This is why your fat

Through April I've encountered this blog, again. *Note, it's recently been taken down by it's owners, no reason given. And its back. [29/07/13]

I first encountered it through one of it's featured dishes, I can't remember what it was, but it featured bacon heavily.

Here's another one in a similar vein, although the title is not quite so benign. I have no hesitation in saying that this particular kind of thing does appeal to me at all at best it amuses at worst disgusts, mostly it just bemuses because I cannot understand why you'd either want to create or even eat these 'dishes'.

I put that in quotes because they don't seem to be dishes per se more more creations that bow to an underlying ideology of food. In most of those senses they remind me of the more extremist healthist eating. They strike me as unbalanced by a dominant conceit and obsessive to the point where it becomes unpleasant, for the sake of that idea.

A lot of the reaction to this around the fat/blogsphere has been negative, but I can't help feeling that the "fat" in the title is not a direct accusatory reference to fat people, per se, but to what some people call "fat days". Yes I know that is somewhat fatphobic, however the blog isn't saying look at what fatties eat. It seems more a kind of Jackass for food.

It's about letting your wildest food fantasies have full reign, yes they are limited and rather pathetic, but that's what I get from it. It feels like it's about what people might be denying or curtailing or feel bad about eating (in lesser extremes). It's about your imagination's desire to bust through limitations, even to the extent of gross out.

The title plays on the usual moralistic admonishment of healthist eating shoulds, you should not be eating even a little of these things, so let's go for it. But I'm not sure it wholly subscribes to it. There's a real sense of unarticulated ambivalence. Like there's some underlying noting of a connection between repression and explosion. The lady blog author said she fantasied about a creation that was a hot dog wrapped in french fries to look like an ice cream cone. I bet it tastes even worse than it looks, but she spoke longingly of this quite monstrous looking creation-I honestly thought the filling was Spam and that turns my stomach.

The guy's a vegetarian.
Whether it's because they eat the same food as us, or they imagine they deny themselves hugely, thin people fantasize about food to the extremes sometimes of those with more disordered eating. I wouldn't have been interested in this even when my eating was disordered, because I would have eaten.

I didn't so much fantasize as have my appetite and hunger settings ramped up so high that all aspects of it were heightened, so my "fantasies" were just my mind running on. I actually wanted this to stop, but couldn't. I could not have sat there fantasizing about food, I can only do that now, because my eating has calmed down enough to recover, strange.

There is a palpable sense underneath some of the hate that fat people are free and really enjoying themselves with no care for tomorrow, there are a lot of fat people around who retell this legend about themselves. Well, it's more positive to many than the helpless glutton. There's sometimes a real sense of disappointment when fat people present contrary to our designated type/s.

One of the more surprisingly disturbing things for many is the idea that fat people aren't necessarily eating more than others-not simply because of 'lying'- but the idea that you can be fat without extra pleasure is deeply threatening in some way. And the idea also that you can eat a lot and not enjoy it all. Nothing is what it seems in this crisis as is often the case with crusades.

I remember years ago when in still in thrall to my ferocious hunger admitting mouse like but determined that I did not enjoy eating, atall. One of the women I was with got so increasingly hysterical, "you must, you must" she cried. Weird. I felt I had to retract,in order to calm things down.

What could possibly explain such feelings?

In this crisis many strange and eerie feelings about food have been siphoned off into the required hate and anger-now I know more about what those are made of. Sometimes it's still possible to perceive that people think we so much stronger than we tend to imagine they feel we are, because they've learned the language of contempt and it is so effective.

I wonder how much that feeling adds to the level and edginess of vitriol directed at us.