because I have two daughters and any beauty work I engage in in front of them, I feel like I have to disclaim “This is something I’m opting into, but it’s beauty labor, and it’s not fair that women are expected to put on makeup and do our hair like this to go out into the world. And, you notice your father doesn’t have to do any of this to leave the house!” And they’re just like, okay, really mom?

Helen

It’s makeup and it’s Mommy’s discourse and praxis!

Virginia

Also, it makes me happy?! I’m trying to tease out how much of it is my own joy versus the male gaze. I don’t know.

So, I think I like Makeup Now?

Everything I Put On My Face

Helen

Are they even extractable from each other?

Virginia

So yes, all of these individual choices are also us performing in diet culture and performing in patriarchy. But I think we are all allowed to do our own math there, is where I’ve landed.

Helen

It’s kind of amazing to me. I was like, how much this is such a sophomore year stoned thing to realize, but how much everything is just the one thing, right?

Like, diet culture and the patriarchy and homophobia and queerphobia, all of racism, all of it is just the same thing. It’s just like, actually your body doesn’t have any impact on how much respect you deserve.

And it’s wild, how much wrapping that needs to have, and how granular the getting ahead of objections needs to be. I think this is where it gets very sophomore year stoned. But it’s like, once you see it, you see it everywhere. It’s like the spider web is everywhere, and every twitch of a strand twitches everything else. And it’s just like, well, no, this is really easy, actually. Like, it’s super easy. We solved it. We just have to be cool.

Virginia

Just be cool.

Helen

Just be cool. And then it turns out that’s actually incredibly complicated. Like, listen, I know that the entire medical profession has institutionalized fatphobia, but you’re gonna be cool.

Virginia

No, I think that’s completely it.

What I often hear from folks who are on this journey of suddenly seeing the matrix, is you can do this thing where you then are trying to be perfect about not participating in diet culture. But it’s like, no, no. That’s diet culture that told you you had to be perfect. So it’s okay if you’re messing up a lot.

I’ll have readers write in and be like, “I can’t show my four year old Peppa Pig because there’s so much fat shaming of Daddy Pig.” And yeah there sure is, but you also need to put cartoons on so you can make dinner, man. Talk about it later, and if you don’t talk about it this time, it’s fine. There will be other opportunities to name anti-fatness for your children.

So I think we can get perfectionist about wanting to keep our kids in this bubble of not being exposed to all the big, scary things. I mean, now that I have a middle schooler, this is the whole conversation with social media and phones and all of that. And it’s like, okay, yes on one hand, I would love to throw it all into the sea and not have her ever do any of that, as someone who has to spend too much time on Instagram. You know what it’s like, it’s a dark place.

But on the other hand, we need to give them the tools to navigate this. And they’re only going to be able to learn to do that by doing it to a certain extent and by spotting it and having their own relationship to it.

Helen

It reminds me of a concept you come back to a lot the book, this idea that restriction creates obsession and fixation. It’s almost like inoculating yourself to the poison by taking a tiny dose. Like, if we can learn how to function within a society where fatphobia or diet culture is normalized in various places, it allows us to reinforce our sense of what the right way to behave is—not right in a moral sense.

Virginia

What aligns with your values.

Helen

Exactly.

I’m a food writer. I’m a restaurant critic. I’ve been a food writer for decades now. My relationship to food is different in a lot of ways than most people’s. For professional reasons, I have to be obsessed with food. I get paid to be obsessed with food. And that is really bizarre. It often doesn’t come into conflict with my sense of myself and my body, I think because I have a moderately, decently healthy sense of myself and my body.

But when it does come into conflict, it’s wild. I’m like, oh my God. I have to go out to dinner. I have to go to fancy restaurants and eat and it’s the thing that I am praised for. And then simultaneously, it’s also a thing that leads to a bodily result that I am punished for. We’re just having a therapy session.

Virginia

No, but I’m so interested in this.

