I don’t think about food often. Apart from when I’m eating sweets, and remember an article I read about artificial sweeteners being possibly carcinogenic to humans; or when I’m in the supermarket buying anything to satiate my hunger, and remember all the sweeteners and gums that are put in soups and plant-based milks, and the ways they will spike my blood sugar; or when I’m eating packet ramen, and remember a TikTok where someone classified them as her “reproductive harm noodles”. I don’t think about food at all, really, apart from when I’m at home with my mum, who is in the midst of menopause and believes that her body is failing her. Health anxieties have calcified in her body as she reads the labels of everything before consuming it. I watch her grow more and more defeated as she realises she cannot afford the “healthier” options she thinks will improve and prolong her life.

In actuality, I think about food all the time. But I try my best not to. “It’s such a shame that we are made to feel so exhausted by food,” Amber Husain, writer of Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live, tells me. “Because it’s great. It is one of life’s great pleasures”. Husain knows all too well the feeling of exhaustion and deep disinterest in food. A few years ago, she experienced an eating disorder – anorexia to be specific – but found that her disinterest in food had little to do with body-image issues, as is widely thought when a woman suffers from disordered eating. “I was disgusted by the state of the world,” Husain tells Dazed. “And I think that’s something that gets ignored when we talk about women as only interested in their appearance and their bodies. They are obviously interested in and care ideologically and spiritually about what happens in the world.”

In Tell Me How You Eat, Husain attempts to challenge our understanding of eating disorders by highlighting just how difficult eating is made for so many of us, and how we all deserve to exist in a world where it is the easiest and most pleasurable thing to do. Below, we spoke to Husain about her book, the Trump administration’s obsession with whole milk and how we should all fight to ensure that food is not a privilege but a right.

A lot of what I’ve read about eating disorders has to do with beauty standards. But you argue that it can be a result of more than that; that the violence of the world can make us ill and uninspired to eat. Why do you think it’s important to push our understanding of eating disorders beyond the body and aesthetics?

Amber Husain: This was my understanding of eating disorders, too, until I got one myself. That’s not to say it isn’t often related to beauty standards. But because it is so much of the dominant cultural narrative, specifically when women struggle with eating, we accept that this is the only possible explanation. In some ways, it is an achievement of feminism that people think about the relationship between patriarchal beauty standards and the limitations that are imposed on basic things like survival and pleasure that we can get through food. But in another way, it’s kind of a failure of feminism that we refuse to imagine that women’s psyches, when it comes to these kinds of illness, could be driven by something other than beauty.

This narrative is so strong that when I found myself really struggling to eat, I felt a weird sense of shame because I was like, ‘Oh, I must care about this [beauty] more than I think.’ By the time I noticed that there was a problem, it became clear to me that I wasn’t thinking about beauty, because what I was going through was very unbeautiful. I didn’t care about what I was wearing; I had thin, horrible hair. And so, I knew on some level that if I wanted to understand what was going on, I needed to pursue other possibilities. I was disgusted by the state of the world, and I think that’s something that gets ignored when we talk about women as only interested in their appearance and their bodies. They are obviously interested in and care ideologically and spiritually about what happens in the world.

It’s not enough that people are fed; it matters how they’re fed. If you have been crushed by the world and insulted with bad food that you perceive as harmful to you, it makes sense that you would lose the will to nourish yourself – Amber Husain

You write about the conditions of society and the ways they can inspire one to eat or not. It made me think about Liam, the five-year-old boy who ICE kidnapped in Minnesota. I read an article last week that said he was sick because the food they give him is of poor quality. ‘He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever, and he no longer wants to eat.’

Amber Husain: In the book, I talk a lot not just about the ways we as individuals choose to eat, but also about the ways we’re made to eat and the kinds of food cultures and institutions we exist within, such as the family, schools and prisons. They have a huge impact on how we understand ourselves… It’s not enough that people are fed; it matters how they’re fed. If you have been crushed by the world and insulted with bad food that you perceive as harmful to you, it makes sense that you would lose the will to keep trying to nourish yourself.

It’s also very striking that while ICE are murdering people in communities in Minneapolis, ordinary people are feeding each other because people are scared to leave the house. These people are essentially being starved. What effect does that have on your capacity to hope? Your capacity to build a future for you and the people around you? But more optimistically, what does it do to demonstrate to your community that you care about each other and are prepared to organise to make sure that people are fed through mutual aid and food banks?

We’re all like ‘eating is a privilege’ and not like ‘wait, eating should not be a privilege, and we should do something about it.’ We shouldn’t just feel good about having won this game of privilege – Amber Husain

While you were in group therapy for your eating disorder, therapists would say to you and the group that if you just ate the right foods, you would ‘transform into the right kind of beings’. Do you think this is what the Trump administration is also trying to push with its new whole-milk agenda?

Amber Husain: This narrative that if you eat the right kinds of foods, you’ll become the right person taps into what theorist Lauren Berlant famously called ‘cruel optimism’. The government will make life really hard and unequal, but then will tell people that if they make good choices, everything will be fine. Food is a really useful lever for that. It’s a really easy idea to sell: that there are foods that will make you live forever, give you a good life, increase your status, and get you more opportunities because you are seen to eat in this way.

This is part of what I diagnose in the book – the ways we are made to feel exhausted by thinking about food. We are made to feel anxious about making the right food choices, and we are responsible for making them as individuals, which is a complete fantasy because so much of which food is available to us is determined by social factors over which we have only a complicated kind of control. Their message [Trump administration] is very seductive, though. Sometimes, as I write in the book, it can feel easier to want what is wanted for you when it comes to food.

One of my favourite parts of the book is when you write about the phrase ‘eating is a privilege’. People (myself included) will often say it to remind themselves to be grateful for the food they have, but the thought never goes beyond that. 

Amber Husain: Listen, there’s no harm in being grateful for things. But it is kind of insane to me that it mostly stops there. We’re all like ‘eating is a privilege’ and not like ‘Wait, eating should not be a privilege, and we should do something about it.’ We shouldn’t just feel good about having won this game of privilege. Ultimately, it matters much less what an individual eats, whoever they are, and more that everyone has the opportunity to eat as much as they want and need. That’s something that gets missed from the conversation when we think too much about our personal responsibility to eat in a way that is conscious and grateful for the privilege of eating.

You have so many wonderful and deeply moving historical anecdotes about food in this book. From the Black Panthers’ breakfast programme to feminist restaurants from the 1970s – what story inspires you the most optimistic about creating a world where food is not a privilege and where eating is easy for everyone?

I really love this story that’s in Audre Lorde’s biography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, where she talks about these parties in the 50s. One is a house party thrown by white women, with a genteel atmosphere and not enough food. The other party is this one thrown by black women, and there’s loads of booze and yummy food, and she describes how this food ramifies in the bodies of the people in the room, how it affects the way they move, interact with one another, and how it makes something happen. It’s not necessarily the most political moment in Zami or in my book, but it demonstrates really beautifully and powerfully how eating in a certain way and spirit can make something happen.

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live is out now.