Eating 101 with Dr. Jennifer Brady

time of the day. Best because Doug gossip and snacks, worst because I always still felt hungry when it was over. I usually had homemade lunches, brown paper bags filled with foil wrapped chicken brass sandwiches. But oh man, sometimes I would get to take part in the school's pizza Tuesdays. The plastic wrap that enveloped each rectangular foil encased slice steamed with condensation, like the backseat of a high schooler's car,

but instead of forbidden makeouts inside, there was something better. Cheese. Oh man, I love that cheese, and the little globs of translucent orange fat that formed heavenly little pools and the three Measley Pepperoni lily pads that floated on top of it. My cheese lust was only overshadowed by my shame. I remember looking down at my empty rectangular foil tray, still hungry just like I was on most days at the end of lunchtime, and thinking, why isn't this enough food?

What is wrong with me? Even back then, I knew I was supposed to want less food than I did. I knew I was supposed to feel full sooner. I looked to some of my classmates who would eat a few bites and then throw out the rest. What was their secret? As an adult who is now raising fur babies too, very hungry Netherland dwarf rabbits named Lulu and John Candy, I asked on behalf of my little kids self. Why was there never enough food? Why wasn't I ever

encouraged to eat until I was full? Why was I so ashamed of something as natural and innocent as my appetite? I want to introduce you to someone who has some pretty amazing thoughts on these types of questions, my friend, doctor Jennifer Brady. I wish you were here to eat this jam with me. I know it's so good. I'm going to send you some of this jam I make it. Oh my gosh, Holy mulligers, I can't wait. Hold on, let me finished chewing. I am not offended by talking

with food in your mouth. Jennifer is a freaking dietitian with a PhD, an Assistant Professor of Applied Human Nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, and she's a mom of two kids. She studies the history of home economics and the roles of health professionals in social justice. Jen's educational background kind of makes her the ultimate expert on nutrition. She knows what she's talking about. But what truly amazes me about Jen is that she has a

very simple prescription for our cultures issues with food. What healthy eating looks like is eating a variety of foods and you know, filling up your tummy. That's that's it. I mean, filling up your tummy. Yeah. I think that is how we should all live with respect of food. You know, when we when we're thinking about what healthy eating is. And I would also say that that's an evidence based way of understanding what healthy food is. I mean, I don't think we really need anything more complex than

that clapping. Beyond laying down culture smashing wisdom, I learned the jet loves croissants, and because she's a home eck queen, she put together a whole spread of croissant accompaniments for our call. Let me first preface this by saying that I love eating with my fingers. I love eating with my hands, so I've got a bunch of picky hand things. I have carrots. I have some pickles that I've made. Um, I make a lot of pickles and jams, so I

have some eggplant pickles. I have some gherkins. I love gherkins, and I have some jam that I save only for croissants, which is like a pear and coco nib jam. Gosh, the croissant is central though pear and coco nib jam. That sounds really magical when you so, when you told me that you'd chosen the croissant, I immediately began searching, as you know, all over San Francisco for the croissant

of my dreams. And when I shared this with you, you shared with me your croissant philosophy, which I love, which is there's only good and better, And I felt that through my whole entire body when I read your email that said that, and I knew you weren't just

talking about croissants. I mean, I just sort of felt like so anyway, um, yesterday I went out and I was like, Okay, I'm gonna get croissants in preparation for the interview, and I entered a little bit of I decided to call it crnception, which is croissant plus inception.