Helen

I don’t even know what my question is. I’m just talking.

Virginia

Can I ask you a question? Because I’m so curious about this, because it’s quite common for people who work with food or write about food, to be a little weird about food. And it’s understandable because of what you’re saying. Like, there is all this mixed messaging. There’s this need to revel in it. But also…

Helen

There’s this thing in food that if you work in food media, you sort of very quickly understand. It’s never quite said explicitly, but food media is about everything that happens until you swallow. So it’s about preparing, it’s about shopping. It’s about plating, looking at it, taking the bite, tasting the flavors.

But as soon as you swallow, and we start talking about what happens once it hits your body, it becomes health writing. It’s not food writing.

Virginia

This makes so much sense.

Helen

So there’s a really fascinating disconnect. There’s food as an aesthetic and cultural property. And then there’s food as the actual fuel of your body. Or something, even if it’s not fuel, the pleasure, whatever it converts in your body to something physical. And that is just not the purview of food writing or food media.

Virginia

Does that make it easier then? Because you’re like, “I don’t have to think about all of that.” Or is it all still there, just unspoken.

Helen

It makes it easier in the way that compartmentalization does. And like all compartmentalization, it will eventually fail.

Virginia

Right.

This is a personal question, so if you don’t want to answer it, you can reject it. But do you find that your body becomes a subject of discussion as a food writer? Like does that come up for you at all?

Helen

It has historically. Once, a while ago, I was approached by a book agent who was like, “I have a great book idea for you. You should write a nonfiction, personal, first person book about being a fat food writer.” And I was like, well, what about it?

Virginia

That’s an idea that doesn’t make 400 pages.

Helen

And he was sort of like, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Virginia

Just seemed cool, I guess.

Helen

I eat. I put the food into my body. Footnote, the body is fat. This sounds like sour grapes, and I have no idea what my life would have been like if I were thin. But, you know, I’m pretty sure that I’ve probably missed out on some media opportunities. But I don’t think that’s because I’m fat. I think it’s because I have a squishy potato face. So, like, I don’t know.

Virginia

We’ll come back to that later.

Helen

Like, yes and no, right? I think that there are ways in which being a fat person hurts you professionally regardless of the industry that you’re in, right? Like, men who work in food who are fat are considered to be garrulous gourmands, right? They get to be evidence of a life well-lived, a man of appetites, right?

And a woman who’s fat is either going to be totally desexualized and we can go into a big sidebar about this, but the way that women are allowed to be physically embodied as famous food people is really interesting. Either you’re really hot and sexy and fuckable, or you’re a totally desexualized, either mother figure, or a de-gendered kind of Julia Child.

Virginia

Is this explaining all the thin blonde food influencers?

Helen

Yes. But the thing with the thin blonde food influencers is there are also so many thin blonde anything influencers, right?

Virginia

There’s something there though.

I just was curious about this, because we know: Fat people get comments in restaurants. We get comments on what we order, whether it’s our mothers, whether it’s waiters. So I just wondered if that’s something you’re navigating.

Helen

I think that I’ve been very lucky. I can’t think of a specific instance where I felt like I’ve been judged—at least to my awareness, because I’m quite oblivious—for what I’ve ordered or how I eat.

Physically, I can say like I’m a small fat and going to restaurants can be physically difficult, especially in New York, because the tables are so close together, and my ass is not even that huge. But my ass is bigger than they design restaurants for. I have knocked over countless water glasses with my hips and going through the tables or trying to navigate fixed booths. The physical architecture of restaurants is something I’m very, very aware of.

I wrote a thing a couple years ago about chairs with high weight limits and why don’t more restaurants go for that, especially once outdoor dining started happening during the first few years of the pandemic. I was so furious by how many outdoor dining structures were using either those nightmarish Tolix chairs with the side that’s that just like, “would you like to have your sciatic nerve cut in half? We can provide that.”

