Stay ConnectedBurnt Toast is your body liberation community. We’re working to dismantle diet culture and anti-fat bias, and we have a lot of strong opinions about comfy pants.
Co-hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (NYT-bestselling author of FAT TALK) and Corinne Fay (author of the popular plus size fashion newsletter Big Undies).
Copyright: © Virginia Sole-Smith
It’s time for your October Indulgence Gospel. And today… we’re going to look back at all of our Butters!
If you’re new here, Butter is the recommendation segment that runs at the end of every podcast episode. Butter is sometimes things you can buy, but it can also be a show or book we love, something great that we ate, a current mood, etc. Butter is any small moment of joy. (It can also, ofc, be literal butter, which we all know to be synonymous with joy.) But sometimes joy is fleeting!
So today, paid subscribers get to hear which Butters have stood the test of time:
Is Virginia still wearing her trad wife dress?
Does Corinne still love her $100 baseball hat?
Are we still into the bra that made us break up with underwire?
Plus a few low-key life-changing household appliances, Virginia’s favorite thing about her bedroom, and what we’re definitely going to STOP recommending from now on…
To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
Today Virginia is chatting with the delightful Julia Turshen! Julia is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author, and today we’re celebrating her brand new cookbook What Goes With What. WGWW is built on the simple premise that if we understand what makes food delicious, we can feed ourselves well. Nobody understands this better than Julia, who has been excavating the rules, limitations, and hidden diet mindset of food writing for years now, and in doing so, offers us all a better, more straightforward way to think about food and making meals happen.If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the deeply loaded question of “What’s for dinner?” Julia’s work is a safe place to start figuring it all out.You can order What Goes With Whatthrough the Burnt Toast Bookshop. Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)To tell us YOUR thoughts, and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page. If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she and her guests give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.CREDITSThe Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. Follow Virginia on Instagram, Follow Corinne @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and subscribe to Big Undies. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.---Episode 164 TranscriptVirginiaOh my God, my dishwasher. Julia. I’m so over it.JuliaCan I tell you a story that might make you feel better? VirginiaYes, please. I would love an uplifting or just in the trenches dishwasher story. JuliaIt’s an in the trenches story. Grace and I had an old dishwasher that came with our house when we bought our house. So it was probably at least 20 years old. But it worked great, you know? And then it stopped working. So we were like, “oh shit, we finally have to get a new one.” So we did everything you’ve been through. We measured, got the new one, they took the old one out, they put the new one in. It fits, but it sticks out a little, which annoys us to this day. I feel like all the old appliances just worked better and were simpler. So we just don’t like our new one.But the thing that sucks is that when we took out the old one, we realized that one of us, by mistake, had turned off some auto setting off or something. So I think it was working!VirginiaIt wasn’t even broken?!JuliaAnd then we were just like, “Well, we got this nice new one, we’ll just use it.” But it just doesn’t work as well and we are still upset about it and it’s been years. VirginiaOh my God. I mean the embarrassing story I won’t tell the whole Internet—although we’re recording now, maybe we’ll keep it—is somewhat similar. We had the dishwasher that came with the house that worked, that was 20 years old, that worked great until it didn’t. It died like a year ago. We bought a new dishwasher and Dan’s friend told us to buy this fancy GE one that has two drawers. He was like, “It’s going to change your life. It’s so great, blah, blah, blah.” And I did really love it for like, six months, because the ergonomics of having a big top drawer for unloading is really nice. But it clogs constantly because it’s two filters and they’re small, and it’s really meant to be in some rich person’s butler’s pantry for the wine glasses.JuliaIt’s for a fake kitchen. VirginiaExactly. It is not for everyday baked-on mac and cheese duty. So it’s been driving me nuts for ages, and I had a repair guy come out, and he just shamed me for not cleaning it enough. He was like, it’s $150 for the call. It’s not broken. You just don’t clean it. I was like, I hate you? And then it started leaking water all over the floor. So this was a super high end, fancy dishwasher that has brought me nothing but pain. And so now I’m having to buy another dishwasher, maybe it’s like 18 months later? Like, it’s way too soon to have to be going through this! I feel like all I do is deal with dishwashers.And then I ordered a new one and it arrived, and it did not fit. And I had to send it back and start again! I don’t understand. Why is 24 inches not the same to everybody? Why can’t the industry agree on standards? JuliaWhat did you say? It was so funny.VirginiaWhy are women’s clothing designers making dishwashers? Literally. It’s blue jeans sizing all over again. And the installer didn’t understand why I was mad about it. He’s like, “Well, for KitchenAid, 24 inches is 24 and a quarter, but you only have 23 and three quarters.” But they all say 24, that should not be allowed. You have a standard, it’s called inches. Just use the same standard. JuliaIt drives me so nuts.VirginiaWhy are we living like this? I don’t know. Meanwhile, I have so many dirty dishes.JuliaPaper plates!VirginiaI think it’s takeout tonight. But anyway, now let’s record an episode about cooking, which is something I’ll do again some day. JuliaI mean, the dishwasher is not unrelated.VirginiaAll right, all right. Let’s get into this. We are going to talk about your new cookbook. So why don’t we just do that? JuliaGreat. I’m so happy to be here. I feel like any excuse to just chat with you makes me very happy and I’m so excited to tell you and everyone who listens about my book. It is called What Goes With What. And I am just so happy with it.It is a book of not just recipes, but also these charts that kind of help you understand the recipes. There are 20 charts in the book, and each chart has a formula to show you the infrastructure behind things like salad dressings, soups, baked goods, meatballs. And then there are five examples on each chart for how to use this formula. My hope is that not only will that give you 100 recipes total that you can rely on, but it also gives you this way to just think about cooking. You can reference the charts and then riff on things, and learn to kind of trust your your instincts and use what you have in your kitchen and not run to the grocery store to buy something else. So it kind of gives you this framework in addition to the recipes themselves.VirginiaI can’t underscore enough for people, if they haven’t seen your charts, like, they’re mind blowing. It’s like, I suddenly understand salad dressing in a whole new way. I remember when you first started putting them on the newsletter and I think I texted you, and I was like, “What if you did that chart thing, but you did it for salad?”t And you were like, “Of course I’ve done a salad one, of course I’ve done a soup.” And I was like, oh my God, it’s like being inside the matrix.JuliaThe charts were sort of born in my newsletter. It was just something I started doing for fun and a way to kind of give people a tool that I hoped would be helpful to do exactly what you just described, to feel like something was a little bit unlocked, and you could just wrap your head around it. And it was really funny to me when I first started sharing them, because I was like, doesn’t everyone think like this? Like, I just thought it was a given.VirginiaNo, not all of our brains work like yours.JuliaI got such a positive response, that’s why I ended up making it into a book. But I heard from so many people who are either autistic or neurodivergent or identify somewhere on the autism spectrum, who just told me that this was the first time they really understood cooking. It just made sense in a way that hadn’t before. Which led me on a really interesting path to understand how does my brain work? And just to realize we all learn things in such different ways. And I just think the more tools, the better. And I think the charts are a very helpful tool if you’re someone like me who is a visual learner. If you’re someone like me who can get overwhelmed with a lot of information. The charts in the book, just like in my newsletter, they’re all in my handwriting. They’re no spreadsheets. It’s not too much information, they are all contained to one page. There are only five examples. It’s lots of stuff, but it’s done, I hope, in a very accessible way.VirginiaI often feel about recipes the way I feel about when we used to print out the Map Quest directions to drive somewhere. I would know that the smart thing to do would be to read through the whole thing before I started driving. But I never in my life did that. So I would just be stressed out and holding the print out, like where do I turn, and what’s happening? And you lose the printout. It’s why I am not great at not getting lost when I drive places. Thank you, GPS, for keeping me alive. But similarly, with recipes, they throw a lot at you, and it can just be a lot for your brain to take in. You try to just step-by-step through it. But then often you’re like, “Oh, wait, but I wish I’d known that this thing is happening now. I should have known about that earlier.” It can get overwhelming. JuliaYeah, I think the comparison to driving and Mapquest is so on point. Sometimes I’m like, how did my parents get anywhere? VirginiaI can tell you, we were lost a lot. My mom has a really good sense of direction, but my dad does not—love you, Dad! We were lost frequently, and there were some stressed out car rides.JuliaSame. I try not to do too many like binaries, but I think there is a little bit of like “you can divide the world into two” when it comes to recipes. People who either follow recipes or people who don’t. And my kind of funny truth about my life is that I write recipes for a living. I love writing them. I love developing them and testing them and writing them. But I never follow recipes unless I’m testing them. When I’m just cooking, when I’m just in my kitchen making a meal, I’m never following a recipe. So I’ve always had this kind of, I don’t know, question or sort of tension of like, what am I doing? VirginiaWhat am I telling people to do? JuliaI think landing on the charts has really unlocked something for me, because they’ve given me a way to express how I cook and how I think about cooking, which is by thinking in these categories and frameworks, and then being able to riff. So I think for folks that do feel really overwhelmed by cooking, I think recipes have a vital role and are the way a lot of people learn, how they learn and how they learn to trust themselves. So I think they absolutely have a role. But getting to incorporate them into these charts, I think my hope is that people will feel like they can rely on the recipes, use them. I think they’re all great. I really enjoyed them. And also, if you find you’re out of one ingredient, but you have another that kind of serves the same purpose, you can try it and just develop that kind of ease in the kitchen and that confidence to just just make a meal and not worry about it too much.VirginiaIt’s very empowering to cook your recipes and cook from your newsletter and from these charts, because it just makes me feel like, “Oh, it’s okay. Julia’s got me, I can go off on this other direction.”JuliaHearing you say that really means a lot to me. That’s my hope in my work. So that’s really meaningful to hear. And in terms of the overwhelm you or lots of people can feel, just to use another metaphor, I think that a lot of people feel about cooking the same way