It was a little bit of a croissant time looping situation where I would buy a croissant and then I would eat the croissant because it was completely irresistibly delicious looking, right, and then I would have to go buy another one and be like this one is really the one for tomorrow, and then I would eat that one. So it was kind of a fun I was like, oh my god, this could go on forever, Like I could just be in this loop forever, and like what a fantastic loop

it would be in. Should we partake? Yeah? Absolutely, Okay, let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, I'm gonn I'm gonna take my first night. I'm gonna try and make it a loud crunch o. Right, so good, I'm feeling that it sounds so good. Yeah, I'm like enjoying my fingers getting shiny butter. It's like one of my favorite feelings. You can lick that butter off your fingers now, Okay, So tell me about the significance of the croissants. Yeah, well, um, I mean, in some levels, it's just delicious, and so

it's significant just for that reason. I mean, I think it's a food that is just about pleasure for me, which is a huge part of eating that I try to be really conscious about. We don't take time to savor and we're so focused on health and nutrition and eating for a purpose that isn't about just loving it and and tasting it and the textures and the sensuality of eating and croissants. To me, like, it's the pleasure part.

It's the using your body or being in your body in a way that allows you to experience all the wonderful, joyous things that come with having a body. I mean, whether that be eating, whether that be going for a run, whether that be you know, feeling wind in your hair, whether that be having sex, making love. That's all wrapped up and having a body, and that's the beautiful thing of having a body, and diet culture, I think really fucks that up for us and it really teaches us

to hate our bodies. Does the diet culture ever get tired of ruining people's lives? Answer? No. Jennifer has done lots of or to the grandmothers of her profession, from early dieticians to the women who founded Hume Economics. Her work takes us from the science of dietetics to the movement for food justice today, and her journey began when

she was just a kid. I was a fat kid growing up, and that was, you know, like it is for many kids, a source of bullying, not just from peers, but from my parents as well, from teachers, really from everyone around me, even people that I trusted and you know, were meant to take care of me and love me. What really was a turning point for me in getting more deeply invested in dieting and disordered eating. I broke

up with a someone I had been with. It was a pretty significant relationship, broke up with them and just sort of fell into something that was already deep like deeply ingrained in my relationship with food because of my childhood and and you know, I don't know if I've completely pulled that apart yet I feel like it's something that I'm I continue to learn about how that happened, and why that happened, and how I feel about it now.

So I was struggling with an eating disorder, although I wouldn't have been able to articulate that at the time because I was so it was like there was two parts of me. One that did was sort of engaged in disordered eating, believe me up in particular, I was binging and purging, and then another part of me that almost didn't even know that other side. It was like there, I was so split from my body. But I will say what I do know for sure is that going

into dietetics after that experience only made it worse. Dietetics is a field that studies the effects of food on health. We've heard the terms dietitian and nutritionists, but until recently, I didn't know that there's a pretty big difference. It takes a lot to be able to use the term dietitian, years of education and then a formal internship. When you become a dietitian, you're a credential healthcare provider. On the other hand, there are no credentials required to become a nutritionist.

Jen went down the dietetics path. She was first drawn to it because she was interested in both science and in food, but she found that the process of becoming a dietitian impacted her relationship with her body. Becoming a dietitian made me more heavily invested in controlling my body. It's not just the learning. It's not just the what we learn in dietetics about you know, quote unquote obesity and weight management and all and all of that that

we imagine dietitians roles to be. But it was just even the culture of the profession is so very toxic and particularly toxic in terms of relationships with food and bodies and eating. And you know, it's not random that dietitians, based on the research, dietitians struggle with eating disorders. There's some research showing that there's a particularly high prevalence of eating disorders among dietitians, and that that's not random, right. I think a lot of people think of dietitians a

sort of experts in eating, experts of food. And you're saying that there's this really toxic culture. I would love to hear more about you know what that was like. Well, I mean, first of all, in dietetics, the the sort of view of food is a very you know, as something that you can understand through the nutrient components, through um the calories program, through the you know, the vitamins and minerals that are contained in that food. And you know,

I think that that stuff is important. However, you there's a there's an aspect of becoming a dietitian or becoming a professional that is an embodied experience and is a is one of shifting your personal identity. And so when you're learning about a you know, body weight and quote unquote obesity in that way, it you take that on and internalize it. It's not just about becoming a dietitian, earning a credential and sort of carving out a career.

