Episode 1: All Food is Good Food with Mia Feuer
Mia reunites with an old flame.
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Transcript:
Virgie Tovar: It’s December. 1992. Christmastime. I’m 10 years old and writing furiously into the pages of my little pink diary, venting — about dinner.
Dear Diary,
Today Gramma gave us tamales for dinner. They smelled SOOO GOOOOOOD. Why does she always do this to me? Doesn’t she understaaaaand that I’m the fattest girl in my entire school? And it’s because she’s always tempting me with food?
Love always xoxo,
Me
In the Mexican household I grew up in, December was High Tamale Season. We’d make them for the family and give them away as gifts too. And.. they... were LEGENDARY.
My grandmother and grandfather used to sit down in a mini production line and make dozens of tamales. Each one is like a tiny present of spicy meat and earthy masa, wrapped in papery corn husks.
My mouth is watering just thinking about them now. But back then, tamales were the bane of my existence.
I was a little fat girl who was being bullied relentlessly for her weight, and food was Enemy #1 — the better it tasted the more dangerous it was... a threat it was to becoming different, better… thin. If I could just be thin, I thought, I’d be happy… I’d get the love and attention I always craved from the boys at school.
I thought being fat meant ugliness... a loveless future.
Those delicious tamales meant staying fat, failing… failing at being thin and failing all the other things that seemed wrong with me...
Like the Mexican home that made me feel like an alien at school, the words I would mispronounce because my grandmother said them differently, the rituals that kept us from being “real Americans.”
My feelings about those tamales were all about my relationship to culture, family, tradition, immigration, race. Food is powerful that way.
[2:32] I’m Virgie Tovar, and this is Rebel Eaters Club. It’s a show where I talk to incredible people about our relationships to food — and all the things wrapped up in eating — like self-esteem, sex, community, love. I am a fat woman of color, and I hated my body for a long time. I was terrified of food for nearly 20 years. But finally, one day, I gave the finger to diet culture.
But what is diet culture? In the U.S., the weight loss industry has grown to $72 billion a year. 72 billion!! This culture is constantly telling us that all our problems would be solved if only we ate less.
Diet culture shows up in work-out clothing companies that tell you to “find your shine.” In keto cookbooks on the bestseller list, in the way coworkers can’t seem to share a meal without talking about the gym, the way fat people are treated like second-class citizens. Every year 48 million Americans go on a diet. But not everyone is calling it a diet. People might call it “wellness” or “a healthy lifestyle.” But diet culture is everywhere, and it’s destructive.
So we’re going to break up with diet culture one corn dog at a time, and you will salivate. And have feelings and new thoughts. At the end of every episode there will be a question I want you to journal about — the more you know about your history with food and eating, the better equipped you are to finally break up with diet culture. Are you ready?
[4:30] Today, we’re going to talk to my friend Mia Feuer about her food frenemy… bagels.
VT: Mia. I brought some bagels and...
Mia Feuer: [gasps].
VT: Some schmear. Is it schmear? How do you say it?
MF: Well I’ve never heard anyone call it schmear until I moved to the US. But in Winnipeg where i grew up and I ate my earliest bagel, it was just cream cheese.
VT: For Mia, bagels are all tied up with some of her most important relationships - with her mother, her heritage, and herself.
VT: Are you ready? Oh my god, I just dropped a bunch of cream cheese on my laugh.
MF: Uh-huh.
VT: OK. Do it. Let's do it.
Both: Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm.
Vt: It's nice.
MF: Delicious. Although I gotta say. I long for a toaster.
VT: I met Mia when she came to BABECAMP, one of my weekend-long workshops on fat feminism. Since then, she’s become a friend. She’s a Canadian, and a total badass sculptor. When we sat down in the studio to eat some bagels, she started telling me about her childhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
MF: So I grew up in a Jewish house. Jewish grandparents. I went to a Jewish school. And so I was really kind of steeped in a Jewish community and with that came a lot of Jewish cooking. Like, a lot of things like knishes and blintzes and corned beef sandwiches and pickles and bagels, you know, and brisket and chicken soup and matza balls and and bagels were glorious. And the ones that my mom bought at Safeway were not fancy. They were not these like beautiful bagels that I’ve had in Montreal or in New York. They were like out of a plastic bag that you know were made in a factory. That came in frozen on a truck. They were the industrialized bagel for the middle class family who lived in like the middle of Canada.