a lot of people feel when they walk into a hardware store and they’re not familiar with everything. You know you’re there for a reason. But you kind of don’t know where everything is. You don’t know what everything means.VirginiaYou don’t know what other parts you need to go with the part you know you need. It turns out, actually there are five other components. JuliaMy hope as a cookbook author is that I’m that person in the store who you’re not afraid to ask a question, and who will bring you to the right thing and be like, actually, this one works really well, and it’s cheaper than you thought. It’s not going to take that much time. VirginiaYou’re the retired dad who works at Home Depot and helps me out! JuliaThat is me. I’m that guy. I want to be that guy.VirginiaYou are totally that guy!Okay, a big theme of what we talked about on Burnt Toast is how much work it is to feed people. You also talk about this a lot in your work, which I so appreciate, because not every food writer does. There’s often a little veil cast over the dirty dishes and the labor of the chopping and all that.But, I would love to know, and I think listeners would love to know: What is your general food system right now? Do you meal plan? Do you prep? How often do you grocery shop? JuliaYeah, I live for these details, so I’m delighted to talk about them. Your work,Angela Garbes’ work, a lot of the contemporary group of writers that I admire have definitely inspired me to be more open about that in my work. To just say the honest thing of how hard it is to feed ourselves every day. It’s relentless work, and it’s often thankless, and I just feel that home cooks do so much labor, and it’s often totally unacknowledged. And I’m someone who gets a lot of acknowledgement for the cooking I do at home. I’ve made my whole career out of it. So my hope is to just give my fellow home cooks as much acknowledgement as I can. And just remind everyone, we’re just trying our hardest. We’re all doing a great job. So that’s one part of it, and it’s why my recipes pay attention to things like how many dishes you’re going to dirty making something. Because home cooking is not just making a meal. It’s grocery shopping, it’s planning, it’s budgeting, it’s cleaning up. It’s keeping track of all the preferences and dislikes of everyone you’re cooking for. It’s figuring out what to do with leftovers. It’s keeping track of what’s in your kitchen and not rebuying the same thing and then figuring out what to do because inevitably you do buy two jars of the same thing and then what are you going to do with it? It’s a lot, what we’re doing. So those are just some soapbox-y thoughts. But in terms of how I actually day-to-day go about food in my house. I guess, to give you a little context, my house consists of me and Grace, my spouse. And then we have four pets who require a lot of work to feed, I will say. But I’ll leave them out of it. Our bird, especially is wild. He’s so small, but he requires so much. But in terms of Grace and I eating, I would say we eat most of our meals at home. And there are a few things that happen on a pretty weekly basis that help us with that. One is that I don’t do it every single weekend, but I often teach cooking classes on Sunday afternoons, and the contents of those classes varies, but we often have leftovers from that. The other big thing is on Mondays, with my friends Emmett and Steven, we do this thing called Full Fridge Club, which is basically like a prepared meal kind of service we have. It’s like having a private chef, but you don’t get a customized menu. We se…
Full show notes at the publisherWelcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! It's time for your October Extra Butter!
This month we’re diving into some big, hard questions, like:
How do you mourn big body changes?
What happens if your body size really is the reason you can’t do something you used to love?
Does the “Health At Every Size” framework ever fail fat people?
When is it systemic oppression and when is it just…physics?
Or…do we all just need a Fat Day?
If you are already an Extra Butter subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Patreon. To get all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a complete transcript, visit our show page.
Otherwise, to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to join Extra Butter.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
It's time for your Indulgence Gospel! And today we’re talking all things Fat Travel!
We’ll be answering your questions, sharing travel hacks, and just getting into the nitty gritty of how to be a fat person going places in the world.
And so much more!
To hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
Follow us on social!
Virginia is on Instagram and Threads as @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.
Corinne is on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay and on Patreon at Big Undies.
Support the Me Little Me Foundation, a virtual food pantry supporting multiply marginalized folks recovering from eating disorders.
Thanks for listening and supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!
You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is Claire Ayoub.Claire is the writer and director of the brand new feature film—opening tomorrow!!— called Empire Waist, a heartfelt comedy about teens learning to love their bodies through fashion design and friendship.I saw Empire Waist a couple of days before I interviewed Claire, and I haven’t been this excited about a movie in a very, very long time. It’s a film I can’t wait to show my 11 year old, but I’m also dying for all of you to see it. I think kids and adults are going to feel so so seen by this story. You’re going to get so much out of my conversation with Claire. But also know this is an independent film. It’s not getting a huge box office release and the more we, as the Burnt Toast community, can do to show up for it, the more distribution it will get—and the more we’ll communicate to Hollywood that we want more stories that center fat experiences and fat joy.PS. If you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show! And, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 161 TranscriptClaireI’m Claire Ayoub. I’m the writer and director of Empire Waist. It is the movie I wish I had as a teen, and honestly as an adult. As a person with a body.I wrote a piece for Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls in 2015 called Take The Plunge. It was a note to my 12 year old self, and I wrote about how I quit swimming at 12. I wrote it at 25, because I was getting back back in the pool. For me, that was really important to write to my younger self to say, “You’re about to quit something that is your favorite thing in the world because you can’t handle making that walk from the locker room to the pool.” A 20-foot walk to my favorite thing, and I couldn’t handle it because of the shame I felt about my bigger body and my changing body. During puberty, our bodies change—and that’s normal. But I felt so ashamed! So I wrote this piece—and I was so terrified to write it—but the response to it is why I wrote this movie. Hundreds of people, especially women, across the US and around the world, were responding about the things they quit at that age. I wish we had had something that we could have seen to make us feel more seen and less alone, that we’re not alone in this struggle. And so that’s why I wrote the movie. I basically had the idea of, what if you could wear whatever you wanted, that what was available wasn’t the obstacle, but you still didn’t feel worthy to wear it. We see a character who is so talented and has a passion for fashion design, but she’s bullied at school. She keeps her head down. She keeps it to herself, and she doesn’t wear any of her designs because she doesn’t feel worthy to. It’s not until her clothes get discovered by her fat classmate at school who’s confident—she has that confidence and loves color and patterns, but can’t find the clothes she wants to wear that really resonate with her. So she begs her to make her one dress. And what starts there is a friendship love story. Because the movies I saw about body image were all really sad. You know, seeing people binge or seeing people be sad and bullied.VirginiaThe Calista Flockhart eating disorder special that we all grew up with. ClaireI wanted to show what helped me get through it, and always helps me get through it, which is friendship. No matter what our body type, our friends see us at our most powerful. Just because a character is super confident, like in the case of Kayla who plays her best friend, that does not mean she is a two dimensional character who’s just figured it out, you know? That was why it was really important for me to direct and to see this through from beginning to end. Because it was a very commercial script. I had offers to buy the script through The Black List. But I knew if I handed this over, it could have just been smoothed out.VirginiaThere were so many moments as I was watching it, where I thought, oh, she avoided that. You avoided so many moments where I felt like it could have gone in a Disney, a cliched afterschool special way, but also in a way that would have been so much more apologetic of fatness.I just want to say for folks, I got to see a screener a few days ago. I mean, I cried multiple times watching it. I also laughed a ton. It is an incredibly joyful, hopeful movie, with some tough stuff, of course. And I just kept thinking: There is no apology for fatness here. ClaireIt’s really important to meet your audience early and often, because Hollywood doesn’t think we’re worth the risk. Because they don’t see it as a story that resonates, a story that will drive box office. Because it’s always about dollars. So I always talk about finding your audience. Prove that there is an audience on the business side, but also craft-wise. Talking to people, testing the script with them, and getting their actual feedback. Because we only have our one life experience. This is a very diverse cast, and I am a white gay woman. But being gay doesn’t mean I get to talk about everything else in the world, you know? I’m a cisgendered woman, I’m an able-bodied woman—so looking at that, I really wanted to ensure as a way to take care of the story, and also make sure people saw themselves represented.So I did 17 live readings across the country in 2019 and early 2020. And that’s not that’s not normal, that is not normally part of the process. I was like, “I’m doing a script tour!” Everyone’s like, “what’s a script tour?” I’m like, “Just go with it.” And I really gave permission to the audience, both in person and afterwards in Google Forms to say what was working and what confused them and what could be done better. Especially when it came to the diversity and inclusion of this film. So I learned on this script tour across the country, that the script resonated with people from 14 to 84.VirginiaWow, that’s cool.ClaireI remember a 70 year old woman come up to me after a reading, who had lived a life, right? And she goes, “I can still remember my mom and when I was maybe six or seven, giving me skim milk and my sister whole milk because I was bigger than her.” I had another mom who came up to me in tears going, “Oh my God, I have to call my adult daughter.” She’s in her 60s or 70s. She goes, “I thought I was helping. I thought I was helping when I was saying these things.” So in the beginning, I talked about this movie being for teen girls — but I stopped doing that early on, because why are we limiting this? We got great feedback, especially from non binary kids and adults saying thank you for not gendering this to make it just a movie about teen girls. Because body image is body image, and that was really important to us. During this whole process, it’s about learning and shifting and adjusting based on what you learn. Because this is what we love about it is people coming up to us after and saying they felt seen. VirginiaI watched it by myself and the whole time was like, I can’t wait to show my 11 year old. She’s going to love it. But I was also thinking, I can’t wait for Burnt Toast listeners in general to watch because as you’re saying, it really is all ages. It makes the conversation very accessible to kids, which doesn’t always happen. But as a parent, I mean, I connected so hard with her dad. I