Category: Ramblings & Ravings

Anthropophagy

A joke:

What did the cannibal do after he dumped his girlfriend?

–He wiped.

Along with pirate jokes, cannibal jokes count among those I find most ticklish. Once I told this joke to my Japanese language tutor. It necessitated explanation of the double-entendre involved in the slang meanings of the verb “to dump.” A memorable English lesson, I think.

Like most humor, this joke makes light of a topic that we are, deep down, very uneasy with. Cannibalism is a firmly-entrenched taboo in most (but not all[1]) contemporary societies.

We might draw a distinction between two categories of cannibalism: voluntary and involuntary. Involuntary cannibalism is the unfortunate result of a stubborn unwillingness to starve to death in the face of dire circumstances such as accidents in remote locations or widespread famine. Well-known incidents include the Donner Party and the Uruguayan ruby team in 1972, although accounts have abounded throughout history. Desperate and starving, many Russians resorted to digging up corpses for food during the 1921 famine, as did North Koreans during the devastating famine of 1996.

Other involuntary cannibals include the hoodwinked population of New York in the sci-fi classic Soylent Green, but we’ll assume that this doesn’t happen very often.

“Saturn Devouring his Son,” Francisco de Goya

Voluntary cannibalism is a somewhat different beast. In modern times the desire to eat human flesh is associated with derangement or insanity. There are scores of real-life and fictional serial killers who eat their victims, from Jeffrey Dahmer to Hannibal Lector. Cannibalism has also been widely practiced in warfare, as in the ancient Anasazi civilization (see below), 19th century Belgian Congo[2], or in more recent decades to intimidate or terrorize victims during conflicts in Liberia.

In the Western tradition, myths and fairy tales feature cannibalistic monsters such as the Greek Titan Cronus, who devoured his own children to prevent them from supplanting him, or the Grimm Brothers’ gingerbread house-dwelling witch trying to fatten up poor Hansel. Zombies, the most gluttonous and unrepentant cannibals in popular culture, terrify and fascinate us on the big screen. They probably fascinate us more than they terrify, judging from their proliferation from film to television, books, comics, and video games.

Cannibalism, we would conclude from the most common cultural representations, is an activity reserved for the monstrous, savage, and uncivilized. Which is precisely what Europeans thought when they encountered cannibalistic practices during colonial expeditions. Ritual cannibalism, involving the cooking and eating of human flesh, organs, or making medicines derived from human bones or blood, has been practiced by certain South Pacific, Tropical African, or Amazonian peoples (among others, including North American Indians and Europeans) in ceremonies as a way to honor the dead.

In fact the word “cannibal” comes from the Spanish word for the Carib people of the West Indies, who were reputed in the 17th century to be ferocious man-eaters. More recent anthropologists and historians have called into question the accuracy of past European accounts of cannibalism, arguing that these stories propagated a perception of native peoples as savage and primitive, which was used to justify colonist brutality, enslavement, and extermination. While this is undoubtedly the case, the widespread occurrence of cannibalism in many cultures has solid grounds based on documentation and archeological evidence, as Jared Diamond, for one, points out with respect to the Anasazi civilization in his book Collapse.

Most people feel strongly that cannibalism is somehow profoundly wrong. And yet—and yet. The swelling wave of adventurous eaters—those that seek to open their minds and their mouths to what is generally deemed far beyond any standard of decency[3]—is flirting with the breaking point. Anthony Bourdain, the spirited leader of all the worst convention-flouting dining, affirms his participation. Asked by an audience member at a Brooklyn summer festival if he would eat another human, he reportedly said, “Yes, yes, I fucking would.” Then there’s the case of Mao Sugiyama, a Japanese asexual living in Tokyo who this past spring cooked and served to volunteers his own recently-severed genitals, salvaged after a sex-change operation (the subheading of the article I read ran, “Police Shrug, ‘It’s not Illegal’ ”).

Although it may be technically legal, the consumption of human protein is not highly encouraged by Randall Fitzgerald, author of The Hundred Year Lie, an investigation into dangerous chemical additives in the modern diet. Fitzgerald says we ingest so many of these toxins that our own bodies have become toxic. Similarly, in Collapse, which links man-made ecological disaster to the collapse of civilizations, Diamond writes that the levels of highly toxic PCBs in marine animal-eating Inuit mothers’ breast milk is so high as to be considered “hazardous waste.”[4]

I suppose Soylent Green, were it to be manufactured today, would not be approved by the FDA.