And I remember lying in bed and I would think like, oh, I cannot wait to wake up and eat a toasted bagel with Cheez Whiz. That was like the ultimate. That was like my fantasy. I would go to bed, I was so excited to wake up and have breakfast. And then, because of the fact that my family is full of larger bodied people, men and women, I learned how to hate my body from my mother, who hated her body.
And then I hated her body, and I hated my body, and I hated my cousin's bodies, and my aunt's bodies, but my dad became almost like this cop around the house and he put a picture on our fridge. I don't know if you remember Virgie, but like, there was these birthday cards that came out in the 80s of fat women or super fat women in bikinis holding a cupcake and it was meant to be funny you know. But it was hurtful. So he put one of those on our fridge as like a reminder to everybody in the house, me, my brother and my mother that if you open up this door just remember this body right here could be you.
He would tell me that I had to do like X number of minutes on the stair climber every night like there was so much fear being hurled at me as I was just sort of approaching puberty. I wasn't even like 13 yet. And then not soon after that I actually remember sort of telling myself that I should not be so excited about eating bagels because of the fact that I was receiving very strong messages around food, around eating.
VT: I mean that's the thing right, because there's so much weird- there's morality tied into all of it.
MF: Yeah.
VT: And I think when you're talking about- when food stops being something that you enjoy or something that you use for nutrition, right like any number- there's a range of reasons why humans and animals eat, right.
MF: Yeah.
VT: And I would say all of them are natural. But then you add this cultural level where food becomes tied to morality. In our culture. And also our relationship to food culturally is very seated in anxiety. And I think most people think that most food is either dangerous or bad for you. And so when you have that moral overlay, all of a sudden you start to see really strange behavior. And I just feel like that, like I witness so much of that on a day to day basis. There is this kind of understanding of what you're supposed to do when someone else is watching and what you want to do.
MF: Oh I feel like I have been in so many situations where I am performing. If I'm at an art opening and there's like a big table full of delicious food but I'm surrounded by colleagues and other people from the art world you know forget it. I'm just going to nibble at the smallest thing possible. Why? Even if I'm hungry? Because I all of a sudden fall into this weird trap of feeling scrutinized by everyone around me and that scrutiny is somehow linked to what I'm eating.
VT: Yes.
MF: And also how I mean how many dates have I been on in my lifetime where I'm ordering food across the table from somebody who I think is judging me based on how much I eat or what I order I'm happy to say that that it I sort of shake him a lot of that bullshit off. But in my life it's been a constant.
And another thing I was thinking of, back to the bagels. So my mother and the women of my family go to Weight Watchers. This is something that has been a constant since I can remember, my mother has been going to Weight Watchers until she started bringing me with her to Weight Watchers and then I went on my own to Weight Watchers as soon as I was old enough. But they would make bagels.
VT: Woooah.
MF:There would be like, I remember every once in a while in my household growing up, the bagel brand would shift to be like two point bagels from Weight Watchers and they were sort of disgusting and they were smaller. But you still kind of got to saw them in half and put them in the toaster and they became toasty. And then my mother at one point found a recipe to make one point bagels that were like made out of, oh god, there was like fat free yogurt and who knows. That was like the ultimate. Like they're only one point. Weight watchers. You know? And as I got older I, you know, and I moved out and I moved out of Canada and I went to grad school I- I felt like I was deep deep deeply struggling in terms of what I was allowing myself to eat. What I ended up falling into at that point was no bagels, ever. I had loved them once so much and I knew it. And I just felt like if I eat a bagel, it's over. Don't ever order a bagel don't ever eat a bagel just don't do it don't do it don't do it don't do it. For years!