saw her mom, I know her mom. It is just, it’s really rich and beautifully done.ClaireI just want to shout out really quick, Missi Pyle, who plays the mom. She is one of the most supportive human beings—especially when it comes to body image. Because those seventeen live readings basically were for me to get this mom’s character right.VirginiaIt’s a hard character!ClaireIt’s a tough character. It would have been so easy for this mom to be a two-dimensional, icy bitch who is just being mean to her daughter. So really walking that fine line that she loves her daughter so much and is so afraid for her to be rejected, to be bullied, that she wraps that kid in love and fear and it hurts, right? Looking at that. And Missi Pyle—she and Rainn Wilson going toe to toe. There’s a big argument scene that had all of us crying behind the scenes. The two of them have been such champions of this movie, and its message. Both of them are parents and just really want to see this story of acceptance and how to support your kids. It’s really looking at your own fears and where it’s coming from. VirginiaLet’s talk about the cast a little bit. We had Katy Geraghty, who’s an incredible Broadway actor, on the podcast last year. She talked about how, as a fat person playing fat characters, it’s both a huge opportunity for representation, and you’re often reliving some of your own trauma or dealing with a director who is not so sensitive, and it can be really fraught.So talk a little bit about what you did to protect the cast, because the the actors that play Kayla and Lenore are quite young, right?ClaireThey were. They were 19 years old when we filmed. They were babies. My refrain this whole time was, “I am not going to have you pull up something that happened yesterday. I don’t want you pulling from your own experience. I don’t want you re-traumatizing yourself.”What was really important to me was understanding how to protect my cast and crew, both physically—we were shooting at the height of covid—and mentally, because this is a story about someone who has deep self loathing for her own body. This is a movie with bullying from a character, a mean girl who has her own struggles with food, right? Her own struggles with control and body image. I had two people come up to me after that scene with Missi Pyle and Mia Kaplan in the hallway, where the mom really being very clear about her own views of her daughter’s body and how people see her. I had two grown adult men ask if they could give me a hug because they needed a hug, because they had teen daughters, right? So a big part of this was preparing myself with the skill set to support my cast and crew, meaning I tested the script not only with people 14 to 84, but with social workers, psychologists, teachers, educators, healthcare providers. I needed to ensure my cast and crew did not suffer to tell this story.VirginiaSo important.ClaireI was talking with a social worker at a friend’s birthday. And I mentioned the mean girl character, Sylvie, and how she controls her friends’ food. And the social worker goes, “Whatever you do, do not show what she’s eating.” VirginiaYes, I noticed this! ClaireMy brain went, what? Because, as a filmmaker, what would we do? An overhead shot showing four identical meals to convey that. And she goes, whatever you do, do not show what she’s eating. Because someone struggling with an eating disorder will see her, want to look like her, and snap a photo and replicate that. So I relayed it to our props team to say, “Nothing clear. I don’t want to see the food. I only want to see the tops of the food so we know they’re eating something. No direct shots of food. We’re going to shoot across the table to show that they’re sad eating their food, but we’re not going to show what they’re eating.” That is the kind of intentionality that was very important to me. And with my actors. I created essentially a care plan with them, for my for my actors who played Lenore, Kayla and Sylvie, our bully. We worked together on zoom ahead of time, individually and then together as a group, to parse how the character was feeling, why they were feeling, and also making it super clear that they had each other’s backs in the moment, that this was just a script. So they could trust each other to be there for each other. So I talked with each of them and said, “What do you need in the moment? What do you need beforehand and what do you need after?” All my actors basically were like, “I need to be left alone leading up to it. I’m probably going to have headphones on listening to music, getting in a headspace for it.” So I relayed that to my my crew to say, hey, hair and makeup, especially costuming: They’re going to be heads down, really getting in them in the moment. Let’s leave them some space and grace to do that.Then in the moment, it was about making sure that the only people on set were the ones who really needed to be there for certain scenes. But also that our crew had a heads up for really triggering scenes as well.And then afterwards, my favorite example is Mia Kaplan, who plays Lenore. I was like, “What do you need afterwards to really get shake out that feeling of where you are in the scene?” And they’re a big theater kid and they go, “I want to dance.” And so Mia made a playlist called We Finished the Fucking Scene. And basically my instructions were to wait till the last shot and then burst into the room playing songs from this incredible playlist. So yeah, I scared the bejesus out of Rainn Wilson during a scene where she gets weighed at a doctor’s office. It was the final scene of this long day of terrible scenes for Mia, and I jumped into the room blasting Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.” And was like, we finished the scene! Poor Rainn was like, Oh my God. Like, what?VirginiaYou mentioned making the decision not to show the food when the character who has disordered eating behaviors. Another thing I noticed you didn’t show was in that scene where she gets weighed at the doctor’s office—we don’t see the number on the scale. I would love to just hear a little more about any other things like that that you were like, “let’s not include that,” or “let’s make sure to show this” in order to talk about these issues, but in a way that’s going to be safe for everyone watching it, too.ClaireAbsolutely. So for the weigh-in scene, I wanted to capture the feeling she had leading up, not just on the scale, but leading up to it, right? I wanted to capture how she felt. And fun fact, movie magic, Mia Kaplan never stepped on that scale.VirginiaLove that.ClaireThat was our camera operator, Jesse Sanchez Strauss, who stepped on the scale. I didn’t want to show her weight, just like I’d never show Lenore’s own disordered eating. I never show it, and that was done on purpose. We see her taking a bite of pizza. We see her bringing snacks out of her closet. But I did not want someone to be able to freeze frame that and go, “See? See? See? She could have stopped, she could have just not eaten that.” To grab onto that kind of trigger topic and say, see? I was like, no, I want you to see Lenore Miller as a human being. I want you to see Kayla as a human being. I want you to see Daisy Washington, who plays Marcy as the most powerful person in the room. This is a movie genuinely for everyone. It’s not just for fat people, right? It definitely is to feel seen, but it’s not just for fat people. It is a space to understand and feel empathy towards all bodies. Like, I never saw The Whale. I had friends flag it to me. They were like, do not. Nope.VirginiaMarked safe.ClaireMarked safe. Exactly. And I always look at content like this and say, do we need to se this? Just like something we talk about for trigger content, like rape, things like that in film. Do you need to show it? Do you need to re-trigger people to tell this story? And just like my original instinct as a filmmaker would be to show the food, thanks to experts, I didn’t do that. Again, how can I make sure I don’t unintentionally harm my audience, my cast and my crew? Super important. VirginiaIt just seems like such a tricky line that you must have to keep revisiting because on the other hand the movie does contain these raw, emotional scenes of the parents fighting about how to handle her or between the mother and daughter. The bullying is really hard to watch.I was saying to my frien…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is Nicola Salmon.Nicola is a leading voice for fat folks seeking fertility support, and author of the book Fat and Fertile. As a fertility coach and fat activist, Nicola works to challenge the fertility industry’s entrenched weight bias and empower marginalized folks to take control of their reproductive health. (You may know her from Instagram.)The intersection of anti-fatness and infertility is a story I've been covering for over six years now, and depressingly, the situation seems to only be getting worse. I hear from so many of you all the time who are navigating fertility treatment and encountering doctor after doctor who all tell you to lose weight before they'll consider helping you.As I wrote for The New York Times in 2019, this is pretty clear cut medical discrimination—and yet we haven't made much headway in getting clinics to change these policies. If you want more on this whole conversation, check out episode 29 of this podcast, where I talked through all of my reporting and the research on weight and fertility, as it stood at that point. And then go listen to episode two of Cult of Perfect, where we explored the fat mother narrative—and the kind of healthcare that fat moms, and fat pregnant people, get.PS. If you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show! And, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)You’re listening to this episode because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. Neither my guest today nor I are healthcare providers, and this conversation is not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice. AND: If you are in the thick of your own fertility journey, and today’s episode doesn't feel good for you to hear, please take good care.Episode 160 TranscriptNicolaI am what I call a fat positive fertility coach, which means specifically that I support fat folks who want to get pregnant in bigger bodies. So that involves lots of different things: Working one-to-one with people, doing courses and basically just getting lots of information out there which fat folks might need, and then navigating the healthcare system when they are looking to get pregnant and maybe not finding that support with their doctors or their clinics. Just doing everything I can to make sure that fat folks have everything they need to get pregnant and don’t feel guilted or shamed or judged in the process.VirginiaWhich is all too common. We know that anti-fatness shows up in every realm of healthcare and fertility seems to be a particular hot spot. I’m curious: Why do you think fertility care is where we see so much medical anti-fat bias?NicolaPeople want this so bad—growing their families, having babies. And I think there is often this lack of control that we have around the process. We cannot control when we ovulate. We cannot tell our bodies, “okay, now’s the time! Go, go, go!” I think because of that lack of control, people are desperately seeking other ways of controlling the process, controlling their fertility, controlling their health somehow. And especially the diet industry, has really got their claws and latched onto that, and they’re offering people a way of being able to control something about the process. Supplementation, dieting, eating foods, cutting out foods, following all of the different things, regimes. I think giving people that element of possibility that they can control and somehow influence this process is what people really hold on to.The diet industry is really feeding into this idea that people need that control, and they really want that control in order to navigate getting pregnant and being able to influence how they navigate that journey. I think the healthcare system is really just playing into that because we have this idea that is our responsibility to somehow fix ourselves as fat people in order to get pregnant. If there are ever any problems, if there are any other issues, then we never get looked at. We never get the test offered. We never get