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    The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America
    The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America
    The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

    Written by Virginia Sole-Smith

    Narrated by Julie McKay

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today's toxic food culture.

    Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We parse every bite we eat as good or bad, and judge our own worth accordingly. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again-and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing.

    The Eating Instinct visits kitchen tables around America to tell Sole-Smith's own story, as well as the stories of women recovering from weight loss surgery, of people who eat only nine foods, of families with unlimited grocery budgets and those on food stamps. Every struggle is unique. But Sole-Smith shows how they're also all products of our modern food culture. And they're all asking the same questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9781977387646
    Author

    Virginia Sole-Smith

    Virginia Sole-Smith is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Slate, and Elle. She is the author of The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America and also writes the Burnt Toast newsletter. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her two daughters, a cat, a dog, and way too many houseplants.

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    Reviews for The Eating Instinct

    3.5/5

    39 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The book starts with the authors daughters eating issues after birth. From the struggles that Sole-Smith deals with takes her to look at eating and how it is viewed in America what we buy, how we eat, picky eaters, eating disorders, clean food, junk food and the toll it takes on people. there are also stories of people with various types of reading disorders and how they affect their lives.
    • 3/5
      Discusses all the different ways eating can sometimes be anything other than a simple, pleasurable, nourishing experience. The impetus for the book was the author's baby born with a congenital heart defect, which required surgery and for her to be put on a feeding tube as an infant; Violet then refused to eat for many months, even after the tube should no longer have been needed. It was an arduous journey getting Violet to eat. This drove the author to examine other ways and reasons humans may not or can not do such a simple act as eating; she discusses babies with adverse reactions to milk, anorexics, severely "picky" adult eaters, people too poor to eat properly, and of course just plain women born and bred to this diet-crazy, thin-obsessed culture. It was absorbing. I'm not usually into "kid stuff," but she told Violet's story and the other baby/kid/parent stories in such a way that made even me interested.
    • 4/5
      Sole-Smith’s question is simple – how do women relate to food – but the answer is complex and as far reaching as one can imagine. Through interviews with women across the socio-economic and health lines she explores this question. Interwoven is the narrative of where this question came from – her own experience with her daughter’s inability to eat.Sole-Smith is a writer by trade, not a scientist, so that must be first understood when reading this book. While she includes some science, it is important to note that this is not a book about the science of eating – but about the social and cultural challenges and connections.Pros: Sole-Smith included women from a wide range of backgrounds and made a particular point of including low-income women, whose challenges with food are unique and not often understood by the intended audience of her work. Her writing is technical enough to be fulfilling but not so dense that is reads like a textbook. By including stories and first-hand experience, she created a personal narrative that drew the reader in.Cons: Not enough science to prove her points, and she didn’t include the issue of where the diet advice women get from doctors and foundation is even correct. This seems particularly important for this subject, to me, and I found the lack of it a bit conspicuous.This book, although not perfect, was informative and sparked a few good discussions when I brought it up to friends. I would recommend this as an excellent non-fiction selection for Women’s Book Clubs – it’s a topic we all deal with and might open up good avenues of discussion and support. Note: I received this book free through LibraryThing's Early Review Program in exchange for my fair and honest opinion
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book! Although, I would be terrified to read it as a first-time mother. Oh the slippery-slope of having a picky-eater. I loved the author's different collections of stories, and the reasoning behind the behaviors. Its so easy to just say "oh, that person is picky" in a negative light, but this book really made me pause and think back to those moments with friends and family who wouldn't eat certain foods. At some point, it stops being choice. This book is a good reminder that are a lot of different ways to perceive the role of food in our lives.
    • 4/5
