As Good as Skinny Feels 6 comments

By Kelly Foster

It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.
                                                             —Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

I come from sturdy stock, from hardscrabble working folk.

The words slender and lithe have rarely been used to characterize any of my people. We are shortish, muscular types—given to athleticism—and we like to eat.

Adjusting to the dominant role food plays in my family’s vacation scheduling, for instance, has been a real adjustment for my sister-in-law, whose family tends to order leisure time around activities like hiking and mountain climbing instead of eating. When my family sits down to plan a vacation, it tends to sound something like this:

“So I was thinking Tuesday night, we’d do shrimp. And I could make that eggplant thing. Then Wednesday, we’ll do the oysters at that place up the road. OH! And we’ve got to grill those white peaches. And I’ll make that ice cream again, remember?”

And thus all other logistics are at best tertiary to the taste buds. Read, sleep, eat. Walk on the beach. Read, sleep, eat. Watch a movie. This is vacation with the Fosters. You should come sometime. I won’t lie to you, folks. It’s not a bad time.

And this is why we welcome people like Meredith into our weird little fold, because sometimes we forget how good it also is to get up and move. And she helps us remember. She helps us remember how to get up in the morning, as she and I did this past summer, and bike fourteen miles to town and back along the beach path—to feel the warm wind and sun, to sweat a bit then jump into the ocean, to stop for a lemon ice along the way.

A few weeks ago, I went hiking with a friend down the Natchez Trace. We were both hungry and tired and ducked off the empty road to find a little sustenance in town. Breakfast at 7 am had consisted of a few handfuls of dry Cheerios and noon had already come and gone. At a little gas station, we found some Mississippi classics—fried livers and gizzards, potato logs, fried pickles—essentially, a lot of fried things, though I must admit, we did opt for the “Famous White Meat Chicken-on-a-Stick” in place of the gizzards. I’m not quite that brave.

We bought a couple bottled Cokes and popped them open in the car.

We pulled into a lot across from the gas station to eat and realized we were on a Confederate battlefield. We munched on golden greasy onions and read the placard from the Historical Society.

After five minutes of wiping hands on napkins, my friend laughed at himself. “I thought I was getting a bit depressed. But I realize now I was just hungry.”

It is not accidental that the vehicle for the Eucharist is food. Neither is it accidental that Christ feeds the five thousand or helps the disciples find fish or turns water into wine. We are helplessly embodied creatures and no Gnostic asceticism of any stripe can wholly help us transcend that.

Most girls learn to subjugate their hunger and either become closet gluttons or closet masochists as a result. We are taught that healthy food tastes bad. We are taught no pain no gain. We are taught that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

But I’d argue that.

A halibut taco on the beach with a beer and a lime. Chargrilled oysters in New Orleans. Shaved parmesan and lemon zest over arugula with a balsamic glaze and sea salt. Baguettes and herb butter with radishes. Red wine and Vosges chocolate. Brats at Clark Street Dog in Chicago. Pizza Margherita. Crème Brulee. Heirloom beets. Roast beef with horseradish. Mussels with garlic and white wine and a side of grilled bread. Gorgonzola and grilled green apples with truffle honey and watercress.

All these things taste better than skinny feels.

And I know as well as anyone.

As an adult, I’ve cycled from a size 2 to a size 10 and landed on various places within that spectrum and back again. And sure, skinny feels pretty great. But happy feels better. Loved feels better. Hell, full feels better. And, short of lucky genetics, the two rarely walk hand in hand.

For a few years, I starved myself for a boy I thought I loved. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s not an exaggeration. The first time he came to visit me in college, I had two bowls of baked Ramen noodles (99% fat free), three cups of black bean soup, three nutri-grain bars, and six apples over a seven-day stretch. We had pizza before he left and though I didn’t eat while he was around, as soon as I got home, I ate the rest of the pizza.

I still remember how it felt going down, artichoke hearts, garlic, parmesan cream, that yeasty olive oil crust. I still remember how solid, how sturdy, how real I felt afterwards. It was fifteen years ago. I don’t remember anything he said (or more likely didn’t say) or what he was wearing or what he sounded like, but I remember those artichokes and the way they felt against my teeth and tongue going down.

Body and soul may be united. Body and soul may be split. Regardless, we are bodies. We are grasping, aching, trembling bodies. We are hungry today. We will be hungry tomorrow. And there are so very many things that taste better than skinny feels.