the treatments offered. It’s just, “it’s your weight. You need to do something about that. Go away, sort that out, and then come back when you’ve lost weight.” And I think just all of those combinations of factors have led to this cesspool of fat people not being able to access any kind of fertility support. VirginiaI mean, it completely makes sense. We’re conditioned our whole lives to think this way with whatever is hard in our lives—try to control your weight, try to control how you’re eating and you’ll fix it. Women in particular are given that message from so early, and then, in this most vulnerable time of life where you’re trying to do, as you’re saying, this very hard thing that you have very little direct control over. It’s just a perfect storm.You posted a few months ago that the most common reasons fat folks get stuck trying to get pregnant is because they hesitate to give themselves permission to even try in the first place. NicolaI think it goes back to what you said earlier about the conditioning, right? We are conditioned to believe that we need to be smaller in order to become a parent, and that’s shown in the media. With pregnancy, all you ever see is the very slender person with the beautiful bump. I know so many other incredible folks trying to disrupt this. But still, the general narrative is it’s small people getting pregnant. And that is what we see all over the pregnancy magazines. If you’re in any of the apps, like, it’s just this one person who gets pregnant, which is a thin, white lady. We don’t see any representation. And what that means is that we don’t believe that this is a problem that other people face. So many people I talk to feel so isolated because they don’t see anybody else in bigger bodies getting pregnant, necessarily. They think it’s something to be ashamed to talk about. They don’t want to share that with their friends or with their family because of the judgment that they might get back. It’s just really normalized for people to comment on their bodies and to judge them for wanting to grow their families. I think the thing about permission—with that post, I didn’t want people to think, “Oh my gosh, it’s my fault that I am doing this, like I am not giving myself permission.” This is not something else that we need to beat ourselves up about. It is the social conditioning that has led us to believe that we need to be something different in order to be able to do this and to be worthy of doing this. To give ourselves permission to even go to the doctor, for example, or get tests if things are taking a little while longer than you’d expect. So it is really just giving people the permission to think about that and go, actually, yeah, I’ve been putting this off because I think I need to be smaller and just shining a light on it really.VirginiaIt’s hard to give yourself permission to do something that culture is not giving you permission to do. It’s very, also very tied to our ideas about who will be a good mom and to “maternal fitness.” That phrase gets turned thrown around a lot, which I would like to just send right off into the sea if we could. NicolaOh yes, please. VirginiaSo does that come up for folks you’re working with, too? This fear of, “Can I be a good mom in a bigger body?”NicolaYes, because it’s always this conversation of, “Will you be able to pick up your kids off the floor when they’re little? Or will you be able to play in the park with them and run after them?” And I think it comes from such an ableist place. We believe that only one type of person can be a good parent. And actually, the world is made up of so many millions of different types of humans and I think that’s what makes it really special. I think that we all have different ways that we can contribute in terms of mothering. My size has never held me back from being a great parent for my children. I mean, sometimes I can’t sit on a swing or sometimes I might not be able to fit on the roller coaster, for example. But that’s the swing’s fault. That’s not my fault.Because my body isn’t accommodated, there are ways that I have to be a bit mindful about that if we’re going somewhere that may have restrictions and things that might not accommodate me. But day-to-day life, my kids don’t know any different, right? They understand that I’m their mom. This is my body, and they love me for me. Their lives are no less because of the size of my body. It makes me so cross that so many doctors will tell their patients, oh, it would be unethical for me to try and support you in getting pregnant or you’re doing something irresponsible. That puts that responsibility, that shame, that idea that you need to be fixed in some way on people again and again and again. VirginiaI mean, it’s wild. I think about what we know from parenting research on what makes kids feel safe, happy, what helps kids grow up to be good, contributing members of society. Parent body size is never on the list! I’ve been thinking about this a lot because one of the themes my trolls love to focus on is that I must be a bad parent because I’m in a bigger body. Because being a fat mom is seen as so selfish. I kind of want us to unpack the ableism of that for another minute, because I think that is a core fear that folks are up against, and we want to hold hold that together with what we actually know about what kids need from caregivers.NicolaObviously the biggest one is that kids need safety. Kids need to feel secure, feel a sense of belonging, and feel understood and validated. We are so capable of giving that to our kids. And, it shouldn’t be down to solely us, either. We should have a community around us, and we don’t live in that world really anymore where that is often an option or available. But we should not be the sole provider of all that for our kids. We can all have different parts to play in our children’s lives. I think giving them a variety of adults and humans that they interact with and can get different things from is a really good way of helping them become well rounded adults.VirginiaWhat other barriers do you see fat folks encountering? Maybe you’re getting over the this initial “Am I worthy of this? Can I do this?” piece, and then you actually are going to the doctor. What hurdles are you going to encounter there?NicolaBy far the biggest one is the anti-fat attitudes of the healthcare providers and the policies that are in place, not only with doctors, but with the fertility clinics they work for. That is the biggest barrier that fat folks face, by far. Because there’s nothing often that you can do, individually. Like this is a system-level problem, there are bad policies in place. There are often procedures in place at clinics. There are doctors who’ve had however many years of education that is anti-fat education. It’s really difficult to sometimes navigate that when you’re coming up against doctors time and time and again who have either strict BMI limits or have very anti-fat attitudes around “you need to go and lose X pounds or X kilos.”Not only is that a physical barrier in terms of you can’t physically access the tests and treatments that you might need, but it is exhausting. Mentally, when people are having to have these conversations and the doctors judging them, and putting their nervous systems through appointment after appointment, or even just sending off emails and getting the same response back time and time again. That labor is so exhausting and it’s not labor that people should have to do in order to access basic fertility care.VirginiaHow do you encourage folks to start? What support do we want to get in place as you’re navigating this?NicolaThe first thing is to not assume it’s going to be hard, right?Virginia**I like that. That’s helpful. NicolaIt can feel like a mountain, and when I talk to folks about it, I want people to be fully informed of all the potential pitfalls because I don’t want people to be surprised. But if we go in prepared for the worst, but expecting the best, we could come across a great doctor who’s going to give you everything that you want, and that’s what we want. We want the outcome of being supported, of having evidence-based healthcare, and we just have to be prepared that that might happen. But that also might not happen. So having tools in our back pocket for if that doesn’t happen, what we can do instead. I think it can be really helpful to zoom out as well when you’re getting started and really looking at okay, where does this blame truly lie? I understand that culture has given me this blame of it’s my fault, It’s my body’s fault that maybe I haven’t got pregnant as quickly as I wanted to. But then really zooming out and looking okay, well, what systems are in place that are really to blame?It is the healthcare system that has been based on very racist and anti-fat roots that have led to doctors believing that fatness is bad, that fatness is unhealthy?It is all the researchers who are doing their best as researchers, but also live in the diet culture soup where they truly believe that and make assumptions about fat bodies, which biases the research that they do?It is the people who are doing the procedures and the IVF pioneers, who decided we’re only going to look at IVF in straight sized bodies? We are not going to include fat people when we decide what kind of drug levels we give, how we design the protocols. Because once we leave fat people out, that means it doesn’t work as well for fat people, which makes total sense, right? But you cannot then use the research and go, oh well, it doesn’t work for fat people if you’ve never included them in the first place.There are so many people that are to blame for the fact that you cannot access fertility care, but you are not one of them. I think being able to zoom out and see that bigger picture and see really where you sit in it can be really helpful when your mind kind of goes, oh, it’s my fault. You can get in this spiral of shame, which so many of us do all the time, about so many different things around our bodies. It can be really helpful to be going, okay, I understand why I feel like this. It makes total sense that my brain is telling me all this stuff. And I think reframing it like that can just really help people to go, yes, this is a problem. Yes, it’s not my fault, and still I need to take some responsibility to move forward to make sure that I get the care that I deserve.Which, again, not their labor. Should not be having to do this. But right now, we live in a world where that’s the only choice. It’s that or perform weight loss for a short term to be able to go through the BMI barriers. And I do not judge people for going either way. It’s such a hard place to be in and you just have to make the decision that you have to make that’s best for you. But it, yeah, that is, for me, the first pieces of people being able to move forward with this, really believing that they are worthy of it, because it is not their fault. VirginiaHere in the States, when I reported this out, I found that there was a real difference in private fertility clinics, which can set their own BMI cutoffs, and the BMI cutoffs were sometimes as low as 26. Basically anyone out of the “normal” range, they wouldn’t treat. Versus university or major hospital clinics, like within hospitals and university healthcare systems, which tended to have either no BMI cutoffs or much higher BMI cutoffs and better set up for the care that fat folks need. Like having an anesthesiologist on hand who underst…
Full show notes at the publisherWelcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! It's time for your September Extra Butter!
Today we are discussing... dating as a fat person! We'll get into navigating the apps, Corinne's rules for first dates, and why do so many cishet men post fishing pictures.
If you are already an Extra Butter subscriber, you’ll have this entire episode in your podcast feed and access to the entire transcript in your inbox and on the Burnt Toast Patreon.
Otherwise, to hear the whole conversation or read the whole transcript, you'll need to join Extra Butter.
PS. Don't forget to order Fat Talk: Parenting In the Age of Diet Culture! Get your signed copy nowfrom Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the USA). You can also order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Kobo or anywhere you like to buy books. (Or get the UK edition or the audiobook!)
Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctors, or any kind of healthcare providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.
Corinne
I’m really excited about our topic for today.
Virginia
I’m so nervous about our topic for today.
Corinne
There’s nothing to be nervous about. We’re going to talk about dating. And just to be clear, both of us are single. Slide into our DMs.
EPISODE CREDITS
Co-hosts: Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.
Producer: Kim Baldwin.
Logo design: Deanna Lowe.
Theme Song: Farideh.
Video Editor: Elizabeth Ayiku
Audio Engineer: Tommy Harron
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You’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today my guest is romance author Nisha Sharma. 🔥Nisha is a young adult and adult contemporary romance writer whose books have been included in “Best Of” lists by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and more. When she’s not writing about people of color experiencing radical joy or teaching about inclusivity, Nisha’s hitting the books for her PhD in English and social justice. Nisha is the author of an awesome trilogy called If Shakespeare Were an Auntie, the third installment of which just came out last week. It’s called Marriage & Masti and it’s an absolute delight!So we’re going to hear a bit more about Nisha’s own writing in this episode. But the main reason I asked her to come on is to discuss one big question: What is happening with bodies in romance novels?The romance genre has always been a big business, and one of the most reliable ways for women to make money as writers. But in recent years, it has delightfully exploded in terms of diversity of all kinds. Of course, this has been uphill work. So we’re going to get into why we are both seeing more fat rep in romance—but why you’ll also still encounter so many conventionally beautiful, thin white heroines. And she also answers the question: Why are there so few fat male love interests?You can get all of Nisha’s books —and all the other romances we discuss in this episode! —through the Burnt Toast Bookshop. Don’t forget, you can always take 10 percent off that purchase if you also order (or have already ordered!) Fat Talkfrom Split Rock Books! (Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)PS. If you enjoy today’s conversation, please tap the heart on this post — likes are one of the biggest drivers of traffic from Substack’s Notes, so that’s a super easy, free way to support the show!Episode 158 TranscriptNishaSo I live in the Philadelphia suburbs. And I’m also South Asian, the eldest daughter of immigrant parents. I spent about 10 years of my life in corporate as a DEI professional. And now I just write, and I study, because I’m back in school to get my PhD in English and social justice as well. VirginiaWe’re going to talk about bodies and romance novels today. To give a little backstory, I am somewhat of a recent convert to reading romance—within the last five years, I would say. Other than reading a few Harlequin romances and VC Andrews books as an 11-year-old and having my mind blown. Oh and then I definitely had a JD Robb phase in my twenties. I was really into that whole futuristic cop, hot billionaire husband plot line for a while…But I kept putting these books down because I did not feel myself represented. They were fun, and they were a hot read, but it was like okay, it’s great that all these skinny pretty people are having great sex. It never really resonated with me. And then I read Talia Hibbert. And that was my first moment of, Oh, okay, this can be something really different. It was such a revelation, as a fat woman, to read a book centering the pleasure of fat women. So I would love for you to talk to us about how romance has traditionally approached bodies, and how you see that evolving.NishaThat’s a really good question. I think before I answer it, I want to give a little disclaimer. I am a person who is in a fat body, I’ve been fat my entire life. And I have disordered eating patterns. Because, you know, doctors are great at making you feel terrible about the bodies that we’re in. And I’ve been on a fertility journey, which all of you know, anyone who’s also experienced any sort of infertility in the US specifically, a lot of the medication they give you can amplify a lot of the medical concerns that often are associated with individuals in larger bodies. So that’s the first disclaimer. The second is, as a writer, there have only been two books in my repertoire where I have fat bodies on page. And a lot of it is not necessarily me writing thin characters versus fat characters, a lot of my characters just aren’t described in a particular way. VirginiaI noticed that. NishaIt was not intentional at first, but I’ve become more intentional about the way that bodies are presented in my own work. I think that’s important for me to level set before I answer the question. But in terms of the history of romance, I’ve been in the industry for quite a bit of time. My first book was published in 2018. But I have a history in the industry and the history of romance is something that I’m very familiar with. And so we have to look at where it started, right? The romance industry today has its roots in Europe, specifically in the UK. It then went from these category romances in the UK to Harlequin in Canada. And then we see the boom of published romances in the US. So romance is very Eurocentric. And Eurocentric ideologies about bodies are often rooted in racism. History is not linear, there are multiple ways of looking at history. But the one that resonates with me the most is that this colonial influence in Romance also has historically seen Black and Asian and Latinx bodies—that are larger or that are not the Eurocentric body types—as being non-conforming, ugly, lazy…all of the stereotypes that you find associated with fatness. So I think that we have to acknowledge the colonial roots of romance.The other piece of it is that we have to see who’s making the decisions about romance. One of the most recent reports about representation data showed that still over 70 percent of the people making decisions about which books get published are white. And a vast majority of the leadership in publishing are men. So we are looking at white men, straight white men in a lot of situations, who are making decisions about romance from the very top. This influences bodies and the way that bodies are portrayed on the page. And this is influencing the way that finance and marketing work, and all the way down to whether editors are able to purchase books with characters that have larger bodies in them too.VirginiaThat is so exasperating, especially when you consider that the majority of romance writers and readers are women. And yet, this male power system at the top is is dictating what women are publishing and what women are reading. I just want to name that imbalance. That feels like an important piece of this. NishaIt is. On the other side of it, we can’t just point the finger at publishing. We can’t just point the finger at colonialism. There are also readers who will say that they just don’t understand fat bodies. So we have this societal response of, “I don’t find that attractive, I don’t understand how that’s attractive.” That’s also a really terrible terrible take that is still prevalent today.VirginiaIf readers are conditioned to think certain bodies are attractive and certain bodies are aspirational and then you combine that with the fantasy element of romance, readers are gravitating towards romances that perhaps that give them this fantasy. And it matters less about whether they feel like their own bodies are being reflected. But that breaks my heart! That feels really sad.NishaI’ve always said that romance is having a conversation with the world around it. It’s a back and forth. It’s never really a reflection of the world, but it’s also not a predictor of the world to come. It’s this back and forth. As romance progressed, we did start to see the rise of different body types in romance. But I specifically remember, as a voracious reader in the 90s, the books that had fat bodies in them, it was often a woman who was ashamed of her fat body. And this shame came from how they didn’t fit in with the society around them and how the hero had to be the person to be like, “I still find you beautiful anyway.” There is a residual effect of that sometimes still, in our genre. In the 90s, it was a thing. VirginiaJennifer Weiner’s Good In Bed is the classic example of that. It was a hugely revolutionary book, in many ways. And, it is a woman being told by a man that her body is acceptable.NishaAnd I will say, I think that with this influx, the acceptance of marginalized stories, of queer stories, of authors who are writing characters who are older—which is also very important here—we’re getting stories about bodies that are outside of the traditional white, European body that was traditionally accepted in romances. I don’t think we’ve really reached a space of full acceptance yet, but we are seeing so many more books every day that have stories of positive representation of fatness on the page in romance. I wish there was more, but from where we used to be, there is definitely more now. VirginiaI’m curious to hear your thoughts on the male love interests. Because one trend I’ve noticed is romance heroines maybe becoming more diverse in terms of body size, but the men—there’s a range, right? And maybe they’re tall and lanky, or maybe they’re broad and muscular, but—they’re not fat. And that’s interesting to me. I mean, especially in light of the recent cultural conversation around season three of Bridgerton, which very much was that plot line you were talking about, where the thin, hot love interest is telling the perceived-as-fat woman, “look how beautiful you are.”So there’s still some of that embedded in there, right?NishaI always think that Hollywood is behind in the way that publishing is dealing with certain topics. Like 10 years ago, I was getting the whole like, “Oh, our publishing house already has a South Asian author.” And now Hollywood is doing that, too. Like, we already have our South Asian story. So hopefully Hollywood will also change, sadly. With male love interests, I think we’re we’re primarily talking about Cisgender heterosexual romances. I think queer romances have done an incredible job of being way more accepting and open to marginalized identities. I think cisgender heterosexual romances with a lot of whiteness still, are where we’re finding this traditional male love interest model. So, back in the day, Nora Roberts—who is, like, Queen Nora, right? At one point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was selling a book every eight minutes. She has over 300 books published.Virginia Icon. Who is JD Robb, just to call back to my previous endorsement. She was not just Nora Roberts, she was this whole empire of Nora Roberts.NishaBut she has this really famous quote that stuck with me for a long time, because it made me feel really—not icky, but it made me feel a certain type of way. People would ask her, “Why are all of your love interests super hot and attractive?” And Nora said something like, “Well, it’s my fantasy and in my fantasy, I don’t want to write about people who I find ugly. I want to write about people who I find attractive.”And okay, so there’s, there are a lot of problems with this statement. And, there’s one kernel of really uncomfortable truth.But the problems, first, are that Nora is claiming there’s this default standard of hotness. And that default level of hotness or understanding of hotness is that it doesn’t include people with features that may or not be traditionally European, right? But the uncomfortable truth is that authors really have the power of driving what’s conventionally attractive in their stories and a lot of the narratives that they write. And they can do this by avoiding certain words that can specifically indicate what is a traditionally hot body type. But until we see more authors