Virginia

And you’re sliding off the whole time.

Helen

Or just the cheapo IKEA folded half chairs that have a weight limit of 14 ounces. And they’re just a nightmare. And I understand that restaurants are among the most precarious businesses with just no safety net. But it is always really interesting to me to notice which restaurants put thought into accessibility broadly, right? Not just for customers of different body sizes, but also physical accessibility. A lot of restaurants, due to the size of their businesses and things like that, are often exempt from ADA requirements, for example. So that’s been more of a thing than eating in public.

I think in terms of eating in public, I just do it. I like food a lot.

Virginia

I mean, it’s great.

Helen

I have felt shame, but most of that I would locate in, like, high school.

Virginia

I mean, you don’t have to write the fat food writer memoir. But, I do think that representation matters. And you being a public figure in this job is really great.

Helen

To bridge our two worlds, the thing with food is, it is a source of pleasure. And I think that the way that we pathologize bodies, and the way that we use the word wellness and all of its insidious and popular meanings, fundamentally sidesteps the fact that food is a source of joy, both in terms of the flavors and textures, and the actual food itself and the act of eating together.

It’s something that you talk about in the book, is the mental health effect of just participating with your friends eating a birthday cake together instead of freaking out about the sugar content. It is important to be connected to one another, and we can write as many listicles as a society as we want, about ways to hang out without food or like whatever diet culture things people want to do. There are so many of them. Diet culture is always like, “go for a walk.” But it’s better to go for a walk with a popsicle.

Virginia

A walk and a treat! A walk and a treat!

Helen

And there’s a reason for that! Like, evolutionarily. And we don’t have to do our biology, right? If there’s one thing that being human means, it is that your intellect is allowed to supersede your biological impulses. However, in the same way that hunger is our most powerful impulse, the relief of hunger is a powerful mode of connection. When we relieve our hunger with other people, we become connected to them. This isn’t woo, this is like neuroscience. Eating together is actually connection. To try to fabricate ways to connect without that because we are scared of eating, is being scared of being together.

Virginia

100 percent. I love that.

Helen

I feel very passionate!

Virginia

Maybe that’s your book! And just to bring it back to the parenting conversation, this is what I see parents struggling with all the time because there’s so much pressure on how we’re supposed to feed our kids in this really hyper perfect way. Like the rainbow bento box lunches.

What Instagram Gets Wrong About Feeding Your Kids

Helen

Oh my God, yeah.

Virginia

And family dinner. There is so much pressure on the concept of family dinner needing to be executed in this certain way. And it really is just what Helen was saying. All that needs to be happening is two people are sharing a meal. Doesn’t matter what the food is. What matters is that you’re having that opportunity for connection.

And you know, one of the lessons of working on this book that I’ve been able to take into my own life is really giving no effs anymore about nutrition with my kids, which I get a lot of criticism for on the Internet. And I’m comfortable with that.

Why Are Men and Viking Grandmas

Because what I want my kids coming away from the dinner table with is, number one, their body felt safe, and was treated with dignity and respect. So no means no, if you don’t want to eat something.

And number two, that we had some opportunity for connection. Which, again, I have a middle schooler. Like, it’s hard to have connection with them a lot of the time, and they don’t want to talk about their day at the dinner table. But if the food is something she likes, that’s going to get me closer!

And it’s hard, because even for me doing this work and believing all of that quite passionately, there are a lot of nights where I look at our dinner table and think, if the Internet could see this…. Like, I’m failing a lot of the time. And it is what it is. But we have that core connection.

Helen

Also, it doesn’t have to be every day, right? Sitting down together as a family, like, whatever, the research is unimpeachable. But also it’s not every single day forever, right?

I don’t know how you would do a study for this, but I suspect that what’s more important than actually sitting together at a table is being the kind of family that would eat together and cultivating the kind of environment where you all think, should we all sit together at a table? Like, that’s the thing that really.