But looking like a dietitian is about is not about science sub course, looking like a dietitian is about whiteness. It's about femininity. It's about yeah, white supremacy, it's about capitalism, it's about all of these other things that have come to mark the culture of the profession. You know, the drill by now Rebel Eaters, let's break this diet culture

poop garbage down. As we've learned from other Rebel Eaters Club guests, the world of medicine and healthcare, just like every other part of our society, is steeped in fatphobia that includes dietetics and nutrition. The people who enter those fields end up facing a lot of pressure to stick

to the status quo. If they have their own issues with restriction or disordered EA, they will likely not be encouraged to interrogate them because the thin ideal is still the standard of ultimate well being in pretty much every health profession. Sometimes going into these fields can even create issues with food. There are rad examples of people like Jennifer who are pushing back, but they face a lot of resistance. We even heard doctor Janet Toma Yama talk

about this in the second episode. This is all part of a cycle that keeps things the way they are. Just for the record, you don't need to be thin in order to be a dietician. We can interrupt this poop garbage cocktail by naming it when we see it, by hiring fat nutritionists and advocating for weight neutral practices in educational environments. There's another dimension of dietetics and nutrition that is played an important role in its history, and

that's gender. Over ninety percent of dietitians are women. This is in part because we have culturally associated food with care work and care work with women for a really long time. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds, there was one particular group of smart women who thought if they could legitimize care work, women might be able to finally get more power. These women were the mothers of dietetics

and the founders of home economics. You know, most people when you say home economics, they think of their Grade seven experience of home economics, you know, sewing pencil cases and making muffins. And we could chuckle and say, oh, yeah, that's so silly, you know, baking muffins and sewing pencil cases,

But those are the survival skills of life. You know, knowing how to so on a button or mend a shirt and to provide food for yourself and others that you love and take care of is really important and really valuable work, but it's often not valued by society. And so home economics, in large part, was about politicizing and valuing domestic labor. As the labor that literally runs society. A lot of the women that were advancing these ideas

at the time were largely disenfranchised. They had no access to higher education for the most part, and no access to financial independence. You know, women involved in home economics, we're fighting for access to some of those things, and for basic education for women who were tasked with running households with some basic knowledge to be able to do

their jobs, and for those jobs to be valued. Imagine the power of saying, yes, what I do is work and should be legitimized in a culture that, for the most part, didn't believe that women were even worth educating. In the eighteen hundreds, home economics wasn't a class you took in seventh grade. It was a movement. Here are some of the things women were in charge of back then.

Dealing with sewage there was no city government managing sewage back then, figuring out what to do with garbage, no garbage trucks, and taking care of people who were sick because medicine still had a long way to go, quote unquote, women's work included managing things that were matters of public health before that was really a thing. In eighteen forty one, an early advocate of home economics, Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beechristowe, published a treatise on Domestic Economy for the

use of Young Ladies at Home and at school. It was about the importance of women's roles in society, a spicy subject at the time. In those days, science and reason were seen as the realm of men. A woman's place was the emotional realm and taking care of the home. But Beecher's book turned that on its head. It showed how young women could bring a scientific approach to their duties in the home. Now, Catherine Beecher wasn't exactly arguing

for equality. She agreed that women belonged in the home, but she was saying that women should be educated in the sciences that applied to their work in the home. It opened the door for women to pursue higher education, be taken seriously, and get paid. Ellen Swallow Richards is considered the founder of the home economics movement, and she took it a step farther. She believed that home economics

had the power to liberate women. If science could help make women's work more efficient, they could have more time to pursue other things like dare I say, smashing the patriarchy? Pretty fucking cool. Actually, one of the things that people don't know about home economics was it also wasn't just