who are embodying these differences, and who are really writing with care and concern, we’re defaulting to a certain type of hotness. And as an author myself, I also have this belief about is what is traditionally beautiful to me, and it’s different than a lot of the the hotness that exists on page, right? My heroes are South Asian. They have dark skin, they are very hairy and broad chested, very chiseled jaw and a little beaten up looking. That is just what I like. So I also have to recognize that there are certain conventions about South Asian attractiveness that I am also sewing into the fabric of my narratives, which I have to address. This is something that I wish more authors talked about. It’s definitely an ongoing discussion in romance.VirginiaWell and it’s just interesting to think about all the intersections you were laying out before. If we’re thinking about those male publishers at the top of the pyramid, thinking about what they’re selling to women. There’s what they think women want. That whole concept is flawed. And then there is also this need for authors to reflect on their own biases and their own preferences and what they’re putting out. And I think there often is a piece of that old 90s narrative of a thin hot guy being in love with a fat woman somehow validates the fat woman’s body. Even if the story no longer centers on him bringing her up from the pit of despair. We’re still seeing a layer of that play out in books. When you have the fat protagonist, and then the thin male love interest, that’s how we validate this woman’s body. That’s how we make her beautiful. There’s just a lot to tease out there.I don’t envy you all having this as a job and needing to think about what’s hot and also like, what does it mean that it’s hot? Like, what am I bringing to that?NishaI think it’s part of a larger conversation about literary citizenship, about representation, which I don’t think the industry is having. I don’t think that we’re spending enough time talking about it. So as literary citizens, what is our responsibility for representation to the members of our publishing community and our readership? How are we responsible to our readers in the way that we are talking about bodies? About disability, about race, about gender and sexuality? I think this is definitely part of of a bigger, ongoing concern in not just in romance, but I think in publishing in general. VirginiaOh, for sure.Emma Copley Eisenberghas been writing great pieces about fatphobia and literary fiction, and even in a book likeAll Fours, which is just being heralded as this groundbreaking exploration of a midlife woman’s experience in her body. And yet, there’s a very fatphobic sex scene in it!It feels interesting to me that this can still play out so casually, in many arenas of publishing, without anyone thinking to turn the lens on it. NishaAbsolutely.VirginiaWhere else do you see anti-fatness still fairly entrenched in romance? Are there uphill conversations about getting fat folks on covers? Any other piece of it where this shows up? And of course, thinking intersectionally here again, as well.NishaI think in a lot of cisgender white stories, we’re still seeing a lot of anti-fatness. But of course, there are people in those spaces who are really fighting hard against it.Sarah Maclean does not write thin characters. Her characters in her historical romances are all fat characters. She writes plus size women across the board. Contemporary authors like Olivia Dade are also writing plus sized characters. They’re writing older characters in plus size bodies that are just amazing. Jen DeLuca is another author who has a really fun series about older heroines and a Renaissance Fair, which is just so fun. So there are cisgender white stories that do have plus sized characters. And these authors are really pushing the narrative. But if you look at the New York Times list right now and you pull all of the romance novels—there’s not one fat heroine. Not one.VirginiaYeah, it’s maddening. And I have to say, I’m looking at these covers as you’re listing people, and I believe you because I haven’t read these authors. I believe you that the characters are fat inside the books, but Jen DeLuca’s covers, they’re the cartoon covers, but they look like straight-size characters.NishaOlivia Dade has done a lot. VirginiaTo be clear, I’m an author. I know the relationship authors have to covers is often tenuous. I’m not blaming these individual a…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it’s time for another Indulgence Gospel. It’s the last week of our summer break, so we’ll be back after Labor Day with all new podcast episodes for you. We so appreciate everyone who has been continuing to listen and support the podcast during our hiatus. It means a lot to know that our community enjoys our work and cares that we’re able to make it sustainable too. So as a thank you for listening, today’s Indulgence Gospel rerun has no paywall. We’ve realized that so many of you on the free list almost never get to hear how hilarious and smart Corinne is — and as paid subscribers know, Indulgence Gospel episodes are truly the heart of the podcast. They are the most fun to make, because they are the episodes where we feel truly in conversation with all of you.If you love this episode, of course we hope you’ll consider a paid subscription to Burnt Toast so you can get every paywalled episode we make. And we also hope you’ll subscribe to Big Undies, Corinne’s new Substack about clothes. This episode contains affiliate links. Shopping our links is a great way to support Burnt Toast! Episode 157 TranscriptVirginiaYou’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole-Smith I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.CorinneAnd I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.VirginiaWe have so many good questions this month. A lot of parenting food questions. I think maybe because I just ran the lunchbox piece in the newsletter it’s on everybody’s minds. But also, as usual, some fat fashion stuff. Clogs are coming up later. And Ozempic, because obviously. So it’s gonna be a good one.VirginiaSo before we dive in, how are you doing? What’s new with you, Corinne?CorinneI’m doing well. One thing that’s new with me is: I just signed up to do a powerlifting meet. So I’m feeling nervous. VirginiaWell, yeah. Is this like a competition thing, where people come and watch? CorinneI think so. I mean, obviously, I’ve never done something like this before. It’s in Albuquerque, and it’s being run by my gym. And it’s all women’s. VirginiaThat sounds very cool. CorinneI’m just having a little of like, Oh, what did I do? Let’s see. Wow. Am I going to be the most amateur, weakest person there? I might.VirginiaBut you’ll still be super strong and amazing. Because the weakest person at a powerlifting competition is still the strongest person in most other rooms.CorinneThat’s a good point. And I think one great thing about lifting is, it’s really more about your own goals and competing with yourself. But still.VirginiaSo is it like whoever lifts the most is the winner?CorinneSo my understanding is very loose, but I know there are different weight classes. So you compete against people who are roughly around the same size?.Virginia Interesting. Okay.CorinneAnd then I think it’s a cumulative weight of how much you lift, like combined squat, deadlift, bench press. VirginiaWow, that’s so cool. Julia Turshen recently did one of these.CorinneI feel like I was slightly influenced by Julia Turshen.VirginiaDid she enable you? Julia, good job! The pictures and videos she posted of it looked super exciting. And it looked like a very professional athletic setting. I would be intimidated for sure.CorinneThe other thing that I’m sure we’ll end up talking about again, but you have to wear a singlet which is like, where am I gonna find a singlet? And knee socks.VirginiaKnee socks! Why knee socks? CorinneI’m like, oh my God, I’m never gonna find knee socks that fit me, but I’m trying to figure out if I can wear Universal Standard body shorts as a singlet, because I already have one of those. VirginiaThat feels like a great solution. CorinneIt’s singlet-esque? But I don’t know what the actual requirements are.VirginiaGirlfriend Collective also has a shorts body suit thing.CorinneI should look into that. VirginiaBut I feel like you should be able to work with what you have. Especially for your first one. Once you’re a pro and doing this all the time, you’ll get, like, something with rhinestones. CorinneOnce I’m a sponsored Olympic athlete. Yes.VirginiaI love that like we’re getting to follow along on the journey. Obviously we’re going to need another installment on this afterwards.CorinneOkay, yes. And just to be clear, the meet isn’t until July, so, so I have a lot of time to think about it.VirginiaI’m just saying though. A few months ago, you were recommending Casey Johnston and her couch-to-barbell program. And you were like, “I’m just using a broomstick.”CorinneIt’s true. VirginiaAnd now!CorinneIt’s true and now I’m lifting actual pounds.VirginiaVery, very cool. CorinneYeah, what’s new with you? VirginiaI feel like what’s new with me is that I am surviving, not thriving a little bit. So this is going to come out in mid-April. So we’ll be two weeks out from book launch. So I will either be better or I will be way worse. I mean, having had two children, it’s sort of similar to the last month of pregnancy when you’re like, it’s all you can think about, this thing is happening, but you have no control over it. I mean, at least with the book, you know, like the date it’s coming. Which with pregnancy, they have yet to really figure out, unless you’re scheduling. But I counted it up this morning, I have recorded 18 podcasts so far. Of other people’s podcasts. Like for talking about the book. 18 people’s podcasts. CorinneOh whoa. That’s wild.VirginiaAnd like, seven of them were in the last week and a half? So I feel like my voice is hanging on by a thread. And I’m just getting a little mush-brained about it. I need to step back a little.Obviously, I am super grateful. I love that people want me to talk about the book. I love that people are excited about the book. I cannot wait for it to be out. But it’s just at a point where there are a lot of details. Like, review all the press release materials, review the marketing plan…. I forgot we were recording today. And it’s not the first thing I’ve forgotten. Like, I forgot the kids had a dentist appointment. We made it, but I’m just like, my brain is holding too many pieces of information. Some things are getting dropped. I’m just coming in with a sort of scattered energy. But I’ve got the Throat Coat Tea that I’m living on right now. And we’re gonna do it! CorinneDo you have any upcoming book promo stuff that you’re really excited to do?VirginiaWell, I did an interview yesterday that I can’t talk about yet, because I don’t think it will be out by the time this launches. CorinneTop secret. VirginiaThere are two top secret ones that will be coming out in the week or two after this podcast episode. And they’re both very exciting. And I will say that I was very happy with my outfit for one. So that was good. And the other one the outfit matters less because it is not visual. I will say no more! And yeah, that part’s been fun, actually figuring out clothes for like the book tour Dacy has been helping me and maybe some time we’ll do a follow up about finding clothes for this. Because it’s a very specific level of, how dressy do you want to be versus comfortable? So maybe there will be an essay of what I wore for the book tour.CorinneI would love to read that.VirginiaOkay, so we’re going to do some questions! The first one is a hot take opportunity. This came in over Instagram multiple times. People would like to know what we saw of Jia Tolentino’s Ozempic piece in The New Yorker.CorinneOkay, well, now is my time to be embarrassed when I admit that I read it really lightly. I did a really light skim sort of read, and was like, seems fine. And then