Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live - Hardcover

Husain, Amber

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668060310 ISBN 13: 9781668060315

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 2026

Synopsis

An intimate and expansive exploration of how and why we eat, and the relationship between food and empowerment, through the historic feasts and fasts of radicals and tyrants.

Inspired by writer Amber Husain's unorthodox route to healing from anorexia, Tell Me How You Eat examines not just how society views the refusal to eat, but how we understand the meaning and power of food. Suspecting that the standard courses of treatment--as disempowering as they are ineffective--might in fact be part of the underlying problem, Husain took part in an experimental psylocibin treatment study. Where the medical model typically tries to fix the difficult non-eater, this trial opened her mind to the idea that there might be more to fix beyond the self--that our relationship with food might be closely entwined with our outlook on the world.

Through five chapters taking in hunger, restriction, gorging, feeding, and the making of political demands, Husain turns away from thinking about how people are shaped by food to think instead about how food can inspire people to reshape the world. Each chapter searches for reasons to eat and live through histories ranging from pus-drinking medieval nuns to Black Panther breakfast programs; from 1950s lesbian dinner parties to modern-day Gazan food bloggers.

In a culture that insists "you are what you eat," and makes every bite a fraught moral choice, Husain argues that we will only feel truly nourished when we can eat in the spirit of restoring a collective right to food, long eroded over centuries of systems and narratives that have normalized deprivation.

About this title

About the Author

Amber Husain is a writer based in South London, UK. She is the author of Tell Me How You Eat, Meat Love, and Replace Me. Her essays on politics, literature, and art have been published in Granta, The New York Times, Baffler, and more. She has a PhD from UCL in the history of art and mind-body medicine in late-20th-century Britain. She teaches history of art, creative writing, and criticism. Visit AmberHusain.com for more information.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: You Don’t 1 You Don’t
A sandwich can involve many things at once: lettuce, regret, tomatoes, fried tofu, maybe some pickles, slicks of butter, despair, ennui.

Maybe you like sandwiches, though. The one I just described at least looked uncontroversial. Apart from (some would argue) the tofu, which no one could see from the outside anyway, there could be few overt signals in a big white bap that I was some kind of bourgeois arsehole—like the kind who lunches on “street food” made by white entrepreneurs in pedestrianized enclaves overrun by wooden forks. At least it signaled I was not the kind of person who doesn’t care about life and brings an underwhelming squirl of cold spaghetti out for lunch from a stained Tupperware box.

Maybe you too like the idea that a sandwich seems honest, which was hard for me to project because I was supposed to be anorexic and that, as we know, is a textbook liar’s disease. I liked that the sandwich made my veins feel fuller after I’d fasted, under instruction, until four in the afternoon. I liked the way the not-so-sweet tomato juice turned the bread into a moist, acid sponge. But then there are the things it is harder to like: the regret, the despair, the ennui.

It seems likely there are aspects of this complex relationship with sandwiches you find more relatable than others. Perhaps you’d go for bacon and sourdough or a brand-name plastic bread. Perhaps you have never been clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder, and class yourself as only moderately disturbed by the meanings attached to your diet. It is extremely unlikely, though possible, that you typically take your sandwiches after fasting, under instruction, until four in the afternoon. The only reason I did that was because I was participating in a clinical trial, assessing the value of psilocybin-assisted therapy for anorexia patients.

The research team had needed me to spend an extremely hungry hour in an MRI scanner. The instruction, then, was not to eat a thing until it was done. I’d be amazed, the study coordinator insisted, by the difference hunger can make to regional brain activity. I took this to imply that any sins would probably find me out. Stolen mouthfuls would flourish under the scanner like love bites on my prefrontal cortex.

This paranoia may have had something to do with the fact that until the study had started, most of my interactions with the team had revolved around proving my condition. I’d needed doctors’ notes to confirm my DSM-5 diagnosis, and to confirm that their own attempts at treatment had failed to undo it. A series of interviews and physical exams had been arranged to check that I was all the things you had to be: restricting my food (A); of a very low weight (B), and resistant to reversing this trajectory (C).

Yet here I was, not entirely resistant to reversing this trajectory, or I’d never have signed up for the study. My presence was proof, in fact, of some commitment to a reversal—at least enough for me to have taken some powerful drugs. Drugs so powerful, in fact, that on two of the three occasions I’d been given them, I’d started to believe I was dead. I’d been prepared to come back, after hours of what the researchers called “primitive agony,” and see what more the mushrooms had to reveal. I’d returned, at the end of all this, to spend one last hour in a brain-scanning tube, hungrily watching videos of food and rating how much I enjoyed them. I was prepared to play along with the seemingly fruitless task of assigning numbers to fruit, of quantifying my feelings about how the flow of chocolate sauce compared with the churn of a pencil sharpener.

More to the point, I was committed enough to be eating an actual sandwich. To have wanted to eat the sandwich even before the white coats finally gave me the nod at four. The urge to commit sandwich adultery when I was supposed to be anorexic was, I supposed, kind of funny. Had I not been there precisely because desire is a complex thing, I might also have found it quite comforting. I might have wondered, in fact, if I’d cured myself just by signing up for the trial. I might have wondered if, now, when we were wrapping things up and I was wrapping my mouth around a sandwich, this meant the cure was almost complete. This kind of eating, after all, was a category violation of criterion (A)—the one where anorexics must restrict their intake of food. All I would need now was to eat enough to breach criterion (B)—the one about low weight—and I’d be DSM-5–official happy.

