Is our food culture creating eating disorders?
LAST MONTH, my friend hosted a pot-luck lunch to celebrate the publication of her debut novel. Her Israeli husband, a foodie and fabulous cook, prepared a mouth-watering Ottolenghi-esque spread and we guests, all Jews of a certain age, joined in the gastronomic fun with gusto. I brought a butter-bean hummus with red pepper and walnut paste. Another friend made cauliflower steaks with zaatar. There was a cinnamon pavlova with praline cream and fresh figs for pudding.
It was probably the best lunch available that day in Hackney. But one of the guests, a high-profile communal macher, did not touch a morsel. “I don’t do lunch,” she said.
I know several other Jewish women who don’t do coffee. By which I mean that when I suggest a catch-up over a hot beverage, they suggest a bracing walk on Hampstead Heath instead.
“Someone who says they don’t do lunch is someone who is trying to control their appetite,” says Ellen Maloney. “You can train yourself to think like that, but it’s a deception. Bodies need fuel.”
And she knows this better than most. Ellen spent her teens and almost two decades of her adult life avoiding not just lunch, but food per se. Now 36, and firmly on the road to recovery, she was hospitalised with anorexia in the spring of her first year at secondary school and has not properly left the care system since, spending years in and out of eating-disorder, social-service and secure units, and on therapy programmes within these shores and across the pond.
Severe malnutrition has led
to osteoporosis, nerve, joint and tendon damage and a chronic migraine disorder which, together with the “trauma of institutionalisation” means Ellen has never “had the chance to really live.”
And it all began by simply skipping a meal. Not lunch in Ellen’s case, but breakfast. “I was 12 and had spent the night at a friend’s house. It was the first time I’d ever missed breakfast and I was surprised it was possible. Lunch time came and I found I was able to carry on without food. It felt good. I was a very anxious child, and not eating numbed my fears. It felt like being under an anaesthetic.”
Back then, Ellen’s anxieties centred on her academic performance. “I was doing well at school, but I was a perfectionist. If I didn’t get 100 per cent in a test, I felt I’d failed completely. My parents’ message was always ‘we want you to be happy’, but I interpreted that as ‘we want you to be successful’.
They also said I could do whatever I wanted with my life, but the problem was I wanted to do everything, including become a doctor and a professional musician. I put myself under huge pressure.”
There was also the pressure of what she describes as the community’s all-pervading food culture. “Love comes on a plate in our community. Food is how we express our care and how we show our devotion for each other. But at the same time, we have this toxic diet culture, and I think it hits the girls particularly hard. Yes, boys are also subject to body image pressures, but the truth is that, when I was a little girl, my mother was always trying to feed my brother, but with me it was, hmm, don’t eat that or you’ll struggle with your weight like me. Women police each other’s bodies. I grew up presuming I’d be on a diet my entire adult life.”
This is, of course, what came, in extremis, to pass, but Ellen says she didn’t realise her relationship with food was warped until she went into therapy. “What I was being told in treatment jarred hugely with what I had learned before. It took therapy for me to realise that I’d never seen a Jewish woman put butter on her bread and that this isn’t actually how most people eat.
“Even now, my aunt sends me home with eight boxes of glutenfree matzahs for my mum, and low-carb sugar-free cauliflower rice cakes for me. I’m not surprised I don’t know a single Jewish woman without food issues.”
Although eating disorders affect people from all backgrounds they also go hand-in-hand with anxiety,
I’d never seen a Jewish woman put butter on her bread’
and Jews, it hardly needs stating, often excel at being anxious. So, although no formal research has been carried out into eating disorders among British Jews, it is fair to assume that we are disproportionately represented among the 1.25 million people in the UK who suffer from them.
One quarter of those 1.25 million Brits are male and my friend Claudia’s son, Zac, was among them.
“He was diagnosed with anorexia when he was 16 but in retrospect I think his problems probably began at his Jewish primary. He was bullied by a very bright boy who told my son he was stupid.
The school didn’t deal with things very well and its highachieving ethos didn’t help Zac either. He has always been average academically and it’s not always easy to be average in this community. I think my son probably felt ‘less than’ from an early age.”
Alarm bells rang when Zac’s weight began to rapidly drop at the same time as he seemed to find endless excuses for not sharing meals with his parents.
“Then one morning we saw him emerge from the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around his waist. He had always been very slim but we could now see the sharp angles of his shoulder blades and his ribs stuck out. We were shocked and realised it was crunch time. We took him to a doctor.”
Although she thinks Zac’s problems began in primary school, Claudia is sure an adolescence immersed in an Instagram culture featuring emaciated youngsters boasting of their ‘thinspiration’— things that inspire them to stop eating — did not help. “At the time, Zac actually liked being dangerously thin. He came of age in a society that glamorises weight loss and self-deprivation. For some, thinness seems to be a way of distinguishing yourself.”
And the Jewish community seems notably susceptible to these kinds of messages. I’ll never forget when my daughter, Leah, came back from her Israel tour bewildered by a new expression: thigh gap. It’s the space thin people have between their thighs when they stand upright with their feet touching. It is also, Leah learnt, the holy grail of teenage Jewish girls. It was a new term for Leah because she went to a school where black beauty ideals reign supreme. In her school, girls aspired to be “thicc”, slang for curvy.
What’s more, writer Eve Simmons discovered you can succumb to these messages at any age. She was diagnosed with anorexia at the age of 23, soon after she got her first job at a fashion mag, where the office chit-chat was all about fad diets.
Naïve and keen to be part of the office culture she began to emulate the “healthier eating” culture of her peers. Before long, she had eliminated whole food groups from her diet and was surviving on a diet of kale and cauliflower rice.
Within six months, she went from a petite but healthy size eight to ten, to a malnourished size four.
Her mother stepped in and swiftly orchestrated admission to hospital, where Eve’s body was refuelled and her mind was treated by a psychiatrist. Now fully recovered, she co-authors a website (www.notplantbased.com) which debunks dieting myths and — in a sweary, funny, relatable way — encourages healthy eating habits.
She is reluctant to generalise about the reasons people develop eating disorders. She also points out that anorexia actually accounts for only eight per cent of them. Bulimia is almost three times more common and binge eating is the most widespread eating disorder of all.
But she does agree that anxiety is easily displaced on to food and that, in her family, like in many other Jewish families, the link between anxiety and the Holocaust is inextricable. “It trickled down from my grandparents to my mother who was obsessed by those horrific events, and then to me.”
There is, of course, no fast track to coping with Holocaust anxiety. But a first step is surely to try and understand the reasons why it might manifest itself as an eating disorder.
And the next might be acknowledging that skipping breakfast or lunch isn’t a healthy habit, for the mind or the metabolism.