VT: Wooah I mean I'm having like a recollection of something my mother taught me when I was a fat little girl who was getting you know emotionally abused and bludgeoned day after day for being fat. I remember we were sitting in her car and I was crying and I just felt like I was so disgusted by my body. I remember taking her hand and putting it on the inside of my thigh and making her feel the stretch marks and telling her that there was something wrong with me, that normal people don't have this. That you know my life would be better if I was the kind of person who didn't have- you know it was such a physical memory of like, “look at my defect, feel it, like feel what it looks like to feel the little tear under the skin where the stretch mark happens,” you know? And you know I think that she felt really overwhelmed and unable to guide me in that moment. And so she leaned on her own dieting and disordered eating cache of information and tips or whatever, and she said that the key to becoming thin was learning to hate the foods you loved the most.
MF: Whoa.
VT: And that reminds me so much of what you're talking about where it's like that inversion where it's like where the thing you love the most is the biggest danger to who you can and should become. But that's what I mean that's what's- it's like that's also part- like her teaching me how to have an eating disorder, was part of feminine intimacy in our culture.
MF: Right. Right. Right.
VT: It wasn't like somehow like oh this beautiful moment of like feminine intimacy where a mother is passing something onto a daughter, it was like all that awful diet culture shit is as much a part of gender as like my mother touching my body, you know what I'm saying? It's like it's all connected, right?
MF: I completely agree.
VT: It's interesting right because like there's this cultural mechanism. The family is attempting to use food the way that humans use food which is to celebrate, to create intimacy, to feed and nurture and then there's this weird moralistic diet culture thing that's kind of stepping in. And it's just it's like interesting right cause I see the trajectory of family and how food is central to that, and then there's this weird thing that kind of interrupts. Another story that feels really resonant with what you're talking about with your family and your mother is like, I remember you know distinctly writing in my diary these like hate letters to my grandmother because I was so angry at her for making delicious food that I felt tempted me. That I felt you know like if she could just stop making this food that I could be the right size.
And I think what's so interlaced with that and what was so intense about that is that you know my grandmother, my family, is Mexican right? So like I'm learning that this particular kind of Anglo streamlined Norwegian body is the ideal body. And I'm seeing my Mexican grandmother who's making the food that I am connecting with home but also connecting with my racialization as evil.
MF: Me too Virgie. Me too. I- the bagel. There was something so Jewish about it. And I not only hated my body but I hated my Jewish body. This is not something that I fully have resolved. you know the bagel for me like it was it was like the perfect food to hate, you know? It wasn't just like chocolate or it wasn't just like ice cream. This food that like everyone loves and then you know people who are on a diet are like no, you know. The bagel was like, it symbolized my cultural background as a Jew and how at odds I was with that. Yeah I don't know if that makes sense.
VT: Yes of course it does. Of course. I mean yes. I mean I'm wondering like you know you kind of mentioned when we're first talking about it, your kind of return to the bagel during pregnancy and I kind of wanted to hear this story.
MF: Yeah. I got pregnant in 2015 and there were just some foods I did not want. You know I- and there were some foods where you know the cravings just really took over and it was I mean all I wanted was a fucking bagel.
VT: Mm hmm.
MF: All I wanted was a fucking bagel. Like. And it was a plain bagel, no seeds, no flavor with plain cream cheese. It's all I wanted motherfucker. Like. Like give me- just bring it to me. There was- there's something kind of animal happens when you're pregnant you start to smell more and you sense more and you're you know you're like [sniffs around and makes animal noise] you know like you can't really see what I'm doing but I'm pretending to be a little animal sniffing around through garbage looking for that perfect treat. And like that's kind of how- what I was becoming. And when I wanted a bagel which was kind of all I wanted, I you know I made sure I got one.
VT: And did it create like static for you? That that intense craving?
MF: Yes every time. Every time every time. Because I I still was like I can't believe I'm eating a bagel. Mia, do you understand? Your body is gonna do all this crazy shit. And you're probably gonna gain all this weight. And you're- the world's gonna end and you're going to have a child and you're going to da da da da but I you know the bagel the bagel was eaten. Because it was all I- I couldn't, I didn't want anything else.