I’ve seen everyone else being like, “This article is horrible.” And I’ve been like, wow, I really need to revisit that and find out why people are so upset.VirginiaI’m glad to hear people are saying they’re upset! I felt like no one was talking about it at all for a little bit. And I was like, what is happening? I feel like the New York magazine piece came out, which I wrote about and that was not great. And then this piece comes out two weeks later, and I’m just like, why? Why did it come out? It’s the same piece really. And I want to be clear that I love Jia’s work. I loved Trick Mirror. I think she writes phenomenal stuff. The piece she did on Angela Garbes last year was just incredible. And this was… not that. It is very much centering the story on thin people who would like to be thinner if they take Ozempic. There’s one fat person interviewed for the story. And, you know, of course, every fat person is entitled to their own experience of fatness. But her quotes just reinforced so many stereotypes. She talks about wanting to lose weight because she feels like she can’t hike or run at her current size. And it’s like, come on. We can do better. CorinneIf you want to hike and run, you could work on hiking and running?VirginiaRight! There are so many fat hikers and runners on Instagram. CorinneI thought the compounding pharmacy thing was kind of interesting.VirginiaOh, like explaining how sort of like loosey goosey it is and getting the drugs? CorinneBecause I’ve seen a lot of people on TikTok being like, I’m getting this patented drug from a compounding pharmacy. And I’m like, wait, is that real? Like, what is that? So I thought that part was interesting.VirginiaIt was interesting. But when she goes through the process of getting it herself, I always just worry—this is the eating disorder handbook stuff.Corinne True true. You’re literally telling people how to do it. VirginiaAnd I get that that’s not hard to find. We all have Google. But is that something The New Yorker should be doing? Does The New Yorker need to teach us how to get our weight loss drugs? I don’t know. I feel like the general trend in the Ozempic coverage–And this is not just Jia, not just New York Magazine. But by and large, this coverage has this underlying question of: If we have now found a silver bullet that will make people thin, does that mean we can just forget about anti fat bias? And that is so dark. We cannot just say, now that we have a way to make everybody thin, it’s okay to hate fat people, because we can just make them thin.CorinneThat’s a good point.VirginiaI’m not judging anyone’s individual decisions about this. But this larger discourse is not helpful. That’s my hot, grouchy take. CorinneThat’s the hot take! I would love to know also, if any listeners have strong feelings about it? VirginiaYes. Comments are open!CorinneOkay, the next question is:Q: The one thing I can’t shake as a new mom is worrying about making my daughter fat. How do I shake that? I grew up fat and it was hard. I want better for her. But does that mean dieting?VirginiaThis is a very understandable fear. But no, it does not mean dieting. CorinneI want to validate this parent’s worries, because you're coming from a place where it sounds like you struggled a lot. And you don’t want your kids to struggle, and that totally makes sense.VirginiaI think what I’m stuck on is, “I grew up fat and it was hard.” Yes, absolutely. Not denying that. But was it hard because you were fat? Or was it hard because the world made fat not okay?And so, this is kind of the Ozempic thing, right? Is the answer to erase fatness by which we mean erase fat people? Or is the answer systemic change and unlearning this bias on a personal level? But I know, that is a terrible question. You cannot make all those systemic changes by yourself. That is not doable. So it is really, really hard.CorinneThe one thing that’s sort of not explicit in this question is whether the kid is actually fat.VirginiaShe says she’s a new mom. So I’m thinking she has a baby. So she probably doesn’t know? CorinneBecause my next thought was, you could talk to your kid about it being hard. But maybe not for a newborn.VirginiaBut maybe start now! Get the conversation going.CorinneStart thinking about it. You can talk to yourself about it. I think now might be a time to start therapy. VirginiaTherapy, always a great option.You are not going to make your daughter thin or fat. You don’t actually control her body size. The number of factors that go into determining body sizes is this sort of endless and murky list, and no one really knows what are the largest drivers. But how you feed her, and how much you make her run around are not the largest drivers of her body size. And putting all your energy there is only going to cause damage, which you yourself probably know, because when you say it was hard, I’m guessing that some kind of childhood dieting might have been a piece of that.So I feel like we need to let you off the hook of the “I’m gonna make her fat.” She may be fat. There is nothing wrong with that. It is not your fault. And what she really needs is for you to unconditionally accept her body.CorinneI also think this could be a really good time to think of some advocacy you could do, whether that’s looking into school policies about bullying or even at the legislative level, like laws about anti fat bias. Or just trying to be an advocate in your community for body liberation or fat liberation? VirginiaI love that. And I just wanna say this is hard. It is really unfair that that is asked of us. But that is where we are on this issue. And we’re only going to make progress if we all approach it from that perspective. CorinneAnd I want to reiterate: The thing about bias is, the solution is never to get rid of the people we’re biased against. Or to change them somehow.VirginiaRight. So it’s okay. Maybe your daughter is going to be fat and how are you going to support her and advocate for her and make your home a safe space for her body?CorinneAll right, I’m going to read the next one too: Q: I am trying very hard to be very neutral about food with my son who’s four years old. From the start, I have not labeled foods as good or bad. I have not restricted access to sweets or desserts. But lately, I’ve started questioning this. I’ve always felt pressure because I am not able to manage cooking meals. So from the start, my son was fed using a grazing technique where I would put together various foods and he would eat what he wanted. As he has gotten older, he is more specific in his tastes in a way that feels normal to me, pretty much macaroni and cheese or similar foods most of the time. There are other things he will eat, but I feel a lot of grief about my inability to get it together and provide regular hot balanced meals, also for myself. Recently, I’ve been trying to limit his intake of sweets just a little bit and it feels like a backside but I’ve been confused. Only two cookies and even suggesting he eats something before he gets the cookies. This week’s mailbag episode made me reorient when you talked about not doing this and reminded me why I wanted to avoid this restriction based language. And I admit the reason I started thinking about this was twofold. I filled out a research survey that made me admit a lot of things about our household eating that I feel low level guilty about and I felt the sting of perceived societal shaming.And my son started talking about treats. I was a bit miffed as categorizing something as a treat, as opposed to food which he labeled the rest as, was something I was trying to avoid. Then I realized this could have come from daycare television, the fact that we give the dog treats, and so I am overreacting. I find it’s so hard to be consistent in my parenting in many avenues and food encroaches on that too. Giving food as a reward for example, this is something I do for myself, and I like it. But perhaps it is part of the problem of saving food for a special occasion as opposed to having it because you want it.I need some perspective, please. Is it ever useful to direct a child to a more balanced diet…
Full show notes at the publisherYou’re listening to Burnt Toast!I’m Virginia Sole-Smith, and today I am chatting with the brilliant Laura Thomas, PhD.Laura is a Registered Nutritionist who specializes in responsive feeding and anti-diet, body affirming nutrition. Her work centers on helping parents and families end inter-generational dieting and body shame, and work towards a greater sense of embodiment and ease in their relationship with food. She writes the newsletter Can I Have Another Snack? and is the author of two books; Just Eat Itand How to Just Eat It.1Laura did an awesome three part series on her newsletter last summer, and as soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to have her on the podcast to discuss. We’ll be getting into:What even is an Ultra-Processed Food?What does the research tell us about how UPFs impact our health?How should we be thinking about the current UPF discourse?This episode first ran as a two-parter, so if you find today’s conversation helpful, you’ll also want to go back and listen to episode 102, where we answer your nitty gritty questions about the UPFs in your diet.PS. If you’re enjoying the podcast, make sure you’re following us (it’s free!) in your podcast player! We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Pocket Casts! And while you’re there, please leave us a rating or review. (We like 5 stars!)Episode 155 TranscriptLauraI am a Registered nutritionist. I’m based in London, I did live in the States for a while, which is why I’ve got this super messed up accent. All your listeners will be like, where is she from? I grew up in Scotland, lived in the States, and now live in London.I split my time between clinical work, which is focused on family nutrition—I do a lot of work around responsive feeding in kids who have feeding differences, working with families where they’re just stressed about mealtimes with their kids, and also helping parents sort through their own stuff with food and body image. And then I also write the newsletter Can I Have Another Snack? which takes up a lot of time, as I know you know. VirginiaYes. So I basically begged you to come on the podcast to talk about your three part series about ultra processed foods. This is one of those topics I get so many questions about. I’ve reported it out a little bit here and there. And I definitely feel, just as a person in the trenches feeding kids, that I have figured out my own values around this, which is helpful and we may get into talking about that. But I’m not a dietitian or nutritionist. I haven’t done a deep dive of the literature. So when I saw you were doing this series, I was like, thank you, Laura!So everybody, your homework is to go read all three pieces and subscribe to Can I Have Another Snack?. But just as a starting point: Laura, what is an ultra processed food? And why is it so hard for us to agree on that definition?LauraI don’t think we can talk about the definition of an ultra processed food without talking about the NOVA classification system. There are a few different classification systems that have attempted to try and nail down what exactly an ultra processed food is. But what has been most widely accepted in the literature and what we’re seeing a lot of the studies and the headlines coming out about now is something called the NOVA classification system that was developed in 2009 by this Brazilian dude called Carlos Monteiro. NOVA really annoyingly does not stand for anything, it’s not an acronym. That really fucks me up.Carlos is nutrition researcher, he and his team came up with a system whereby he defines four different levels of food processing. So I’m going to walk you through the four different groups. Group 1 is called “unprocessed foods.” This includes anything from a plant, an animal, or a fungus. So that could be fruits and vegetables. It’s eggs and meat. It can be grains, like oats or rice or wheat. It can be chilled or frozen fruits