Virginia

Which, in order to be that kind of family, sometimes that means we’re going to watch TV while we eat dinner.

Helen

It’s going to be at the coffee table, right? But it’s a table.

Virginia

We’re watching Tangled for the 900th time or whatever, because that’s the energy level we all have, and that’s what’s letting us connect as a family tonight.

Helen

I think we’re going to take audience questions now.

So I have this very adorable niece, a little doll of a girl. And one year, when I went to visit her, she had just gotten much bigger. Hefty. And I felt pain, and I swear on a Bible, it’s not because I care what she looks like, but I felt that it was going to make her life harder just because of thin being the ideal. And when she gets a little older and she cares about things, wanting to be attractive or whatever. That she wouldn’t like herself. So obviously, that’s a terrible societal thing, but assuming it wasn’t going to change by the time she grew up. I just I was surprised at how much myself, I wish she had not gotten bigger. So is this another thing that you talk about in the book? That it’s not just “you shouldn’t be fat,” but it can come out of caring for the girl?

Virginia

I think that is most parents of kids in bigger bodies, most adults in the lives of kids with bigger bodies, it’s not “I’m repulsed to look at you.” Sometimes it is that. I’m not going to say that’s not a reality of anti-fatness. But much more, it’s “I love you so much, and I’m worried your life will be harder.”

That is a totally understandable place to start, because you know the world, and you know that the lives of fat people are harder. But the problem is, if we then say, “So, let’s change her body to make life easier,” we’ve told her that the bullies are right, that her body is the problem to solve. And that’s not the message.

The message is your body is not a problem. We live in a world that’s going to give you a different message. I’m here to protect you. I’m here to advocate with you. What do you need from me? We love and support this kid in the body they have and we work on the world. Because that’s what needs to change.

Well, I must say that to me, makes your book seem very important. That comment comes from someone who’s as old as your mother!

Helen

Thank you. This is a really important book. If any of you haven’t read it, you should read it cover to cover. It’s great. It’s really good.

I think it’s totally cool to be the age of my mother, by the way. Many of our mothers—probably your mother, too!—were raised with an incredibly restrictive notion of what a woman was allowed to be.

Virginia

I mean, it’s just multiple decades of diet culture and patriarchy.

Helen

Not just diet culture, but like, how do you get a husband? Because you have to have a husband. How do you keep your husband? How do you maintain your household? I look upon my mother and her relationship to her body to food with a lot of generosity, and a lot of compassion.

I feel lucky that I get to have the relationship to my body and to food and to the culture of food that I get to have, and I see how much space she’s covered in the course of her life, accommodating to a world that has changed around her.

Virginia

I have lots of readers who are my mother’s age, and I love hearing from women in their 60s, 70s who are doing this work and learning. It’s not like it’s ever too late. We all deserve body liberation. Thank you.

So kind of related to that question, I have a two and a half year old daughter and I have a lovely mother in law in her 70s who is really a kind person. She comes with a lot of behaviors that are remnants of being brought up in a time when thinness is really, really important. Things like she has to eat off a small plate, and she has to use a small fork, she has to eat her bread last. These are things that my daughter is seeing, and as much compassion as I have for my mother in law, I’m sort of at an impasse where I don’t know if the next move is to double down and try to fortify my child against the potential impact of those behaviors, or try to talk to my mother in law about those behaviors, which feels kind of cruel because she’s in her 70s. And in a way, she’s been hurt by the same system that’s like getting ready to hurt my my kid.

Virginia

What I always come down to is the compassion you’re talking about. Lead with the compassion. If you’re watching this person enact this on themselves, I don’t think it’s your job to ask them to change. Maybe as your daughter gets older, you can debrief with her after a visit. Like, “Isn’t it kind of sad that grandma always uses that tiny plate? I like using a bigger plate for cake. I get more cake that way.” You debrief with your kid, so your kid sees what grandma’s doing and knows that’s not what’s expected of them, that’s not normal.