But like I said before, I was not sold on the idea that my daily struggle to eat was a struggle with food alone. My suspicion that it wasn’t was only reinforced by the food-free experience of hell I had been shown in psychedelic space. I had been given to believe that my problem might, for example, have something to do with an overwhelming sense of the pointless; the exhaustion of any belief that life was in fact worth feeding.

There are people who would never eat a sandwich, I thought, but whose body weight, for whatever reason, never reaches “very low.” Sometimes these people are so resistant to eating sandwiches that the mere invitation to do so makes it hard for them to breathe. There are also people who really, really do not want to eat sandwiches but for whatever reason eat them anyway. No one calls these people anorexic, and therefore no one offers them therapeutic shrooms, yet still we all have something in common. We all have relationships with sandwiches that give us some level of grief.

People like me, who had been through (A), (B), and (C), and were now engaged in eating, were not supposed to relate to these other people’s complex relationship with sandwiches. The DSM-5 is not interested in collapsing its own boxes. The DSM-5 will try to tell you who you are or who you have been, not the nature of your experience. The DSM-5 would like to know if you are a person who wants to eat, or if you are a person who doesn’t. It doesn’t acknowledge that you can want, and be suspicious of, the same thing at once. It doesn’t care if you want the tofu, the lettuce, and the bread, but not the despair or ennui. It doesn’t care if you want to get better, but only if it’s possible for life to get better too. It certainly doesn’t care if, after a large dose of mushrooms, you decide you want to be nourished, but still are not quite convinced that being nourished will be worth it.

This, in any case, was the state in which I looked forward to eating my sandwich: one of consent to at least finding out if things could be better than they were. This finding out, I recognized, would require me to eat, and eating, as we know, can be nice. Eating, though, was no guarantee that anything much would change but my weight.

In my experience of more orthodox eating disorder treatment, many professionals insist it is objectively possible to feel better simply by eating. They have a pet experiment to prove it—a study conducted in the 1940s. I thought about this study as I bit into the bread.

A few weeks into my course of group “therapy” on an NHS treatment program, the group was treated to a special educational session with a dietitian called Harriet. Harriet could hardly wait to tell us about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment—a study she told us repeatedly that she loved. Harriet wished they could replicate the study today but “you’d never get the permission.” This maybe should have raised some red flags about Harriet. Still, we heard her out. Heard her present the evidence for why “feeding first” was the way to cure an eating disorder.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment took place toward the end of the Second World War. In 1944, civilians in occupied Europe had been starved, and needed to be re-fed. Those who hadn’t been blasted to bits had been living, just about, on mere bread and potatoes, and only God, at this point, knew what their shrunken stomachs could handle. In a bid to establish the optimal diet for bringing a person back to life, the American scientist Ancel Keys set about designing an experimental rehearsal of the refeeding process. For this, he needed healthy subjects to refeed, which meant mercilessly starving them first.

The thirty-six test subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment had been chosen from a pool of male volunteers. For six months, they were subjected to a “war conditions” diet, built around cabbage and potatoes with splashes of bean-and-pea soup. Quantities were controlled right down to the drops of vinegar on salad. As the participants were progressively deprived over the weeks and their bodies began to eat themselves, a curious thing began to happen to these otherwise “normal” men: All of them—Harriet actually beamed at this part—began to act like anorexic girls.

Which is to say, as their bodies underwent the biological assault of malnourishment, their minds grew erratic, impatient, and, crucially, weird about food. As their blood emptied of sugar and protein, the Minnesota men squirreled cookbooks under their beds and sliced thimbles of food into flakes. Like would-be ballerinas they mastered ritual eating and perfected bad moods. On excursions from the research facility, they watched other people eat in restaurants with a lunatic kind of joy. The friendliest souls turned solipsistic, bickered, bitched, bore grudges, made threats.

Which concludes, Harriet told us, that behaviors like this could only have been side effects of hunger. We in the group could stop wasting our time worrying that we needed to fix our relationships with our mothers, with our thighs, with adulthood, with men, or whatever it was that kept us awake. These were men! Harriet might as well have shrieked. Their relationships with their mothers were fine! They were obviously mature, at peace with their thighs, at peace with all the world. To Harriet’s mind, all these men had in common with the women in my group were the biological effects of starvation. Whatever it was that had caused us to dig our hunger holes—in our case an anorexic “personality type”; in theirs, a commitment to science—the thing that kept us sick was the same: nothing more than a suboptimal measure of potatoes. Fix that, she said, and you, like all those men, will get better again.

Keys’s study has resonated widely in an era of neurobiological science—a time more interested in the brain, starved or otherwise, than the rather more nebulous mind. To think of mental illness this way—as biologically contained—suits a treatment model grounded in rapid, cheap, simplified solutions. If an anorexic patient starts to take up time by expressing opinions about her reluctance to eat, she must now contend with 1,385 pages of evidence against her in the form of Keys’s book, The Biology of Human Starvation. Citing the insights of the Minnesota study, modern researchers advise that “trying to make meaningful psychological changes with an anorexic patient in [a] starved state” is “analogous to trying to investigate the underlying issues with an alcoholic patient who is intoxicated.” “Your brains,” Harriet informed us, “have shrunken in size. Eat first, then see what you think.” What began as a guide to rebuilding strength for victims of famine and prisoners of war has since come to justify clinicians’ casual dismissal of anorexic personhood.