about cooking and sewing. Home economics had a really well developed theoretical but also practical knowledge base around a variety of different things finance like personal finance, you know, how to how to budget, and it was also about design and architecture. They were thinking about reproductive rights. They were doing advocate to see around reproductive rights and women's rights throughout the sort of you know what we understand is being the second wave of feminism. So anyway, I love

this stuff because it's so to me. It's just like all these really important threads we've together. In the context of the time, home economics was radical, but looking back at it from where we sit today, the movement had some of the very same challenges we still see in mainstream feminism. First, there were many different factions that wanted

different things. Second, the movement was made up of white middle class women, and that meant that the progress they created ended up only being available to other white middle class women. So yeah, the push for home economics was flawed, but this movement is also part of the reason I got to grow up in a culture where women have careers and get to go to college. After the break, we're going to take a look at how my college years landed me right in the middle of a food fight.

We are back. Like I said in the last episode, I lived in Berkeley after I moved away from home. I was learning how to fit into a new community, one that was much wealthier and whiter than the one I grew up in. I noticed that good food was a core way of relating. Good food meant something very specific, not just flavorful or worthy of seconds, but also local, quote unquote clean, and definitely not from a fast food restaurant. I was proud to know the names of famous foodies

like Michael Pollen and Alice Waters. It made me feel like I belonged, and honestly, like I'd earned access to an exclusive club full of people who I suspected were better than me. I remember going to lectures where sustainable food advocates would point to fat people as the ultimate evidence of global food system failure. I was deep in diet culture, and I didn't think twice about what these smart reputable, well dressed. Usually men were saying about people

like me. They didn't relate to food the way my family had raised me to. This fight over the future of food wasn't just about what you ate. It was about who you were good or bad, clean or dirty, healthy or ill, thin or fat. Sure, foodie culture celebrates eating, but there are still bs rules about who gets to enjoy food and how. I think the pleasure of food

also needs to be understood as a as political. If at one point it was about eating right, which meant, you know, controlling your weight and eating for health, we we just shift the goalposts, so now it's about pleasure and affording certain things and um putting on airs and the pretense of eating, which is, you know, one of the reasons why I like eating with my fingers because I think it for me. I feel like it rejects and maybe I'm overselling it, but I don't. I don't

feel like a ready for me. It's also a political act in that you know, you can uh, it's it's rejects that pretense of eating with this sort of you know, middle class ideals I guess of uh using the certain fork and using the certain knife sucking on your fingers, sucking sauce off your fingers, to me is both pleasure and politics, right, Like, I mean, I remember moving to San Francisco and learning that people eat pizza with a knife and akh and just kind of I was just like,

I don't, I can't. I mean for me eating with my fingers, sort of saying like I want to get my hands sturdy. I do not want to be a person who is completely just like separated from the butter and the grease on the oil and the tomato sauce or whatever it is, Like how did it end up on my elbow? There's something like so beautiful about that, Yeah, exactly.

And I think eating pizza with a knife and fork is the epitome of that sort of middle class disconnection with our food and with our bodies as well, and then the application of those rules of who's in, who's out, who knows what they're supposed to be doing with food, And that's like this marker of class and status. I have to say that if you eat pizza with a knife and fork, we do not hate you, I promise.

I name checked this practice though, because the first time I saw it, I immediately felt this downpour of shame. Oh God, I've been eating pizza like a caveman my whole life. And honestly, there are many food practices and behaviors that are sort of meant to elicit that response. They draw a line between the distinguished and everyone else. Like think of how many spoons and forks there are at the table setting of a fancy restaurant. Insider knowledge

is required to navigate the utensil situation. I remember being at a restaurant a few years ago and not remembering how to pronounce the French word for fries, frights or frets. My palms were drenched. And if you didn't grow up going to restaurants with a wine list, like you have no idea why a waiter might bring you in tiny glass, pour wine into it, and then just stand there while you drink it like a perv. Jennifer has all sorts of ideas about what fat, positive, equal opportunity and more