VT: Totally.
MF: I just remember this moment while I was giving birth, I had my son Gallileo in my in my house in my own bed, and I was pushing and I was, it was like screaming and and it was like I was an animal and I was trying to bite my doula in her face and [makes bleh sound]. You know and it was storming outside and it was you know at 4:00 in the morning. And I remember my partner said, he's like Mia you look so beautiful right now. And I just was like, shut the fuck up. I'm so fat. Why are you even telling me this right now? Like I was so deeply invested in the fact that my body was wrong that even in that moment when my body was doing like the most magical thing it's ever done. And I even had somebody right there rooting me on and I just couldn't even shake diet culture in that moment. And then when I think back to that ... how depressing. What a shame that like I have to have that memory poisoning my experience. I mean I'll forever look back on that. You know I chose to have a home birth so I could be really present and yet, I was not present. I was still having thoughts that I needed to be skinny. In that moment! I mean how ridiculous is that?
[Interstitial music]
[20:58] VT: We are back. A couple years after Mia gave birth, she came to Babecamp. That’s the workshop I do with women where we get free from the lies we’re told about our bodies. Remember — Mia’s an artist. She takes found industrial materials and makes huge, human-sized sculptures. Not long after Babecamp, she was asked to do an installation in a decommissioned greenhouse in the LA Arboretum.
MF: This greenhouse is like this derelict little shit box. It’s been vacant for decades. It is like this ruinous structure that's made of wood and glass and it's kind of fucked up, it's gnarly, like the glass is kind of smashed out in parts. And I spent some time in this greenhouse and also thought about kind of the journey that I've been on in my own body, getting pregnant, letting go of diet culture, you know really sort of re-prioritizing the things that I was going to put my energy into – which was not shrinking myself, like it just was. It was like glaring. It was a glaring problem for me to wake up in the morning and say well what was I going to do today? Am I going to go to the gym? And then spend the rest of the day worrying about what I was going to not eat? Or you know or was I just gonna go to my fuckin studio. There was nothing about shrinking my body that felt remotely important, felt like anything I needed to bother with. It felt like something that was if anything working against me and I needed to fucking get rid of that. As soon as that shit started to melt away, I was thinking I want to make this like celebratory body of work pun intended.
VT: Yes.
MF: And I wanted to use my own body, I wanted to use the bodies of brilliant women around me. I was moved to create an installation in that greenhouse of these fictional goddess figures. One of them was the Egyptian goddess Taweret. Who has the head of a hippo and the body of a woman. And her and her sisters were referred to as the solar mothers. And what their role was was to protect birthing mothers and newborns of all species during the birthing process and also to usher the sun being born over the horizon every morning.
VT: So I had an opportunity to take all my clothes off and be cast by you. It was such a specific experience. It was like, you know, like I'd never been cast before. And there's some logistics to it. Like for instance you had to put Vaseline all over my vagina and then put a tiny piece of Saran Wrap over it and it was like you were so consent-driven. You were like, is this OK? I'm going to put this- and you kind of, I think you even had like a joint dangling out of your mouth at this point or something and you're like, Is this OK? Is this OK? So evocative. I always envision you with a joint hanging out of your mouth. It's it's I mean that's not a judgment. It's actually very charming.
MF: Oh I'm so I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful to weed.
VT: So it's like I got cast and then I started to panic. And you had to cut me out. You and like your assistant had to cut me out of it and you gave me some weed and then I started to freak out and I was like, I've never been higher in my life. And you were like, you are not that high. Like you held it down in that moment like it was like the moment when the airplane was like crashing and you're like, we're gonna be OK!
[Both laughing].
VT: So powerful.
MF: Oh boy.
VT: And I felt okay after that I felt like you were just so emphatic and I felt like I could trust you in that moment.
I just want to tell you about the first time I saw Mia’s show, once it all came together. Mia had invited the group of fat babes she had cast for the sculptures to be VIP guests. After the wine and cheese reception, we walked the windy paths of the LA arboretum to the greenhouse.