Chomping my sandwich several months later, I wondered how Harriet knew that those men had been so okay. That nothing they said, suffered, or did could be interpreted other than through the lens of physical depletion. This may have been Keys’s framework, but Keys had never been looking for anything other than the effects of a biological process; a process of starvation that he oversaw himself and treated as entirely neutral. But can you imagine a neutral experience of starving, either inside or outside the scientist’s lab? It is true that the Minnesota men’s “anorexic” careers had not begun with any objection to food. But should we therefore assume that these men objected to nothing at all?

In the first instance, at least, they had objected to the war. Which is to say, the thirty-six men used for the study had been drawn from a pool of conscientious objectors. COs in the Second World War were assigned to the Civilian Public Service (CPS), a program that gave them useful things to do that didn’t involve taking up arms.

Even with the CPS, it wasn’t easy for these men to do the kinds of work they wanted. In the eyes of a disapproving public, men such as these were unfit to be redeemed through public service. In 1942, the government briefly aired the prospect of sending COs to perform relief work overseas, but Congress blocked the opportunity, appalled that “slackers” like these would have a chance to be made to feel brave. The War Department appropriation bill of January 1943 prohibited the use of government money for sending CPS men abroad. CPS men despaired at this. They were desperate for something to do. They objected to the ways in which society at large tried to keep them from fulfilling their ideals.

Keys’s research team were keenly aware of the depth of this desperation. It seems there was a lot these men would suffer short of blowing out other men’s brains, particularly for medical science. Some signed up to gargle sputum from pneumonia-infected lungs, clasped boxes of malarial mosquitoes to their bellies. Others put on lice-infested underpants with the aim of picking up typhus. Then there were the hundreds who applied to take part in Keys’s starvation experiment: an entire year surrendering all their dietary freedom, the first six months marked for wasting away on a diet of cabbage and peas.

When it came to recruiting volunteers, Keys and his associates pitched the starvation study as a route to moral salvation. Along with their full-time duty of hunger—a public service in itself—the men would be offered free university tuition and enrollment in a “school of foreign relief.” Here they would at least learn the skills required to do the kind of work they dreamed of. In the meantime, the study’s recruitment pamphlet, written by another CO who was working on Keys’s team, addressed fellow CPS men directly: “Every avenue of relief service has been closed to us, but here’s something we can now do.” On the cover were three small children closely examining empty bowls, beneath them the words: “WILL YOU STARVE THAT THEY BE BETTER FED?”

This equation was more than mere rhetoric; the need to “better” feed others was evidently urgent. Continental Europe relied on food imports even in peacetime, and not only had the region been under fire since 1939, but so had the usual shipping of foodstuffs been disrupted by naval warfare. US newspapers routinely reported on the food crisis, particularly in France—abject scenes of mass tubercular death, an imminent potential for riot.

The Minnesota men had reason to believe in a point to their starvation—a well-defined social utility for every moment of hunger. What’s more, the final thirty-six participants had been carefully chosen for their tendency to care about these things. Among the selection criteria were a “willingness to subordinate personal interests, activities and welfare to the requirements of the experimental program,” and “active interest in the problems of nutritional relief and rehabilitation.”

If you believe that difficulties with eating, or in fact all kinds of mental struggle, stem from nothing more than hard-wired personality types, the Minnesota men—at least to today’s researchers—certainly fit a different profile from the one that is drawn for anorexics. Anorexics, according to the Maudsley model of treatment I have described, are anxious, introspective, emotionally and socially impaired. The Minnesota men, by contrast, were thoroughly outward looking, civic minded. Perhaps it is no wonder that the Harriets of this world, whose living is made off Maudsley’s wisdom, are so quick to look at these men and see only their empty stomachs. If the only explanations for strange behavior, to your mind, are biological—type of brain or state of body—to rule out “type of brain” is to leave yourself with only one thing left to see.

But if you are willing to consider that our relationship with food might grow from more than biological factors, you are likely to find a lot more in the tale of the Minnesota men. While you may never be able to say with cold authority why the men became so strange—so fantastically obsessed with how they ate—you will see a much wider range of possible explanations. The Minnesota men, for example, were not just civic-minded by nature; they were disempowered actors in a literal world war. Their sense of civic purpose was not just innate—it was both socially contingent and fragile.

It is true that when the study began, the men showed some pretty high spirits. At this time, they ate their meals together in the football stadium of the University of Minnesota, the campus of which became their home for the duration of the study. For the first twelve weeks they reported themselves well fed and energetic. They volunteered in local settlement houses, acted in local plays, played instruments in town, organized dances, went to concerts, dated women, lived lives. And it is true that it was only when the study progressed into semi-starvation stage that their moods began to go south. A shock to their calorific intake, designed to mimic the siege of Leningrad, coincided with the first significant dent in the Minnesota men’s missionary zeal.