fun food culture would look like. I mean, I think it's a world where, not to simplify it, but I think it's a world where we don't eat pizza with a knife and a mark, where we eat with our fingers, engaging with food and touching our food and feeling our bodies as part of that. But it's a way that joy and pleasure can be inclusive and can be something that you don't need to have a lot of money

to do. There's no rules that we can expand our thinking about what pleasure but also meaning, Like for me, what is healthy about food? When I think about what healthy means, it's what brings joy and pleasure and meaning to someone's life. And so I think, you know, in thinking about a world that has food justice, it's similar. It's about a world where the production of food is

meaningful for people and isn't oppressive. You know, we don't have migrant workers who are taken advantage of to produce the cheap food that North Americans have come to demand. But that also we can all take joy and pleasure in food in whatever ways that means to people. And I think on one side that's a really vague and open description or almost a non answer, but I think that's where we need to get, the really open, fluid

way of being with food. Does that make sense? I love that, Yes, absolutely, Like what we need is fewer singular answers. Yes, exactly. A flexity, nuance, intuition. Okay, so I kind of want to ask how your I mean, I see you as a fat positive feminist, you know, in this space doing incredible work. I'm curious about what this looks like as a mom, Like, how does this? I mean? Oh, my god, Like the Parenting Food Conversation is its own ten hour baby series narrated by David Attenborough.

But but like, you know, what does it look like for you as a mom? Oh, it's so fraught. It's my daughter's nine and I have a son who's six. When my daughter, when we lived back in Ontario, I I would give my daughter like I do still a variety of different foods in her lunch, you know, everything from apples to chips, to a sandwich to yogurt to you know, cookies or cake or whatever, and trusting her to make decisions around what she puts in her body

at recess or lunch or whatever and when she's hungry. Well, the school was not having that. So the school on a number of occasions told her that she couldn't eat you know, the treat that I'd given her, or she had to save it until the end of the day. Wow.

And then the lunch monitors were taking food out of kids lunch bags, like the so called unhealthy food, and so I talked to the principle and the vice principles about why that is totally unacceptable for them to be taking food away from kids, but also to be teaching kids that, you know, they can't trust their bodies to know when they're hungry or what they're hungry for. You know, so once in a while I can pull out the

dietitian card. And so that is an instance where I did pull a bit of rank with expertise and say, listen, you know, I've got a PhD in this. You you know, don't you dare take food out of my kid's lunch bag. Again. I think I'm particularly attuned to this with my daughter, partly because of the ways that diet culture I think is particularly cruel to women's bodies. But I think also because I do see so much of myself in my

daughter as well. You know, she's a big kid as I was, and it just brings back for me the bullying that I experienced as a kid, and you know, it breaks my heart to know that I'm sure she's also experiencing that. And one of the ways that that came out is on her sixth birthday, she asked me if she was thin, and I didn't know how to respond to that. You know, she's not thin, but there's bullying happening in her environment around weight, there's fat phobia

in her environment. How do I respond with, No, you're not thin, and that is perfectly normal, and that is that your body is perfect, just the way it is. And sometimes I don't know if I if I get it right, but you know who knows. There's all this mother guilt too, you know that adds to it. So, yeah, it's just fraught. It's just a constant battle. Oh, I mean, yes, I can imagine. I mean, it's it's interesting for me as someone who is not sure if she wants to

be a mother. Like one of the questions that comes up is like, what does it mean to bring a little fat, brown baby into this world? Just knowing that they'll I mean, the likelihood that they'll be traumatized, the likelihood that I won't know how to navigate these things. It's just like, I mean, it's just so much and I think like that that absolutely that preemptive, like even as sort of just thinking about it. I have preemptive

mother guild. Um. But I mean I think like there's I think there's something really beautiful in what you're talking about, which is like this. I mean, there's so much going on. It's like, you know, you're doing the work of justice. You're going in there and you're being a dissenting voice, and that's so powerful in the school. But I think from an individual perspective, it's like that beautiful capacity to