To end, allow me to venture a second cannibal joke:

Why did the cannibal live on his own?

–Because he was fed up with other people.


[1] It has been reported that the Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea still practices ritual cannibalism. However, it is unclear how prevalent the practice is in reality and how much of the documentation may be exaggerated or sensationalized.

[2] See The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo by Robert B. Edgerton for a fascinating account.

[3] Adventurous eaters look to dine out on anything from grasshopper tacos to choicer bits of various animals such as heart and tongue and testicles.

[4] Jared Diamond, Collapse. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. p. 518

Male or Female, You Are What You Eat

On the night of my freshman homecoming, my date and I, along with four other awkwardly-limbed and giggling couples, sat down to eat in one of the terrible Australian-themed steakhouse restaurants that proliferate throughout these United States. When faced with the familiar anxiety of what to order the choice proved remarkably simple: all five boys ordered steaks or hamburgers, “well-done” (we can forgive those pour souls on the threshold of adolescence for such errors); and all five girls ordered salad in combinations of chicken breast and zesty mandarin orange. Despite my current vegetarianism, I am not nor was I ever favorably inclined to paying much for a bowl of chopped leaves and I would have much preferred a nice juicy hamburger with fries. But unspoken peer pressure prevailed—I did want to be one of the girls, didn’t I?

This same scenario plays out in dining rooms across the country, men staidly reviewing the STEAK & CHOPS or FROM THE GRILL menu listings (or eyeing the most expensive item, in my 17-year-old brother’s case), while women opt for the fish special or “just a salad, to save room for dessert.” Female fans of filet mignon and men prone to strawberry salads, meanwhile, have surely noticed their server’s hesitation on reaching the table—sometimes even mistakenly switching the orders to place a plateful of ribs in front of the man and the frozen fruit cocktail in front of the woman. Undeniably gender has a strong influence over people’s preferences or perceived preferences of what to eat.

monte cristo sandwich

It seems to be true that more women than men are chronic dieters, as there is much greater cultural pressure for women to watch their weight and therefore what they eat. This is learned at a very young age; check out a high school cafeteria one of these days—I’ll bet it’s not the boys you’ll find splitting a portion of fries or blotting their pizza with napkins. Women have learned to attach guilt to foods high in carbohydrates and fat in a way that men typically have not and so their choices are understandably affected, regardless of weight or diet. Men, meanwhile, attach ideas of physical strength, height, and athletic prowess to the consumption of animal protein and dense, high-energy foods. It’s important to emphasize that these stereotypical differences, like most stereotypes, have developed with a certain basis on truth but are not consistently true across the board. The teenage me certainly didn’t fall into these gender patterns: my favorite school lunch in high school was the Monte cristo sandwich (an abomination so gluttonous that I am now shocked at my school board’s disregard for student health—and sometimes I got two(!)) with fries; and, in that same cafeteria I once ate an entire box of Ho Hos on a dare (I sorely regretted it during afternoon P.E., but that’s beside the point).

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Regardless of widespread exceptions to the rule, we can observe that in the common cultural imagination foods associated with “dieting” or “healthy eating” such as salads, chicken breast, or fish are considered women’s foods. Other foods that have strong feminine associations are chocolate, dessert in general, fruity cocktails, strawberries, peaches; in other words, sweet foods. The phrases “I’m such a chocoholic!” or “I have an enormous sweet tooth” don’t seem to emanate very often from the mouths of men, at least not in public.

On the other hand, eating steak, hamburgers, chili, barbecuing and grilling are very manly-man activities. Men drink whisky on the rocks or fingers of rum. Masculinity seems to be associated with red meat, raw-ish foods with minimal dressing up or modifications, and potent flavors. Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” blog features weekly alcoholic drinks and regular sides of bacon, saying, “there are ways that men eat that are just different.”

Food preferences vary by culture, of course; what I’ve been describing are very American food habits. French women, for example, don’t shy so much away from high-fat, calorific foods such as cheese, butter, or foie gras (although this is changing as French obesity rates rise[1]). Both men and women enjoy yogurt for dessert after a meal. In Japan, chocolate is not considered feminine and is enjoyed with equal pleasure by both sexes. Other cultures may have alternate conceptions of what is masculine or feminine eating.