Keys concluded that the men’s good moods were directly proportional to their good diets. Yet their calorific intake was not the only variable at play. Their psychological decline could also have been linked with events that cast the very value of the experiment into doubt. Only a few months in, the war began to conclude. The need to start implementing relief plans came more quickly into view than expected. The results of the experiment, it seemed, would never be ready on time. Indeed, the war ended before the study’s test subjects had been re-fed—the whole point of all their starvation. Allied relief efforts in Europe and Asia would have to forge ahead without the benefit of Keys’s findings. Doctors around the world would have to speculate as to the merits of vitamins, protein percentages, and feeding tubes.

This did not, by itself, completely deflate the Minnesota men. They forged ahead, gripping on to their hope that the work would at least be useful for some. But this was not the end of their demoralization by external factors. The study itself gave plenty for the men to feel shitty about.

I am not talking, here, merely about the amount of food these men ate. This was exactly, after all, what they signed up for. I am talking about the stunningly dehumanizing way in which their eating was observed and controlled. Keys enforced the strict limitation of quantities with humiliating suspicion. Midway through the starvation phase, he introduced a buddy system so the men could police one another. The result, perhaps predictably, was mutual resentment, irritation, and wounded pride. When one of the men was caught eating in secret, Keys’s response was to double down—each man would now be surveilled around the clock by one of the others. If you didn’t have a buddy to go with you to a class, or to church, then God and education could wait. No one was prepared to go dating with a buddy in tow, so from that point on, the men were chaste.

In an atmosphere of such scrutiny and mutual mistrust, even the closest buddy will make a man feel more alone. Nothing in that study was designed to nurture solidarity in starvation. From the start, each participant’s dietary ordeal was carefully individualized, the amount of food he received depending on how well he was descending toward his weekly target weight. Every Friday, a list of the participants would be posted, showing their rations for the following week. Additions and subtractions to the baseline diet were made in slices of bread. Like schoolkids divided in dignity with grades and gold stars, the men were classed by the calories they had earned with their weight-loss progress.

Though these were men whose decision to starve instead of going to war had been born of deeply pacifist principles, by a few months in, their interest in politics had been all but engulfed by thoughts about food. When Norman Mattoon Thomas, a five-time Socialist presidential candidate and celebrated advocate for nonviolence, came to give a lecture for the volunteers, they struggled to stay awake or ask the man anything that wasn’t somehow about eating. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, not one of the Minnesota men made any mention of it in his journal. All they wrote down were their changing body weights, reflections on meals, notes on the canteen queue.

Participant Twenty, Samuel Legg, had at the start of the study been typically idealistic. “Everyone else was pulling down the world,” he reflected in an interview years later. “We wanted to build it up.” All he wanted, like his fellow CPS members, was what they called “significant work.” Halfway through the trial, he forgot all of this and began collecting cookbooks.

Legg began to eat in solitary silence, right at the end of the table. He began to play with his food—to heap the assortment of measly items on his plate into a single, hideous pile. Fish, peas, spaghetti, and potatoes were smushed and stirred into a gray-green mass, encrusted with salt and pepper—two things he could use as much as he liked.

For where do you go when you find that your capacity to act has been all but reduced to pepper? Maybe you do resort to sculpting the materials to hand—fish, peas, spaghetti, potatoes. Nowhere to go but inward for the Minnesota men. Nowhere to channel all that energy but their bodies and their food.

Keys’s regime of isolation showed no signs of abating when the time to refeed rolled around. The men, near deranged by their experience at this point, were divided into four different groups, each entitled to significantly different calorie counts. Legg was one of those unfortunate enough to land the fewest calories per day. Three weeks into refeeding, he silently left the canteen, went outside the building, and chopped off three of his fingers.

This didn’t stop Legg from begging Keys to let him complete the study. The moment he came around from his state of post-mutilation unconsciousness, he started making the case for why he had to keep going. “For the rest of my life,” he gasped, “people are going to ask what I did during the war. This experiment is my chance to give an honorable answer to that question.”

Perhaps he was right—maybe Ancel Keys’s starvation experiment was an honorable gift to the world, whether or not its results were delayed; whether or not they came at the cost of three fingers and thirty-six wills to live. To the extent that Legg felt this, his decision to embark on the study must be distinguished from the average person’s decision to embark on a weight-loss diet. But does this mean that Samuel Legg and an anorexic woman could have nothing in common but underfed brains? Nothing in common, for example, in their impotent desperation?

Medical researchers’ reluctance to overidentify anorexic girls with politically minded heroes may have some shared features with feminists’ reluctance to politicize the disease. In both cases, those who recoil from the comparison are right to shrink from the notion that refusing to eat is, by itself, a heroic thing to do. When feminists lament that the anorexic is read as “rebellious and selfless,” critiquing their comparison to saints, suffragettes, and other political actors, they are right, at least, to reject the reduction of the condition to a personal disposition. What’s more, when it comes to the action—the actual non-eating—they are right to query its rebellious impact. When Lisa Appignanesi casts anorexic girls as “suicide bombers inside the bourgeois nuclear family,” we sense, by juxtaposition, the gap between the organized martyr and the chaotic private drama of illness: One declares war on an entire set of values, the other on one’s mere inner circle.

Yet to refuse the search for resonance in the historical record of hunger is to shed a load of other things too. An interest, for example, in where suffragettes and saints both sat in a matrix of power. A medieval saint is not interesting for her moral status alone. What if other aspects of a fasting nun’s life could illuminate other kinds of suffering? What would it mean not to throw the baby of curiosity out with the bathwater of lazy analogy? What would it mean to stick with comparison of different kinds of starvation, not to rank or certificate them morally, but simply to historicize?

