Feeding the Absent Referent

 “The men… were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat.” (Alice Walker)

               Sadly, the roar that many women can be heard making comes from their stomach. In our society, attention toward the health and welfare of women is starved and often women are (truly) starving for others. The U.S. dinner bell does not signal the trough of equality to appear and ask any and all to step up and “pig on out!” The reality is that those who are poorer will eat less food, have access to less medicine and end up receiving lower quality care from both. Even worse is that many women will likely eat very little or low quality foods in order for their children and/or partners to benefit. As a woman, this makes me sad because I know that life should never be about making yourself hollow, but instead should celebrate your abundance. There needs to be consistent recognition for women’s self-worth and a promise to locate empowerment every day.
 

           In her song Death By Chocolate, songwriter Sia belts out, “Death by chocolate is a myth.. Death by crying doesn’t exist..Death by anger, this is true.” I can verify that a heavy

cacao-rich diet doesn’t hurt you and that crying won’t cause death (or blindness for that matter). But death by anger, this is true. The way our body reacts to anger is similar in the way it reacts to when it is being starved or feed troublesome foods. I recently went to Mountain View to see an Talya Lutzker speak about her Ayurvedic cookbook. In her book, she discusses how the five senses are connected to the five elements and that the five elements are organized into three doshas (body types). Any symptoms, illness or disorders are an excess or depletion of one or more doshas. Doshas are the language of Auyrvedic medicine. Part of women respecting our bodies most definitely includes respecting our stomachs. Society has held onto phrases like “trust your gut” and “listen to your gut”, but ones gut is too often un-honored as a trustworthy source. Why is this so?

            There is a disconnection. Patriarchal culture asks women to live by insane reasoning through following contradictive dominant ideologies of womanhood. In fact, we are asked to be connected and disconnected at all times. We are asked to nod along or embody such ideas that as being passive and fragile while bearing and raising a child. This being the case, not just in the U.S., but all over the world, is it any wonder that woman have a history of being disenfranchised? Is it any wonder that the majority of those who starve are women? Access to food and medicine is too often out of reach, not to mention attaining an education on both. Because such problematic societal structuring exists, “going with your gut” is not always as instinctual as it could be. In 2012, RaceForward(.org) reported that 40 million households in the U.S. suffer from lack of access to adequate foods and 111 million people are classified as obese. Women of color are confronted with the experience of this death-defying tightrope walking more than others. 

            With all of the images presented to consumers daily, the thousands showing women’s bodies, revealing to us these tiny tummies, how come we are never left to think about those that are left hungry? Most often, the implication lingering from an ad that features a woman is the need for something else to be filled. On behalf of all women, I state (as fact) that death from lack of sex is not a thing, but death from lack of food actually is. “Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh. Watch who they beat and who they eat.” (Marge Piercy) For all of us that are made into absent referents in society, it is our job to be more aware than who would want us placed in hiding. The mindset of those in power is sometimes like that of a bad babysitter. They get paid to tune you out, enforce rules, threaten to get you in trouble with authority figures and likely tell you to “go hide”, only to “seek” after they finish talking to a friend about their problems.

 

A favorite song of mine is called Food by artist Nellie McKay. In her lyrics she spirals up from hopelessness to joy, “For to starve is to hate is to kill is to sin. Better love's on your plate, get your fill and dig in.” That is truly my hope for all women, to eat with love and abundance. Nellie, like me, eats a Vegan diet. I feel that eating a Vegan diet encourages a person to engage with their food on many more levels. For one, it begs for answers to questions and illuminates injustices. I want to point out again, that women are asked to connect and disconnect. Society tells us it is bad to feel “treated like a piece of meat,” but meat is still seen as “king” and meant to be eaten by real men. It’s a bleak message that if in wanting to be with a real men, we must in some ways want to be made a consumable thing.

            I feel that a meal should honor health because food is our history of health. Unfortunately, our country’s history of food honors violence over health. Men have long been seen as being stronger than women and that has also meant that they require more food to maintain this strength, particularly meat. Carol Adams discusses this in her invaluable book The Sexual Politics of Meat. Women, even when pregnant, have been seen as weaker and requiring less food, particularly less meat.  Meat represents virility whereas in vegetables represent weakness and are seen as “feminine foods.” The myth of meat providing superior strength to those superior in a hierarchy fans out into not only gender to race in this country. It is suggested by black historians that one of the reasons that black people were enslaved by white Americans instead of Native Americans is because of the of income made from the slaughter of fur bearing animals. 

            It is tragic that we are not commonly taught to move our minds within the gaps in popularized, patriarchal history. How much more filled with urgency and action we could all be if we could see others oppression more clearly? The absent referent does not stand apart from history. Why do all those seen as absent not stand side by side then? Why not stand together to show that we are not lost or waiting for others to seek us, not absent, but very much found.