You would not believe the stuff people were encouraged to eat during the flu pandemic of nineteen eighteen. For example, sugar lumps soaked in kerosene. People thought that helped treat the Spanish flu and to prevent it. Americans were told to eat an ungodly amount of onions in nineteen eighteen in home. Refrigerators hadn't been invented yet, so restaurants stayed open throughout the pandemic. The flu did change them, though.
Before they had sawdust floors and waiters wore black. After the flu, marble countertops and white tiled walls and floors became the norm. Waiters started wearing white. These changes were about making patrons feel like they were eating somewhere sanitary. You can still see that in restaurants and coffee shops today. This is just one tiny example of how history doesn't stay in the past. It leaves a trace. That's something I've been thinking a lot about this year since COVID
has kept us all at home. I'm Virgie Tovar, fat positive, feminist, patriarchy smasher, corn dog enthusiast, and the host of Rebel Eaters Club. When this pandemic started, I had to face some of my own history with food. My past with disordered eating came up in ways that we're startling and honestly scary. It felt like an old, rusty machine, a machine I hadn't seen since my twenties. Grinding back to life. I started projecting my COVID anxieties onto food. I was
convinced that anything I ate could contaminate me. It made food, which is usually such a source of joy, feel like a chore, a risk, a monster. The fear of contamination can lean to an obsession with only wanting so called clean food. That's called orthorexia, and about ten years ago it consumed me. My recovery began when I learned about fat liberation and made a promise to myself that I would never try to lose weight again. So I thought
that chapter of my life was over. I thought I was done with my past, but it wasn't done with me. I know lots of people at the start of COVID were experiencing relapses or other scary changes. Maybe you're one of them. I want to tell you you are absolutely not alone. Friend. The silver lining of my story is that during the last decade, I have learned a bunch of tools for how not to be scared of food.
So this spring I put them to work. I sat at my kitchen table and coached myself through every bite, repeating the same script, food is good, I will be okay. This meal will help my brain and body get through this stressful experience. As a way to try and make food feel like a friend again, I did what I do whenever I'm scared. I researched the shit out of it. I spent literal hours reading up on food customs, traditions, production recipes from as far back as the sixteen hundreds.
Here's what I learned. What we eat, how we eat, Why we eat is a rich archive full of both our individual memories and the ghosts we've inherited America's past. This season, I'll continue talking with amazing, shiny humans about their relationships to food. If anything is going to survive the end of the world, it's going to be stand and walk you through some important chapters in our culture's social history. And what does it mean for us to not know shame and not no guilt, but only to
no pleasure. What are we going to do here together? Well? I think on the surface, we're going to make some instant ramen, but I think the reality of what we're going to do is that our souls are going to touch. Welcome to Season two of A Rebel Eaters Club