When I think of Samuel Legg, three fingers to the wind, pleading with Keys to let him starve, I think of the mystic philosopher and sometime activist Simone Weil. Two years before the finger incident, Weil had starved herself to death. A year before that, she had been pleading with the general Charles de Gaulle to give her a sense of purpose in the war.

First a middle-class schoolteacher in France, who gave most of her wages to a strike fund; then a factory worker and author of La condition ouvrière—a text on the crushing effects of capitalist labor, Simone Weil was a master of trying, and often failing, to do things other people didn’t want her to do. Mostly, this involved trying to share in the suffering of those less well-heeled than herself. In her work on assembly lines she was bullied by the foremen, fired, made redundant, fired again. In 1936, after securing herself a volunteer role in the Spanish Civil War, she managed to persuade her higher ups that she wasn’t so shortsighted (she was) that she couldn’t be trusted with a rifle. The adventure was still cut short when she stepped in a vat of boiling oil, sprouting blisters on her vision of public service.

By 1942, Weil was languishing with her family in New York. They had just outpaced the German invasion of Paris, her hometown, where people were hungry. Weil had had the idea of organizing volunteer Allied nurses to go and spend time on the front lines. She’d hoped that someone in New York would get behind the idea. When it seemed that this was not going to happen, she petitioned to join the shadow Free French government, led by de Gaulle in London. Though she made it there, he too assumed she was joking about the nurses, so instead she begged to be sent to join the French Resistance in Paris. “I confess,” she wrote to her friend and comrade in spirit Maurice Schumann, “that I can hardly bear to contemplate the thought of not being allowed to go.” This would be the final disappointment that she would, in fact, bear. She would spend the remaining months of her life consigned by the Free French government to bureaucratic admin.

It was then, trapped in London editing memoranda, that Weil stopped eating much at all. When in April 1943 she was admitted to Middlesex Hospital, she claimed to be rationing her food intake in solidarity with her compatriots. This was not the kind of organized hunger strike that was taking place elsewhere. The month before Weil went into hospital, Gandhi had been fasting for twenty-one days in connection with the Bengal famine, after the British had let market forces ravage the Indian food supply. The viceroy wanted Gandhi to admit that the Indians themselves were responsible for unrest in the region. Rather than simply refusing, Gandhi also refused to eat. Gandhi believed that there was spiritual value in hunger—that abstinence could set the soul free. But he also meant to put pressure on the levers of power, to push the cause of Indian freedom from British rule.

When Weil died in an Ashford sanitorium in August 1943, her fast had likely put pressure on nothing but her insides. As the physician who recorded her death put it, she had simply “killed and slain herself by refusing to eat.”

Weil’s vision of solidaristic action had not always been so narrow. At university, her political horizons had included an end to the kind of class inequality that breeds mass starvation in the first place. She scolded her academic rival Simone de Beauvoir for suggesting the political priority should be existential nourishment. “It’s easy to see,” she said to the other Simone, “you’ve never gone hungry.” Her first book had been an analysis of Marxist thought, published under the title Oppression and Liberty. There had been a time when Weil chewed energetically on the dynamics of social change.

How could such a person come to believe that solidarity meant quietly starving to death? “I cannot eat the bread of the English,” Weil wrote to Schumann, “without taking part in their war effort.” She couldn’t take part in the war, so she couldn’t take part in anything. Rather than starving so that others be better fed, Weil seemed to starve without a plan. She starved in a state of resignation. She starved in a way that looked more like chopping off your fingers when you’re just about done with “significant work.”

Weil had once thought of bread as fundamental to feeding the working-class struggle. After her stint in the early 1930s working in factories, witnessing the crushing effects of the profit imperative, Weil struggled to agree with Marx that it was possible for working people to “make their own history” through revolution. Marx, she thought, had misunderstood the realities of class—the brute fact that workers, who used all their energy to survive, were utterly lacking in power. This was a woman who had tried her best to improve the conditions of workers only to judge this an impossible task. Toward the start of the Second World War, she mused that workers needed poetry, not bread. “They need that their life should be a poem.”

In her later years, Weil seemed to think of progress less in terms of revolution than a kind of spiritual transcendence. “The transcendent bread,” she wrote in 1942, “is the bread of today.” Perhaps it didn’t matter, she thought, if you couldn’t fill everyone’s stomach with actual bread, since in the end only God could fill the “void” within. In fact, perhaps it was better to leave the belly empty—leave a little room for God. “All the desire which nature has placed in the human soul and attached to food,” she wrote, “should be detached from [such] things and directed exclusively toward obedience to God.” If she could please God by being hungry, went the logic, maybe everyone would be saved. “Ask that God may transform our flesh into Christ’s flesh,” she advised, “so that we may be food for all the afflicted.”

Claims like this have long been categorized as acts of conscious will—as chosen forms of protest. For historian Rudolph Bell, it was righteous indignation that had the “holy anorexics” of medieval Italy wreaking havoc on their own bodies. Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, clusters of nuns, according to Bell, “decided” to starve on spiritual grounds. Religion provided a framework for escape from a world where the body was a site of corruption. Women’s bodies, in particular, faced constant invasion—from penises, from food, from any number of other pollutants. But a woman could “decide with no small amount of pressure from catechism lessons only she takes literally and seriously” that the noblest response was to refuse. “The holy anorexic,” writes Bell, “rebels against the passive, vicarious, dependent Christianity; her piety centers intensely and personally upon Jesus and his crucifixion, and she actively seeks an intimate, physical union with God.”