Buffalo Wild Wings advertisement

Food advertising provides fairly unequivocal evidence of this gender-typing of foods. McDonald’s advertisements, for example, typically show young men enjoying their beef hamburgers, while ads for salads or their new breakfast oatmeal with blueberries feature active-looking women. Chocolate advertisements are overwhelming aimed at women with themes speaking to pleasure and indulgence (sexy women don’t have restraints), or taking a deserved break from a stressful life (to absolve guilt). Ads for spicy buffalo wings and beer, on the other hand, target the male sector by showing groups of male buddies goofing off, watching football on TV (men don’t have to worry about domestic hassles), or trying to pick up women in bars (outgoing, energetic men are attractive to women).

Moreover, evidence shows that the unconscious ways in which we have formed gendered preferences for foods result from advertising initiatives that seek to gender-type specific foods to specific consumer groups. By creating perceptions of masculinity and femininity attached to their products advertisers encourage consumers to reaffirm their gender identity through their food choices and become consistent, reliable consumers of these products.[2] Yorkie chocolate bars, popular in England, were created with the bold slogan “IT’S NOT FOR GIRLS!” intending to appeal to an untapped male demographic of chocolate consumers.

Some studies have shown that men as a group tend to make dietary choices that conflict with their actual preferences, revealing that they are more influenced towards foods that they perceive as having certain desirable qualities apart from taste.[3] It makes sense that the eating choices of heterosexual men are, as a whole, more limited and inflexible than the choices of women or gay men, because the idea of “masculinity” in our culture is a rigid and supposedly stable construct where the boundaries are blurred only uncomfortably. In other words, there are not as many acceptable and recognizable ways to be a man as there are to be a woman. Men in our society are more concerned with defining and reaffirming their gender identity, and this is expressed through food as much as other lifestyle choices.

Consuming foods such as red meat, therefore, make the eater feel more “masculine” with all of its associated perks: strength, power, success, virility. This goes just as much for women as it does for men. The highest-priced and most prestigious items on a menu will always be the cuts of red meat or seafood. It is no accident that a high-profile business dinner will see a lot of tenderloin or ribeye on the table.

 

Anthony Bourdain in his show "No Reservations"

Carol J. Adams in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat (every feminist vegetarian’s credo) makes precisely this connection between eating meat and conforming to accepted modes of masculinity. With the publication of a study by Paul Rozin entitled “Is Meat Male?” we can add in “the eating of bits” such as inner organs or blood.[4] Celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain comes immediately to mind, obnoxiously chowing down on “exotic dishes” such as sheep testicles, seal eyeball, and warthog rectum with his famously foul mouth (he has yet to swallow his own machismo, however). The grossest Manly-Man food award, though, goes to Adam Richman for his Travel Channel TV show Man v. Food, a spin-off of Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild but instead of hunky Bear Grylls (incidentally, my favorite name in the world) performing amazing feats of survival the increasingly overweight but never out-of-breath Richman “performs” feats of heroic gluttony, in one episode consuming six pounds (!!!) of milkshake, while the crowd behind him cheers him on. Go Go America (sigh).

I reject the idea that the male appetite for meat and adventure and the female appetite for vegetables, cupcakes and domestic foods is “natural” and linked to evolutionary behavior. The “hunter-gatherer” dynamic has been stretched too far in too many cases, in this one to explain our eating differences as an evolved biological necessity to ensure the propagation of our species. Gender itself is not “natural”; it is a social construct that we perform in every behavior, including eating.

In conclusion, I advise girls not to order salad on homecoming night, and I advise boys to eat cupcakes, even the ones with pink frosting.[5]


[1] See this very interesting New York Times article about Nestle promoting Jenny Craig in France

[2] See “The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability” by Katherine Parkin, Advertising and Society Review, 2004

[3] Further readings: “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: Regulation of Gender-Expressive Choices by Men” published in Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal, June 2010; and “Gender differences in the consumption of meat, fruit and vegetables . . .” from the European Journal of Public Health, 2007

[4] Interestingly, Rozin’s study also concluded that feminists were more likely to associate meat with gender. See this New Yorker article: “Of Meat and Men”.

[5] For example, from Big Man Bakes.