      "Food is supposed to sustain and nurture us. Eaing well, any doctor will tell you, is the most important thing you can do to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you is the most important job a mother has, especially in the first months of her child's life. But right now, in America, we no longer think of food as sustenance or nourishment. For many of us food feels dangerous. We fear it, We regret it. And we categorize everything we eat as good or bad."When her daughter was born with a heart condition, needing multiple surgeries, feeding tubes, she realized her daughter did not know how to eat, enjoy food. She felt she had failed in the most important duty of motherhood. Even once the feeding tube was removed, they had a slow journey towards regarding food as enjoyable. This prsked her interest in how food is viewed by many, and in multiple interviews she takes us through the ever changing role of what we eat.The differen dirt crazes, heslth advice that is ever changing, the emotional connection to food and the many food related illnessess. The pressure of a media that promotes thinness, a culture that thinks if one gets I'll they have not eaten correctly. Food and food related books, diets, supplements has become a mega business worth billions. it is in their favor if they can keep us off balance, constantly searching for the new and improved cure all. For many eating is no longer enjoyable, it has become challenging and pressurized. We have forgotten the instinct, and no longer listen to our body, which can and will, if we let it,ctell us when and how much to eat. Our own control has been diverted and control given over to others.Quite an informative read, well done and we'll presented.ARC from Netgalley.
    • 3/5
      This book is an easy and interesting read for those interested in diet culture and eating disorders. For me, it focused entirely on personal stories and not enough (or at all) in any exploration of the consequences of diet culture and its relationships with and effects on sexism, racism, and classism in our culture. A superficial look at food and eating in American society.
    • 3/5
      Inspired by her baby daughter's experience with a feeding disorder, author Victoria Sole-Smith examines that most basic of tasks, eating, and some of the more unusual issues that are associated with it. She profiles well-heeled ladies who feel guilty if they (or their children) eat something that isn't organic or "clean", as well as bariatric surgery veterans and African-Americans who engage in "eating while black". Self-proclaimed "picky eaters" are given their due as well. And don't even get her informants started on breastfeeding! After a while it gets wearing to read about the eating habits of strangers. The author also makes presumptuous statements about how "we" feel about food and body image issues. Recommended only for those with a strong interest in the topic.
    • 3/5
      This book is a non-fiction book about eating, diet, health, culture, and eating disorders. It is well-researched, with extensive end notes. Being a rather squeamish person when it comes to medical details, I was put off by the extensive descriptions about the author's child's illnesses and medical situations. I skipped over a lot of that part of the book. I almost stopped reading it because of this, and did not feel these memoirs were necessary to the book's main points. A short introduction to the thesis of the book with reference to the child's illness would have been sufficient. I did not find anything new to add to what I already knew about this topic. I received this book from Early Reviewers, in exchange for a review.
    • 3/5
      A combination of memoir, reportage, and light polemic. Makes a fairly convincing case that pretty much everyone in America is eating disordered, to one degree or another. Surprisingly little emphasis on the gendered aspects of this, which seems like a super major omission. I was drawn through it quickly, but felt in the end that I had learned little and shifted my views not at all. Just because socioeconomic factors make it elitist to urge everyone to eat unprocessed food, does not mean that processed food is not bad for you. Just because some people seem to experience few health consequences (for a time!) eating nothing but junk, doesn't mean we should give up fighting against the corporate and industrial forces who are trying to promote this stuff. Piqued my interest in the intuitive eating approach and Health at Every Size movement, although frustratingly little concrete info was given.
    • 3/5
      I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I enjoyed the fresh perspective on eating for pleasure, and the author's reminder that enjoyment should not and cannot be separated from food intake was timely and welcome. There is also some good material here about body image, albeit no information or argument that I haven't encountered many times before.I felt that the author meandered quite a lot, tossing in "Eating While Black" seemingly just for a cute chapter title, and I couldn't quite gather exactly what Sole-Smith did recommend about food and eating--because surely eating for pleasure as much as we please isn't doing us any good and has certainly contributed to, if not caused, an obesity epidemic in this country. There is just too much cheap delicious food around, loaded with addictive salt, sugar, and fat, to take the purely hedonistic view. I came very close to putting the book down after 30 pages at the beginning about the author's baby daughter's medical problems. While I was sympathetic, I could not figure out what the long memoir had to do with the thesis of the book. The anecdote about her daughter stopped on page 32.The book would have benefited from less personal experience/anecdotal evidence and better organization of topics.