So off she goes, refusing food and eating spiders instead; drinking water infused with lepers’ putrefying flesh. Gathering pus from cancerous sores into ladles and drinking it down “to overcome all bodily sensations.” When Catherine of Siena had finished with her ladle, she dreamed of Jesus inviting her to drink from his wounds. Her stomach, in that moment, reportedly “no longer had need of food.” For Bell, the holy anorexic’s total dependence on God’s will “legitimizes her defiance and places her in a position of enormous strength.” I suppose that really depends on how you think about strength. How you think about choice, about power.

For in an ideal world, should a woman really need to eat spiders to feel strong? Is this the kind of power she would choose for herself if other kinds of power were available? Would this kind of union with Jesus have tasted so good had it not felt quite so urgent, for example, to escape the forced union of marriage? This is not to deny the idea that self-starvation gave these women a kind of psychological strength—that it provided a sense of autonomy in a patriarchal world. But this is not the same as giving them the power to change the patriarchal order.

It is difficult to believe that in an ideal world, Simone Weil would have wanted the poor to live on poems. Even in her dying months, she kept one foot in a fantasy of herself as a person she considered worth feeding. The letters she wrote to her parents from London spent no time trying to elevate the agony of an empty stomach. Instead, they represent fantasies of a Simone who ate gladly, who considered it noble to eat. She reports on the happy surprise of finding some traditional English food—roast lamb and mint sauce—“remarkable.” Roast pork with apple sauce, too, she declares an “honorable” dish. “The pure taste of the apples is as much a contact with the beauty of the universe as the contemplation of a picture by Cézanne.” She complains that English pubs tend not to serve food—how is she supposed to keep down her stout?

The regime of abstinence the real Simone was imposing on herself was at odds not only with that fantasy but with the ideals she harbored for her parents. Her notebooks from her dying years—private repositories of doom—speak of pleasure as nothing but an illusion. It was an illusion, she wrote, to believe that there was any good to human existence. With that in mind, she aspired to experience “an excess of physical suffering,” and not to forget the lessons it taught. Yet in her letters she seems genuinely moved by the concern that her parents can’t afford nice things. “Do please tell me the truth,” she insists. “A little pleasure is necessary in this world, like bread and water (or Coca-Cola and cornflakes).”

Which Weil was right? The one who believed in cornflakes, or the one who thought their pleasures were elusive? The Weil who saw a point to feeding oneself, or the one who considered eating a lost cause? It is hard to adjudicate how hopeful one should be about the world. In the end, we can to some extent only hope that hope is a thing worth having.

For the purposes of eating my sandwich, I preferred to imagine that Weil had been wrong about Marx. Weil considered the working class a fundamentally downtrodden people—a factually powerless group. Marx, on the other hand, thought of class as more of a project than a fact—a process of coming to understand yourself a certain way. If the working class did not yet have the power to start a revolution, this was because they had not yet been empowered. And what could be less empowering than thinking of yourself as a person who doesn’t need bread? What would it take to inspire those people who literally couldn’t get food to consider bread and cornflakes their right? Probably not the spiritual fasts of middle-class philosopher-writers.

Solidarity requires not just the recognition of a shared political enemy, but the collectively generated sense that the enemy can be beaten. This process of coming into power is starkly played out in the story of Marx’s own daughter. It goes without saying that without Karl Marx, there would be no Marxist feminism—broadly, a social movement that links the subjugation of women with the upkeep of patriarchal capitalism. Unfortunately, Marx himself was guilty of certain patriarchal maneuvers, at least within the confines of his own (nuclear) household.

The defeat of the Paris commune in 1871, when Eleanor Marx was sixteen years old, had filled the Marx family household in London with French political refugees. One of the most prominent among them, named Hippolyte Lissagaray, became the young Eleanor’s boyfriend. Her father, Karl, did not approve.

As Karl became increasingly demanding of his daughter’s attention, insisting she assist with his research, Eleanor took it upon herself to make her way out. She found herself a teaching job in Brighton and took her love of politics there. She buoyed herself up by introducing young people to the international labor movement.

According to Rachel Holmes’s biography of Eleanor Marx, her appetite then was pretty healthy. On Lissagaray’s weekend visits, the pair would take seafront walks. As they deconstructed politics and debated the future direction of class struggle, they did so with mouths full of fish and chips, eels, clams, and whelks. They “rambled,” writes Holmes, “over the Sussex downs with picnics of bread, cheese and wine… ending the day in lamplit country pubs with pies and pints of ale.”

But Eleanor wasn’t always able to eat exactly as she chose. Food was frequently thrust on her unwanted. It is said that Karl, in childhood, was prone to making his sisters swallow down mud pies. It seems as though perhaps his wife, Jenny, got her kicks from similar places. While Eleanor makes no mention of her health in any letters to her parents, Jenny’s missives address her daughter as though she were always on the brink of starvation. She is reported to have sent Eleanor endless chocolates, along with parcels of potted meat, fretting that Brighton’s food might be too rough for her delicate child. Her letters are stuffed with injunctions not to swim too long, not to take on too many pupils, spend too much time in thought.