 

Ugly Food

 

We don’t usually think of foods as “beautiful” or “ugly.” More often while gazing at a deli sandwich or a peach pie we choose descriptors that speak to hunger or craving, feelings that are rooted in bodily, primitive desires rather than in dispassionate aesthetic ideals. A food we think looks good might be tasty, delicious, delectable, full-flavored, luscious, scrumptious, yummy, fresh, moist, rich, creamy—not alluring, charming, comely, handsome, or pretty.

While foods surely can be beautiful, there seems to be a clear difference between a beautiful food, which touches on some higher objective aesthetic—a crisp red apple, for instance, or a perfectly rounded scoop of vanilla ice cream—and a food that simply looks good because it tastes good: homemade spaghetti, buffalo wings, or a pint of dark ale. And we don’t necessary want to eat the former, whereas we almost certainly want to eat the latter. In fact, I would say that we find these latter foods attractive because we want to eat them; we have a desire to consume them and indulge in the accompanying gustatory pleasures. There’s a reason that legions of websites are devoted to “food porn” rather than food art or food still lives; what’s appealed to is desire and satisfaction, not intellectual stimulation.

When you look at what makes food visually attractive or not, it has less to do with timeless aesthetic criteria than it does with what we want to eat right now; that is, cultural attitudes shaping how we view and consume food and food images. All standards of beauty are shifting and subject to current popular tastes, as we well know by looking at fashion trends that change by the decade, or more obviously by the century. You would be hard pressed today to find a Diesel ad with men wearing long powdered wigs, lace, and heeled booties (Diesel limited those ad runs to the mid-18th century). But certain natural attributes seem to universally classify a face as beautiful or not: symmetry, health, completeness, a preference for the natural and the wholesome over the artificial or fantastic.[1]

  

In food too, it seems reasonable to suggest that certain inherent qualities make a food item attractive or not—color, for example, which suggests nutritional content; fullness and firmness of form, indicating freshness; or symmetry and lack of blemishes, which attests to a healthy and disease-free specimen.

And yet these criteria hold limited sway over what we really want to eat or not, all told. People have widely differing food preferences even within one homogenous cuisine (I hate bananas, my brother won’t touch salad dressing), and when you get into the realm of comparing national cuisines, well, there is very little the born-and-raised American palate might have in common with that of an ethnic Chinese, relatively speaking.

All this brings me to what I really want to talk about, which is ugly food. Appealing food is rather easy to identify, and spans the globe—most every culture appreciates fresh fruit and vegetables, has their own form of fried dough, has their own sweets and comforting beverages. If I am allowed to appropriate a line from Tolstoy: Beautiful foods are all alike, every ugly food is ugly in its own way. Cultures differ much more on which foods they consider ugly than which they consider beautiful or appealing.

   

Now let’s define ugly foods, which is simultaneously very easy (look at a food—how do you feel? The gut reaction is swift) and very hard to do (now get 100 people from diverse populations to look at a food and decide how they feel). There are foods that are “objectively” ugly, for reasons of asymmetry, or rotten color, or strange irregular growths. Rotten or deformed fruits and vegetables, to begin, or root vegetables such as ginger, the Jerusalem artichoke, or turnips.[2]

Much more than this, there are foods that reach people on a gut level, that are ugly because they inspire disgust, sickness, or repulsion. This is perhaps what defines ugliness itself—not so much the lack of what qualifies as beauty, but a strongly negative emotional response. Umberto Eco, who has edited the volumes History of Beauty and On Ugliness, shows us that while the multitude of words we have for “beautiful” often reveal a rational intellectual observation of the subject or disinterested appreciation (divine, brilliant, elegant, exquisite, stunning) synonyms for “ugly” (awful, disgusting, repellent, horrible, foul) almost unanimously invoke personal reactions of disgust, horror, repulsion, or fear.