And with your mother-in-law, you just continue to have a loving relationship with her, and make it clear in any way you can that you don’t expect this from her.

Where I suggest talking directly to the grandparent is if they’re saying things about your child’s body. That’s different. Then you intervene and advocate on behalf of your kid.

I’m a parent of a 16 year old, the child of an 80 year old. So those are fascinating conversations. But the parenting in the age of diet culture, I feel like it could also be parenting and teaching in the age of diet culture. A lot of my listening was as an educator in terms of, like, it’s not exclusively a parenting book. It’s also a guide for teachers. Can you speak to that?

Virginia

I feel really strongly that this is a book I want in the hands of as many teachers as possible. There’s a whole chapter on anti-fatness in schools. It’s systemic, with the kinds of health class calorie counting assignments that come up. But it’s also the culture of the schools, the way teachers might casually reference their own diets. It’s when they’re putting together a syllabus, how many books center fat protagonists? Not that many, because we don’t have enough books like that. (There are more, a lot of them are sold here!) But, that’s a work in progress, especially depending what age you’re teaching.

So I think the book is a tremendous resource for teachers. And there are several teachers quoted in that chapter who have put their own resources on the internet, and I think are making efforts to connect with other educators. So I love it when teachers come to events. Thank you!

I’m a pediatric dietitian, and I have your book on my desk so medical professionals know what I’m about when they pass by. I have families come to me, and I feel like they’re very much expecting me to say one thing, and then they’re kind of blown away when I don’t, and it’s also exciting in that way.
But my question is, when I have teen patients, it’s easy to talk to the teens separately and then talk to parents separately about how we talk about food and how we can change that at home. But when I have kids who are under 13, and I’m working with their parents and the kids in the same room together, what are your recommendations for navigating changing how we talk about food and body image? When I have the parent in front of me and I have the young kiddo in front of me too.

Virginia

That is really tricky. You have a really important job, and thank you.

I think whatever age kid you’re dealing with, it’s great for them to hear you saying what you’re going to say about food. If you’re presenting the idea of food as nourishment and pleasure, and you’re pushing back against weight loss plans and all of that, then anything you’re saying to the parent, even if the parent is getting uncomfortable or arguing with you, like, it’s great that the kid is getting to hear this perspective. So I think I wouldn’t worry too much about filtering.

Just also coming back to giving the kid as many opportunities to feel empowered about it as possible, whatever choices make sense to give to the kid. And the framework you’re talking about. I think it’s kind of great you’re having the conversation in front of the kid, honestly, although I can imagine there are conversations that are really challenging in that job.

Can I break the Ozempic rule? Celebrities and pop culture and idols have always been celebrated for being thin, but this is the first time there’s been this $1,000 a month drug that makes people thinner. So then, thinness and its relationship to class and celebrity has changed. So like, I’m here to get the book. I haven’t read it, but. Do you have any thoughts on how that changes how people idolize celebrities? Or is it the same thing?

Virginia

I think Ozempic is just making obvious what has always been true, which is that a celebrity body is the product of time and money. More time, more money, some genetic luck, more money. Any thin celebrity is just a physical manifestation of all the money that has gone into all of the whatever they’re doing to maintain that body.

So in a way, I really appreciate those conversations about who is taking what drug, because it just makes all of this more obvious. It makes the anti-fatness more obvious. It makes the fact that anti-fatness intersects with classism more obvious. Because when we see the media writing these glowing pieces about “soon anyone can be thin!” it’s like, well, no. There are always going to be fat people. We’re just going to see fatness stratified by class even more.

Helen

This isn’t quite what you were saying, but from a food media perspective, I feel like there was a story, maybe it’s in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that was, like, “the rise of Ozempic and these drugs mean the end of the snack food industry.”