Eventually, Eleanor’s parents demanded she come back home. It wasn’t that they had heard any hint of illness or distress. Instead, the thing that bothered them was that people in Brighton had been saying that Eleanor was engaged. This would have given her the freedom to walk around unchaperoned with her boyfriend, a freedom too extreme for Karl and Jenny. Eleanor at first resisted the call, but her parents got her in the end. She bent to their will, left her job, went home, and found she could no longer eat.

Eleanor’s doctor in 1874 was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a suffragist and the first British woman to qualify as a physician. Unlike many eating disorder specialists today, who objectify their patients as stomachs to be filled before they can be dealt with as people, Garrett Anderson saw a need for Eleanor both to be nourished and afforded a sense of purpose. She saw the ways that Eleanor’s parents had overwhelmed her developing values, reducing her life from one of teaching, debate, and a mind-expanding romance to one of daughterly admin and asphyxiating surveillance. She tactfully advised that the Marxes focus on getting their daughter fed, while also ensuring her exposure, in the process, to a world outside.

Karl reported that the family’s encouragement improved her diet “in geometric proportions.” But from Eleanor’s own correspondence, it seems that other factors were also at play. As part of Garrett Anderson’s prescription, Eleanor went on a retreat with her father to Karlsbad forest and spa in Austria. At Karlsbad, she certainly ate and enjoyed the local pilsner, but she also did so in the company of garrulous writers and artists, fellow radicals in exile, people who excited her appetite. A person isn’t inspired to start eating again by nothing more than other people’s advice. In Austria, Eleanor ate among people who nourished her ideas, and likely nourished her reason to eat.

On the way back, she and Karl went to Leipzig and visited the family of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the first founders of the German Social Democratic Party. Wilhelm listened generously to Eleanor’s grief about her parents’ distaste for her relationship, while also giving her other things to think about instead. The two of them began to work together coordinating socialist efforts in Germany and France. This, according to Holmes, was a turning point for Eleanor: “depression overcome, appetite regained, engaged in matters of the world at large.”

Eleanor, unlike Weil, found it in her to eat again, and unlike Weil, found it in her to hope. Of course, this still cannot tell us whether hope of this kind is actually a thing worth having. More instructive in that regard are the details of where Eleanor’s enthusiasm took her. Not just whether she ate, but what this allowed her to imagine and achieve.

Eleanor, like Weil, had been fortunate enough to be able to afford to eat. They had also both been free to eat, in the most basic sense, in that they lived outside of prison conditions. The privileged context for their hunger set them apart from many other hungry people. Yet Eleanor’s growing consciousness of the ways in which women also suffered a species of imprisonment, a species of dispossession, bolstered her sense of solidarity with subjugated people quite different from herself. This solidarity was not merely nominal—an empty expression of allegiance. After Eleanor returned to life and resumed her relationship with Lissagaray, she turned toward a range of anti-imperialist struggles. Specifically, she turned her energies against the English use of hunger as a weapon.

Eleanor’s writings on the persecution of the Irish bear witness to the depth of her political feeling. In this, she resembled her father, who had already written on the English control of Irish eating in his critique of the industrial-capitalist food system. British agriculture, he observed, was an imperial system. The soil fertility crisis of the 1830s and ’40s saw fertilizer exported from Ireland to England, with the Irish receiving little or nothing back. The shift from cereal and grain production to livestock and forage-crop farming meant more food for the upper classes, but a lot less bread for everyone else. Meat-based agriculture also needed far fewer workers, meaning the displacement, between 1855 and 1866, of over a million Irish men by cattle, pigs, and sheep. The cost of colonial profit, Marx observed, was widespread Irish hunger. Some twenty years later, Eleanor’s challenge to the cost of colonial violence focused on the starving of Irish political prisoners.

In 1884, Eleanor authored a number of tracts inciting sympathy with the Irish Dynamiters—a group of Irish Americans committed to physically forcing a republic through bombing campaigns. Between 1881 and 1990, targets included the detective headquarters of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Whitehall, Scotland Yard, and the chamber of the House of Commons. Without suggesting that violence of this order could ever be politically productive, Eleanor wrote of the importance of understanding the campaign not as an act of unexplained evil, but a response to systematic oppression. The bombings seemed to Eleanor nothing less than what can happen when you persecute a whole population, subjecting its people to the disfigurations and desperation of hunger. When you have been or are being starved, Eleanor saw, conditions aren’t ideal for strategizing slow political action. In fact, the effects of forced hunger could literally be explosive.

In one of these tracts, Eleanor takes up the case of an Irish republican man imprisoned for refusing to declare his religion, prior to his bombing career. She describes in revolting detail the penal diet to which he was subjected. Even the “normal” diet for men in these prisons was of a quantity so small that “a child could scarcely live on it.” Additional penal flourishes included garnishing these scraps with “untanned skin,” hair, and, apparently, snails. Prisoners were reported to be eating candles and soap, and drinking the oil meant for boots. If the man was now a terrorist, Eleanor wrote, his crimes were in part the metabolized product of state brutalization. Whatever his crimes, she wrote, “there is a greater criminal than he—the English Government, that has made him what he is.”