Now which foods are ugly? Obvious candidates are what we know others eat, but which we cannot really bring ourselves to believe or imagine. For Americans that might be insects, reptiles, offal, animal fluids other than milk, sexual organs and extremities. Most of these products are associated with uncleanliness—body parts used for unwholesome activities, bodily secretions or their locale, and animals such as insects and snails that live in places perceived as unclean. Other foods might be ugly as a result of a color or texture we associate with unfavorable experiences. Natto, fermented soybeans enjoyed throughout Japan, are unpleasantly slimy and gooey. Squid ink pasta disgusts because of its black color that stains lips and teeth. So-called 1,000-year-old eggs, a delicacy in China, may remind us of putrefied matter. Monkfish looks like a monster, with its gaping jaws and googly eyes. There is also a moral element to disgust—eating balut, or duck embryo, would strike many people as a horrible sin, as would eating dog, cat, horse, or whale meat. The cultural gaps in question become an impassable abyss as we realize that there’s virtually no food substance that isn’t consumed (barring what’s literally inedible, such as feces or rotten food—and even then . . .) by someone else, somewhere—and more than likely, by someone you know. The English eat blood sausage, the French eat frogs and fatty goose liver and horse carpaccio, Australians eat vegemite. I’ve consumed all but one of the foods shown in these photos, my mother is even worse, counting chicken feet and bird’s nest soup in her meal history, and an unnamed friend has gone so far as to eat unmentionable things, including brains, semen, and heart. To note, he is not some kind of reality TV host, he is just a guy ordering dinner in China.

  

We mustn’t forget that food is primarily not a visual experience. We experience food more importantly through taste, smell, and touch. And so food that is redolent of death or decay (aged soft cheeses, durian) or that has an unpleasant texture (sea snails, seaweed) repels us.

Obviously I’m writing from a more or less Western/American food culture, and we could turn this around: we love our bacon and ground chuck, reviled in the first instance by Muslims and Jews and in the second by Hindus; we pay large sums in restaurants to dirty our bibs with lobster and crab, which are large arthropods, basically sea insects.

These preferences have virtually nothing whatsoever to do with nutritional content or hardwired human tendencies. Tastes come and go just like fashion. This is pointed out by Paul Greenberg in his book Four Fish, on our current bottomless hunger for Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is very quickly disappearing from the ocean. Modern sushi connoisseurs may not be able to imagine a decent sushi meal sans toro, or fatty bluefin belly, but the taste for this meat is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in the 1930s, and was motivated by economics rather than gastronomics (as are so many things when you care to look).[3] The familiar story of New England prisoners protesting their lobster dinners comes to mind (and so did Irish prisoners in response to too many meals of cod[4]).

What’s interesting is how adamant people are about what they like to eat and what they cannot even conceive of as decently edible, even if rationally these preferences are rooted in nothing more stable than what’s familiar to them. Beyond that, hungry people at dinner can be at their most unreasonable, bigoted, and frankly racist when it comes to food differences.

  

Food, much more so than sexual attraction or artistic appreciation, I would argue, is emotionally charged. It is related to personal histories, to localities, to isolated moments in individual memory and collective cultural traditions. This is why tastes are so difficult to change, and why obsessive or compulsive eating is a response to a variety of emotional stresses and disorders. Alongside of this is the bombardment of commercial images we receive from food companies that homogenize our food culture and nostalgia and feed it back to us in easily consumable packages that reinforce what’s already familiar.

Whatever the feelings of disgust or fear attached to it, ugliness carries a certain fascination, especially when this ugliness is chewed up and swallowed inside our own bodies. Adventurous eating has become a kind of underground sport, and “exotic” dishes (read: very exotic) are gaining in popularity on urban menus not especially for the taste but for the novelty. Ugliness is just as vital to defining gastronomic tastes as beauty, and in a lot of ways, ugly food has more variety and excitement. Ugly food, more people seem to be agreeing, is worth a second look.


[1] For an entertaining discussion of what defines beauty see the BBC series The Human Face with John Cleese.

[2] See the “Ugliest Vegetable in Britain” contest.

[3] According to Greenberg, giant bluefin tuna were first fished by sport fishermen in Canada and their bodies simply thrown away. Japanese planes importing goods to North America after WWII found they could buy the fish at next to nothing and fly them back to Japan, providing the sushi market with an influx of cheap flesh and creating a taste for it. Now a large bluefin can sell for as much as $150,000.

[4] In Four Fish, Paul Greenberg

 

How a Japanese first grader changed my life

Designated students serving lunch for the class.

Japan, October 2007. I am on the playground, supervising the students of Higashi Wasada Elementary on their recess break, just after lunch. Sayuri, a pigtailed six-year-old in class 2, runs up to me wide-eyed and beaming, shooting me little heart signs made with the outlines of her hands. “Oh! Sensei!” she squeals, and leans her head on my stomach. “Is there a baby inside?” I look down at my stomach, slightly rounded from lunch. Speechless outrage overwhelms me. Mouth gaping, I watch her skip away to practice the unicycle with her first-grader friends. Did she really say that? Was she just trying to be cute? Maybe there’s some other bizarre translation for “akachan” . . . ? I get out my pocket dictionary, just making sure . . . nope, definitely means baby.