And what we saw there was like something out of a science fiction fairytale. Through the windows, I saw these incredible sculptures that had the heads of hippos, the tails of dinosaurs, and human bodies. Our bodies.
I saw our bellies, our double chins, and thigh rolls illuminated under the gallery lighting... as if we were demigods. It was like a museum of witchy hippos crossed with a forgotten corner of Jurassic park. And it was amazing.
MF: I mean I do believe that this is the most exciting work I've ever made. Yeah. And it's only just sort of like the beginning of the most exciting work that I've ever made because all it did was just make me want to make better and more and crazier and you know like I just want to kind of keep riding it.
VT: I mean one of the things I love about this work is that I mean first of all there's there's like the documentation of bodies that have largely been either completely deleted from the archive of Western art or are only portrayed to display sin or gluttony or something, you know something kind of a deviation. Or a sign of immorality. In general I don't see fat women's bodies being revered and loved. And I think there's also what I love is because of the nudity there's like a documentation of the physicality of fatness that is so unique.
Anyway, the last question I wanted to ask you was, I know you're still on the journey but you're kind of on the other side of the line, right. I just found out recently that 48 million Americans diet every year. And so what is your dispatch? What do you know now that you didn't know when you were part of that statistic?
MF: Yeah I would say that to walk through that you know that that threshold or whatever of like committing to this bullshit sort of like living in the future aspirational gobbledygook, to consider leaving it could only be like, well then what happens to me? That is scary. But then, I feel like once the door was even cracked a little bit open you can't close it. Because it's searing bullshit that you realize you were in. Like just as soon as there's like a little inch of light going through it's like-
VT: You see all the poop garbage. The light coming in illuminates it.
MF: Yes, yeah. You're like well okay wait a second here.
[Virgie laughs]
MF: The other thing is the parenting question. Because I feel really fortunate too to have sort of discovered this radical way of living in our culture which is like without having a priority to shrink myself. I'm so grateful that it kind of happened when it did as I had been you know just becoming a parent because there are so many things that I am seeing other parents around me do that are setting their children up for the exact same sad painful relationships. I see it just with the way parents talk about their own bodies.
I never ever ever want there to be any shame around eating. Around eating bagels. Around bodies, around bodies in bathing suits, around jiggling, around tickling, around you know like anything that's kind of associated with like bodies and how bodies are funny and how bodies are hairy and smelly and I just I'm trying to protect Gallileo as much as I can from how the culture sterilizes and creates so much shame.
VT: Mia, thank you for being here. For eating bagels that were not toasted. And for sharing your beautiful story.
MF: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Theme Music]
[29:53] VT: Eating is a basic need. We have to eat. We rely on food for survival. Our bodies are built to enjoy eating. It’s a basic, biological source of pleasure. Beyond that, food connects us to other people and to ourselves. It’s part of our greatest moments of celebration, joy, and mourning. And — for better or worse — it’s tied to all things that anchor us to the place we’re from, to the people many of us will never be closer to — our family.
My relationship with my family is complex but now, tamales remind me of the warm parts of our relationship, not the hurtful ones. I know my grandma was caring for me with her tamales. She was never trying to tempt or torture me. She was only interested in nourishing me. Nowadays, tamales are a big chunk of my food pyramid. I don't hate my body or food anymore. So they don't represent danger. Instead, they represent a small delicious part of a very fraught inheritance.
[31:15] Every week, at the end of the episode, I’m going to share a journal prompt that will help you think about your relationship to food. This week, I want you to think about one of your food inheritances. Write about food that reminds you of family – chosen or biological, it doesn't matter. What does this dish represent to you? What’s its story? The joy, the tension, where it came from, the good memories and the weird ones, and how it’s shaped who you’ve become.
Rebel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media… the podcast company that’s like the last cream puff on the dessert tray. I’m Virgie Tovar. The show is produced by Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey, with help from James T. Green and Alex Sujong Laughlin. Our editor is Sara Nics. Gretta Cohn is our executive producer.
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