The line between how a person eats and how they understand the world can never be straight or clear, but can we deny that it is there? Any more than we can deny the connection between how a person understands the world and the mark they leave upon it? To strengthen oneself with food can be empowering; to be cajoled into eating overwhelming. A hunger strike can bring about political change; forced starvation can bring about bombs. What might the men who became the Irish Dynamiters have done with themselves had they not been debased by a diet of soap and snails? How much less might Eleanor Marx have achieved had she forever been force-fed potted meat by her parents? Ancel Keys’s writing on the biology of starvation can only tell us so much. It can tell us what happens to a hungry body and brain, while saying nothing of the mind or the soul.

I have come to believe that the greatest value of Keys’s study when it comes to thinking about starvation lies not in its “findings,” but in the story that gave rise to them. To me, the most revelatory moment in the tale of the Minnesota men takes place in week twenty-seven, when, anxious about morale among his lab rats, Keys permitted them a single “relief meal.” On this one occasion, the men were allowed to contribute to the menu themselves, and to eat it together, each man receiving the same as everyone else. Craving grease and bulk, they went for bacon, eggs, and biscuits, but they also made more whimsical choices—peanut butter, grapefruit juice, strawberries, fruit punch. Meat could now have gravy; bread could have butter and honey. Food was not just about weight control; it was something to be savored and embellished.

When the meal came around, a group of men who had learned to suspect and resent one another were able to laugh while eating, for the first time in months. They ate together companionably, remembered the shared ambition that had brought them there in the first place. And though Keys had tried to regulate every calorie in the feast, they found themselves a way to confound him. Emboldened by their long-lost sense of autonomy, they also ate the peel of every orange.

Even on Keys’s terms, calories alone could not account for this radical change of behavior. According to the logic of The Biology of Human Starvation, and indeed of modern eating disorder treatments, a person has to gain significant weight before meaningful psychological changes can be seen. To exit the clinical “starvation state,” you must achieve a clinically respectable BMI. Yet the Minnesota men transformed for a day without the need for sustained, controlled refeeding. And by contrast, the first weeks of refeeding were far from a time of calorie-induced bliss. As we have seen, they were in fact a time of terrible angst and severed fingers. Though according to Keys, the pace of recovery from starvation is related only to the level of calories consumed, accounts of the story behind his study suggest that context was just as important.

It wasn’t until September 1945 that things really began to change. It was only then, quite a way into refeeding, that Keys gave every man an extra 800 calories per day. It was also only then that the men could graduate from two meals a day to the socially customary three. At last, their bread was dignified with butter and jam. At last, the men were reacquainted with sweet potatoes. Though it still took a while for them to gain any weight, their spirits began to soar. Only two days into this new way of life, the men began to organize together. It only took a few good meals, eaten with equal dignity and entitlement, to spur the men to devise a set of demands to present to Keys. They typed a manifesto, threatening non-cooperation in the study if he didn’t take note. The first of these demands was for the abolition of the buddy system.

This micro-radicalization—a small but successful moment of collective bargaining—was only the beginning for the Minnesota men of a return to political consciousness. After the study was over, ten of the men would go on to work in international relief efforts, while others ran for office or lectured on hunger and its global significance. Samuel Legg joined the American Friends Service Committee, raising money to send food to Europe. He later became entangled in the struggle against the Vietnam War. For the rest of his life, he found the energy to keep causing trouble with the police. At eighty-two years old, he was arrested for protesting the bombing of Yugoslavia.

These men had not been able to save themselves from helplessness through elaborate salt and pepper rituals any more than Catherine of Siena was able to transform the patriarchy by drinking pus from cancerous sores. Anorexia and its routines can offer a sense of control, but this should not be mistaken for power. Yet nor had food alone—the mere reinjection of calorific substances—been enough to restore these men to a belief in their own capacities. As with Eleanor Marx, it took a certain confluence of food, conviviality, and respect.

What if the things that complicate sandwiches—the feelings they inspire—encompass more than their calorific content? More, in fact, than all the details of their contents and what we think those contents mean? There I was, looking at bread and wondering if liking it made me “normal,” whether it changed my diagnosis, whether it made me look down-to-earth. I had never really considered the things that mattered, sandwich-wise—not the things you scrutinize to tell you what you are, but the things that go to shape how you feel about the world. Like whether your sandwich is one of those miserable single-layer cheese ones the UK government thought would be good enough for hungry children in the pandemic; like whether your sandwich has been designed in a spirit of indifference and budgeted for in a spirit of contempt. Or whether your sandwich has been abstracted into a beige liquid diet and pulsed through your nostrils via a tube because in fact, you do not want to eat a sandwich; you are not sure you ever want to eat again.

Or whether your sandwich represents an attempt at life—at giving yourself a chance. If it has been made by someone who thinks about whether or not you like pickles. If you made it for yourself and made it well. If you have been given the time to eat it by a society that believes in lunch breaks, and assumes that people should be fed. The sandwich has a history of holding both people and protein in its embrace, yet I held my own in such profound suspicion.

I needed some kind of relief meal—one that might raise my spirits high enough to make me want to eat a whole lemon. I needed inspiration to eat in ways that might spare me a fate like Weil’s: restricting her food (A); of a very low weight (B); resistant to reversing this trajectory (C); but also a great deal more besides: out of love with the dream of revolution.

Edition details

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668060310
• ISBN 13: 9781668060315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288