reparent yourself um on some level. And I think that like for for um, for parents who are fat positive, who are trying to teach their children that all food is good food, that they can trust their bodies right, Like I think I think that that work is about repair, you know, for ourselves as well. And I'm sor I'm sort of curious. Do you have like some simple frameworks or um or rules or sort of policies or mottos

that you have in your household around food? H Well, I mean you kind of said it all food is healthy food, like all food is good food. Um. You know one of the things that I you know, often say in response when they come home with the oh no, that's not healthy because they learned that at school, I try to impress upon them that what healthy eating looks like is eating a variety of foods and you know, filling up your tummy. That's that's it, I mean, filling

up your tummy. Yeah, yeah, I think that is how we should all live with respect of food, you know, when we when we're thinking about what healthy eating is. And I would also say that that's an evidence based way of understanding what healthy food is. And I don't

think we really need anything more complex than that. However, I would say that, like going back to something I said earlier, I do think that nutrition science and more, you know, the sort of complex city of what healthy eating that nutrition science gives us is important in some instances. You know, for example, for a Celiac who can't eat gluten,

nutrition science has been immensely important. But for most of us, what healthy look eating looks like is just that eat a variety of foods and you know, to your hunger cues essentially. Yeah, I mean I think, like for me, it's like, you know, how do we up the pleasure on eating and then how do we lower the steaks for everyone on eating as well? Yeah, my last question is what's your recipe for the change we need to see. Alternatively, in the change we need to see, soup, what ingredient

are you bringing? Oh that is a good colostion, My goodness. Okay, so the change that we need to see, Okay. The ingredient that I bring, I think is what I value about myself actually and about the opportunities and experiences I've had. Is that respect for what science can do for us, but also that valuing of science only being important insofar is it allows us to advance justice or advance love and advance dignity. You know. Uh wow, I just love that.

Oh my god, science in service of love, dignity and justice absolutely right, Like, oh my god, oh my god, that was so amazing. Um, fill your tummy. And also science and service of justice, love, these are the takeaways. Oh my god, Jennifer, thank you so much for being on rebel Pleasure. I love this. I want to do this more often. Yes, yes, thank you for enjoying delicious croissants and you're amazing. We've talked a lot about science

and medicine this season. Talking with jen I realize that for most of my life I haven't felt there was any option besides do whatever my doctor, and the culture says or rejected all outright. That's the thing about being fat, or a woman, or any marginalized person. You've learned again and again that the people you're supposed to trust don't know how to give you what you need. And it's so hard to find a third path, an accessible path forward that gives you the facts you need without the

ideological trash you don't. I crave that third path, full of dignity and autonomy, the idea that the rules of Patricia could be simple, the idea that science shouldn't exist if it's not in service to love and justice. That is the medicine we need. I want to go back to that lunchroom story I told you, and I want to rewrite it together. In this version, I'm still dying for the bell to ring. Since we're dreaming big here, New Kids on the Blocks Pruner Joey McIntyre is my boyfriend.

Joey and I run hand in hand the lunchroom. It's Pizza Tuesday, and I get in line for my steamy slice. The lunch lady, Miss Vanessa asks how hungry are you today? And I yell with complete joy, very hungry, Miss Vanessa she laughs, pats her tummy, which is as round as mine, and says eat as much as you want. Rebel Eaters Club is produced by Transmitter Media. Our lead producer is

Jordan Bailey, Lacy Roberts is our managing producer. Sarah nix edits the show, and our executive producer is Greta Khane and I'm your host. Virgie Tovar Ben Shano is our mix engineer. Special kudos to James T. Green, Jessica Glazer and Mitchell Johnson for the production assist and Taka Yauzawa, who wrote some of the music we use in the show. If you love Rebel Eaters Club, tell your friends and share the love by writing a review on your favorite podcast app. See you next week.