and vegetables without salt or oil added. Basically, it’s any raw ingredient that you could buy from the supermarket or that you could pull straight out of the ground or pick from a tree, that kind of thing.VirginiaSo, oats but not oatmeal or oat bars? Like, just the oats.LauraExactly that, but that’s an important clarification.Then within this unprocessed foods category, there’s this minimally processed subcategory, which are things that are pickled or fermented from those raw ingredients. So, that’s group one.VirginiaI feel like they’re already finding weird loopholes that pickled things are part of group one, but okay, keep going.LauraHonestly, it’s a minefield.Group 2 are processed culinary ingredients. So these are ingredients that are derived from group one. It can be oils, from like olives or sunflower. It can be salt, spices, herbs, lard, butter, honey, maple syrup, that kind of stuff. They’re kind of like extracts or derived from those group one, minimally processed or unprocessed foods.VirginiaGot it.LauraGroup 3, you can think of as group one plus group two, mixed together. And these are called processed foods. It can be anything from fresh bread that you buy at a bakery to cheese that has been fermented and goes through the whole conversion from milk into cheese.But also, it includes virtually anything you make yourself at home or anything that you would buy in a restaurant, right? Because it’s taking those fresh ingredients, plus those culinary ingredients like salts and fats and sugars, and transforming them into what you and I would recognize as a meal.So I think the point that I want people to understand is that the vast majority of the food that we’re eating, even if we’re cooking it by ourselves at home from ingredients that we’ve picked up at the farmers market or the periphery of the grocery store or whatever, unless we’ve gone and pulled a carrot out of the ground, it’s a processed food.VirginiaProcessed is just another way of saying cooked. Like, processed foods are meals. LauraYeah. Pretty much, unless you’re eating a raw apple.VirginiaAs a meal.LauraIt’s not even a snack. But if you’re dipping your apple in some peanut butter, that’s a processed food.VirginiaGot it. Okay.LauraSo then we get to Group 4, which is ultra processed foods. Now, they’ve tried to pin down a definition, but there are a lot of different criteria. And the bar for what constitutes an ultra processed food is actually really low. So in terms of a technical definition, an ultra processed food is a food that is derived from Group 1 foods. So for example, whey or casein protein that is taken from milk or gluten taken from whole wheat flour—these things would be considered an ultra processed food. So, an ultra processed food is something that contains ingredients derived from whole food products or contains additives that are intended to either imitate or enhance the sensory qualities of food. So, already it’s such a vague definition. VirginiaAgain… cooking.LauraVirtually anything that you would add to a food to make it taste better, those are part of the definition. Another part of the definition is the type of processing that a food has undergone. So things like hydrogenation, extrusion, molding, these are not things that we’re doing at home really, in our kitchen. So it’s essentially anything that is made in a factory, like cornflakes or Cheerios have to go through some sort of extrusion process. A granola bar has to go through like a molding process. So again, some of these common everyday foods are actually ultra processed foods.The third criteria for what constitutes an ultra processed food is that it has to be a branded food product. That means that it comes in a package. It’s convenient. There’s little or minimal cooking and it is marketed somehow at you. Whether that’s through the packaging, whether that’s through a nutrition claim like a health halo type thing. The food manufacturers are doing what they can to try and get you to eat that food.VirginiaRight. Okay.LauraSo there is this really big vague definition which means that the bar for what actually counts as an ultra processed food is really low. You could argue, for example, that a natural peanut butter, which has been pulverized within an inch of its life, you could argue that that’s an ultra processed food.VirginiaThat’s funny, one of the reader questions was, “Is the smashed natural peanut butter better for me than Jif?” And what you’re saying is that they would likely be in the same category. LauraThey would both be ultra processed foods. So it can end up lumping really disparate foods together. So, like I said, Cheerios and supermarket bread that you might buy or bagels, or whatever it might be are alongside like Haribo. I’m trying to think of an American appropriate food.VirginiaCheetos. Flaming Hot Cheetos. LauraYes, exactly.VirginiaSo that is really interesting because it does show all of the media conversations around ultra processed foods are trying to alert us to these threats, like this is this dangerous category of foods you need to be cutting out—which we can talk separately about, like, is that even a helpful strategy for nutrition? But that’s the goal is to fear-monger around all of these foods. And what you’re saying is: If you were really going to use the definition that they’ve laid out, you’d be cutting out like 75 percent of the grocery store.LauraYeah, pretty much. And I think it’s interesting that you say that it’s creating a lot of fear and stress about the food and anxiety about the food that we’re eating, which I think is true. But one thing that I keep coming back to is that NOVA in and of itself wasn’t designed as a hierarchy. But we, in our twisted diet culture brains, have weaponized it as a hierarchy. Because if you think of it from a nutrition perspective, like I said, lard is in Group 2. White rice and white flour are in group one right now. I’m not saying that they’re a bad food, but I don’t think we would also argue that they’re like a health food. But they’re in Groups 1 and 2. So we’ve kind of manipulated it into a hierarchy, but that’s not necessarily what it means.VirginiaIt’s sort of like what we’ve done with growth charts, right? Like, growth charts are just meant to track what percentage point your kid is relative to their peers, like they’re bigger than 80 percent of kids or they’re only bigger than 20 percent of kids. And we attach all this meaning to what those points mean and where’s the good part of the growth chart to be.Well, poor NOVA, I feel bad for Carlos that this work got distorted if that was not the intention.LauraI think he has a part to play in this because he really has pushed this agenda in Brazil. Now the NOVA classification is being used alongside or is sort of amalgamated into the dietary guidelines of Brazil, which I don’t I don’t think is a helpful move.VirginiaIt’s clear from the way you’ve explained the categories and which foods end up in which groups, but it feels important to say very clearly that ‘processed’ is not synonymous with ‘has no nutrition,’ and that actually processing foods is a good thing to do in order to eat, right? LauraAll forms of cooking are process. So unless you want to go down some raw vegan path, you can’t really avoid processing your food to some extent. Now, advocates of NOVA I think would say that’s a bit of a red herring because what we’re actually talking about is this additional level of processing, this ultra processing phenomenon.But even within that category, I think there are merits to processing, even ultra processing, our foods. One of the things that happens when we process food is we extend the shelf life of it. And that means that we are wasting less food overall which I think we would all agree is probably a helpful thing.Industrial food processing also reduces foodborne pathogens. It reduces microbes that would spoil food and make it turn rancid faster.It also significantly cuts down on the time and labor that it requires to cook a meal. And for me, as a parent, and I know for you as well, that’s huge. VirginiaIt’s really everything, honestly, for me personally. Limiting the amount of time I spend cooking dinner is the thing that enables me to eat dinner with my family at night.LauraBut it’s not just super privileged white women that have a lot of nutrition knowledge who benefit from ultra processed foods. I’m also thinking about kids with feeding disorders that would struggle to get all the nutrition that they need without processed foods. I’m thinking about elderly or disabled people who can maintain a level of independence because they can quickly cook some pasta and throw an ultra processed jar of pasta sauce on that and have a nourishing meal. I’m thinking about pregnant people who otherwise might not be able to stomach eating because of morning sickness and nausea—which we know lasts forever, not just the morning.There are so many groups of people that benefit from ultra processed foods and they just seem to be missing entirely from the conversation around these foods.VirginiaSo often there’s this message, “We have to just get poor people cooking more, get them cooking more.” But if you live in a shelter, you don’t have a kitchen. If you are crashing on a couch with family members, in a house with lots of different people and it’s not easy for you to get time in the kitchen. There are so many different scenarios where cooking is not a practical solution and having greater shelf stability is very important.LauraIt also says a lot about where we place our values, right? And who is making decisions about where we put our values, because it’s not everyone’s value system to spend more time cooking from scratch, right? And buying fresh ingredients and spending more time in the kitchen.There’s a line that Carlos Monteiro wrote in a scientific paper and I legitimately cannot understand how this passed peer review because it’s so much about judgment rather than objective scientific argument, where he basically is saying that ultra processed foods prevent families from eating together. And he talks about ultra processed foods as though they’re the undoing of family meals.VirginiaOh, Carlos. No, no, no, no, no.LauraAnd aside from the fact that for me, and I think for you, and probably a lot of people listening, ultra processed foods save family dinners.VirginiaLiterally how I’m achieving it. Literally how I’m getting it done. LauraBut again, it’s like who’s determining how we should be eating and you know what our values are around food and eating? SubscribeVirginiaYou have a great line in part two of the series:My argument is not that we don’t need to change the food system. My argument is that the headlines have leapfrogged science, allowing people in places of power and privilege to create fear and shame about the food we eat. This keeps us focused on food as the issue, rather than the social, political, and structural forces that shape our lives and our experiences of wellbeing.It just feels like exactly what we’re getting at here. We are letting this one set of values and this real laser focus on food as a moral concept get in the way of actually thinking about people’s lives.LauraAgain, the conversation is just reducing our health and wellbeing down to how processed or otherwise our food is. To me it feels symptomatic of these much deeper sociocultural political problems that we’re facing and just a red herring for deeper structural issues that that need addressing.This is not going to sound like a big number in American terms, but in the UK, in England alone, there’s something like 4 million food insecure children who just simply do not have enough food to eat in a cost of living crisis. I think public health nutrition should be focusing on universal free school meals for those kids and making sure that they have provisions in breakfast clubs and after school clubs, rather than quibbling over whether Weetabix or a can of baked beans is an ultra processed food.VirginiaAnother question that I get of…
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