And the answer is no. The way that that these drugs are talked about is so wildly divorced from reality. If you’ve read any of the actual literature about these drugs and how they work, and what kind of impact they have on people’s behaviors and thought processes and hormonal reactions—none of is a silver bullet, right?

Even if you take it every week, some people don’t lose weight. You still have to decrease your calorie consumption, increase your exercise. Ozempic isn’t the drug that the narrative wants it to be. I think the drug itself is neutral.

Virginia

It’s a great diabetes medication!

Helen

And I read something recently about how it seems to be having extraordinary promise for dealing with substance abuse disorder and there are lots of interesting effects that are coming out. As a drug, I think it is morally neutral, the way all drugs are morally neutral.

But the narrative around it is being constructed in ways that tells us a lot about our fatphobia, and diet culture, and the way we hierarchize bodies and the accessibility of those bodies. I think that your question cuts exactly to the core of this. It is always easier to have the ideal body when you are rich. And it is always harder to have the ideal body if you have to focus on anything other than attaining and maintaining that body. So I think I would take everything with a grain of salt, unless it is actually about a scientific study. Because, like, no, Doritos is not going to go out of business.

Virginia

I have faith we can keep Doritos alive. Maybe a government bailout. I don’t know.

Helen

The reason there are not plus sizes in store at Old Navy is not because there’s not a demand for them. It’s because old Navy has tried to create a narrative. The realities of demand and money and supply in human bodies has almost nothing to do with this story that is trying to be told about the way that capital is flowing.

"We Couldn't Have a Campaign That Was Just For Fat People."

Thank you so much for your book. I am a health teacher in lower school and middle school. I read it last year, and I feel like I’m armed with such knowledge and permission to teach my classes the way that I do. And I have to talk about so many other things. Like, I talk about stress and regulation and gender and sexuality and all the other sex ed stuff too, but obviously, I really want to talk about food and nutrition. A lot of the kids’ parents come to me and they say, okay, so you’re going to help me stop my kid eating sugar. And I just say, after having read that book, I go, I will not be doing that.
I remember you saying something in the book that kids are always getting so many confusing messages about food, right? The clean your plate club, but don’t get too fat. And that just creates this swirling whorl of confusing messages for children. I want to be a safe adult where I’m the health teacher that literally never uses the words “healthy food” or “unhealthy food.” But I also know that I’m very much coming up against the messages that they are getting at home. So where do you feel like is the line between a cool teacher that is a safe place to open their minds to all of these restrictive messages, where’s the line between that and like just being another person where they’re like, I don’t know what the truth is. My Health teacher saying this, I have my parents saying that.

Virginia

Kind of like our pediatric dietitian friend over there, I’m just so glad you guys are doing this and saying these things to the kids. This is what I am hoping will happen more and more. And I think there are absolutely going to be kids who are confused, right? Who are like, “But my mom is saying we’re going to the gym every day after school, and this doesn’t make sense.”

But there is going to be some kid in your class who really needs an adult in their life to say this. And what you say is going to plant a seed that is going to help them navigate what they’re dealing with at home, or what’s to come. You have this amazing opportunity to be the safe adult. And I think you could invite conversation about what other messages they’re getting, not because you’re going to necessarily tell them that’s wrong or argue against it, but to encourage them to start thinking a little more critically, and build some of those skills. So asking, does this make sense to you? How do you feel when this happens? I think that would be like a great opportunity to just have them start exploring the messages.

Because what I find with the kids I interact with is they are so good at calling this out once they have a few talking points about this. They’re spotting it everywhere. So I think they’ll be off and running with it for sure.