A week later at recess it happens again: different first grader, different school. “Are you gonna have a baby, Kamiru-sensei?” Seriously?? Was there a first-grader conspiracy to make English teachers feel bad? Maybe the school vice principal told everyone to subtly encourage foreigners to slim down as part of a new plan to improve work efficiency? Or is it just not very common in Japan to have a bit of a belly after lunch? Hmm, time to reevaluate my school lunch choices.

Kareraisu (curry rice) on the menu today.

Being American, I had been proudly packing American-size bag lunches for school, and rather healthy ones, or so I thought. At noon on both of these days I had eaten something like: A sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and cheese (rather large—the sliced sandwich bread in Japan is easily twice the thickness of American slices), an apple (again—rather large, though it better be because it cost three dollars), a bag of crackers, and a dessert pudding. After that I was full. It never occurred to me that I could be eating too much food—after all, the apple and the vegetable sandwich hardly count anyways, right? My first few days at work, I had sniffed at how small the school lunch servings were: a small bowl of rice, a scoop of curry, one small milk carton, and a half a piece of fruit. “Aren’t you still hungry?” I asked students and teachers. They would look at me, bemused. “Actually this is enough for me.” I didn’t believe them. Surely they were all sneaking Nutrageous bars during cleaning time. Except that snacks weren’t allowed in school.

After the double pregnancy scare, I decided to cut down my meal portions to match what my colleagues were eating at lunch. By like, half. The first day I started in at my usual pace and lunch was over in about five minutes. I waited, went outside, walked around. I expected to come down with ravenous zombie-like hunger cravings. And yet—nothing. I felt, not full, but satisfied. I wasn’t hungry anymore. Supposedly this meant that I had eaten enough. I inspected my shirt front: my stomach was no longer inflated like a dodgeball. Plus, I actually had energy to run around and play tag with the kids, and I didn’t nod off at my desk in the afternoon.

So, the snotty little first graders had taught me something—imagine, a student teaching a teacher something! What a world. They taught me that despite twenty-two years of habituation to Cheesecake Factory portions and extra value meals and two-for-one deals, my body just didn’t need to eat so much. In fact, I didn’t need nearly as much food as I thought. I learned that most Americans’ idea of correct portion size is grossly inflated (even if you consider yourself slim and healthy—which I did). I learned to listen to my body—if I couldn’t run or move around after eating without discomfort, I was eating too much. I learned that it’s not normal to look like you’re pregnant just because you ate lunch (who woulda thought?). By eating a small meal of nutritious food, I had more energy and felt more alert.

My accuser, second from left.

I like to say that Japan, to westerners, is a world upside down. Part of this is because living there forces you to look in the mirror and reconsider your own previously unchallenged ideas of who you are and where you came from. For the many Americans, English, and Australians (making up the top obesity rates in the world) who live in Japan, literally looking in the mirror is equally discomfiting. Like our inflated portion sizes, Americans have a very inflated sense of healthy body size. In Japan it is simply not normal to carry excess weight. Being bigger than you need to be is not something to be proud of, nor it is not a way to express opposition to supermodels or fantasy portrayals of women in the media (or men—though this has much less to do with weight). I’m not suggesting that everyone try to look like Kate Moss; body types and shapes vary widely, and weight is distributed around the body in different ways for different people. But this doesn’t mean that you should carry more weight than is necessary. Most Japanese people do not have extra fat on them—each time I flew home to Chicago I noticed a difference just in the airport. Big people with big suitcases, carting around more than they need. Something else I learned from traveling: simplify. Will you actually need six pairs of shoes on vacation to Iceland? Probably not, so don’t take them. Do you need ten extra pounds on you? Probably not, so get rid of it.

Playing tag at recess.

I think that if you care about eating healthily, portion control is really the most important thing to keep in mind. I’m a proponent of eating with variety and enjoying food, so I don’t believe in restricting what you eat. But whatever you eat, eat it in reasonable amounts. Food is very much a pleasure, but let’s not forget its primary function—to give your body energy and nourishment. Anything more would be a waste.