I have a five year old, and this kind of ties into your first book, The Eating Instinct. She has just been diagnosed with ARFID, which, for everyone who doesn’t know what ARFID is, it’s basically like, she just doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty. And I’ve been trying to follow her cues, and if she doesn’t want to eat, she doesn’t have to eat, kind of thing. And now I’m at this point where they’re like, no, she has to eat because she can’t grow if she doesn’t eat. And I am trying to reckon with all of the wonderful body autonomy and like not ever weighing her except for at the pediatricians or whatever. And now I’m supposed to weigh her every two weeks, and I have to count every calorie that she eats. And I know that you went through an even more extreme version with with your first daughter.
So I just wanted to know, as your kid has gotten older, and she had to go through the trauma of the tube feeding, which, luckily, my kid is not at that level. But like, I don’t want to cause a problem while trying to fix a problem.

Virginia

You’re doing a great job.

And for anyone who hasn’t read my first book, The Eating Instinct, what launched me into all of this in a lot of ways, is that my older child was on a feeding tube for the first two years of her life, and went through very much what this person is talking about.

And what I can say to you now as a parent of an 11-year-old is: You aren’t messing it up. It’s going to be okay. You are in the acute stages of something, and you need to get your child fed, and sometimes that’s going to feel like you’re doing the opposite of honoring her body autonomy, but you’re keeping her thriving, and that’s what matters the most.

Because you’re going to be coming at it from this framework of, whenever I can, I’m supporting her body autonomy. Whatever choice I can give her, I am giving her that choice. I’ll put her on the scale, but she won’t see the number. You can keep that talk away from her. She’s going to get through this, she deserves to have a great relationship with food. If that means she eats four things or 40 things in her life, then you’re doing an amazing job.

"They Say 'Failure to Thrive' but Moms Hear 'Failure To Feed.'"

Helen

One more question!

I also have two young daughters, and it’s very challenging trying to both raise them in a way that you know you can eat whatever you want, and you know food is neutral, and there’s no good or bad or unhealthy healthy. But sometimes I’ll look at what my daughter has eaten today, just cookies or just foods that are generally thought of, that you’re supposed to have less of or something like that. And I don’t know that I think that’s so bad, but I feel like I get faced with, like, well, don’t you care about her health? And like, isn’t this bad for her nutrition?
And I’m like, I don’t think she’s going to get scurvy? But I don’t know where that line is. Like, am I’m overdoing it on, eat whatever you want, and actually putting her health at risk. Because I kind of keep going out to, like, I don’t know, you can have candy for breakfast. Like, that’s not going to have a major health effect.

Virginia

I mean, as you just heard from this other mom, and me: Having a kid who eats is a privilege and something to be celebrated and treasured. So that’s our starting point. And I did really dive into the pediatric nutrition research for the book. There’s a lot more to it, in the book. The biggest thing I took away from the research is that what matters for kids’ nutritional needs is having enough to eat. That’s what matters the most.

So if your kid is getting enough to eat, they will, over the course of a week, get enough nutrition. I have one child, I have to look sometimes, over the course of several weeks, and then be like, oh yeah, there was that green vegetable a couple Thursdays ago. They will hit their nutritional needs. There will be more variety than you see when we look at that day that’s only cookies. I call those snake days, where they just eat massive quantities of one food. You know, like, how a snake eats the whole rodent and then doesn’t eat for like, a week. That is a normal eating pattern for a lot of children. So there’s a lot in the book that will give you more facts if you need that. But I think the biggest takeaway is: If kids have enough to eat, if they know their body is safe and loved in their home, then we’re all doing a great job.

Helen

If I can, with no expertise, weigh in on another aspect of your question, where you’re like, “But people say, are you poorly parenting your child?” Like, who the fuck are those people?

My husband is right here.

Virginia

Okay, we’ll talk after.

Helen

Sir, are you a registered dietitian? No? Okay!

Virginia

I think we solved that!

Helen

Thank you guys. This was incredible. This was awesome. This book is amazing. If you haven’t read it, you should read it. And if you’ve already read it, you should read it again.

Virginia

Valentine’s Day is coming! Buy one for your loved ones.

Helen

Nothing says I love you more than healing your own relationship to your body and food so that you can pass that to your child!

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.

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