Everything in moderation

Kate Moss. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – that’s what she said. I’d grown up with girls can do anything, the personal is political, and Fat is a Feminist Issue, so I was a bit shocked. And it seemed to set the tone for the decade to follow, all primping and posing and pretending you disliked other people more than you disliked yourself. 

I suppose she was subversive in her own way, projecting a different kind of sultry on the magazine covers that was often more about bad attitude than femmey sexual signalling. But still, she was just another packaged product, sulking and pouting and making a living from her surface; banking on the male gaze.

So worth it
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I suppose it could be she's one of those people without a sense of smell, who can't taste their food at all. Rather than someone so mired in concern about her physical acceptability, so absorbed by her presentation of herself to the outside world, that it's become preferable for her not to actually feed herself. 


But either way, I feel sad for Kate Moss. So I wrote her a poem.

Things that taste as good as skinny feels

Baked potatoes,

Fresh baked bread, 

with real butter

melting

Whittaker’s almond gold.

Peanut butter, cheese on toast, garlic mushrooms

Carrot cake,

nutmeg cake,

chocolate cake,

basically, cake.

That thing your mother used to make on the weekends,

a really good, fresh, still-warm croissant

The first feijoa of winter,

Pumpkin soup, salt

and vinegar

chips

Roast kumara, pikelets, a ripe apricot

the last beer of summer,

doughnuts.

Vitamins

It's like magic: a bottle of pills will sort you.

Worn down by the toxins of bad air and over-processed food, poisoned with the by-products of industry and factory farming, you're feeling exhausted. You probably have adrenal fatigue. Or Wilson’s Syndrome.  You’re almost certainly deficient in the necessaries of nutrition: vitamin C, the B group vitamins, zinc, selenium, iron….because modern life is killing you.

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Is it just a multi-vitamin you need? A broad-spectrum approach. Or should you get specific: have a blood test, a hair test, a pendulum test, have someone check the iris of your eye?  It’s always hard to know. 

Thing is, you could eat some vegetables, drink less alcohol, or get to bed earlier, and chances are you sit in a chair all day and could do with some more exercise. But god, who has the energy to make a bunch of changes? After all, you are Fatigued.

So, they market to you.

B1, B2 and B3, some pantothenic acid. A large dose of Vitamin C, and a variety of herbs. Licorice root, ashwagandha, Siberian ginseng, and some rhodiola rosea (as used by Vikings!)

You will need a very large glass of water to get all that lot down you. Actually, maybe that’s all you need? Maybe you were just thirsty.

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Ordering

At first it was self defence. They never got her name right, and it made her squirm. At one place they made her spell it out, so embarrassing.  All she wanted was a bloody sandwich. So she lied.

Sally, Jenny, Angela.  She gave so many different names she started to get funny looks at her local haunts; she had to go further away from work and start afresh. 

Sarah, Rachel, Sam. It was liberating when they didn't know your real name. She'd never really realised what an intimate thing it was, when they asked it. Somehow it broke an unspoken contract: a sudden demand for intimacy, that didn’t let you keep the

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walls up. But not anymore. She became emboldened by the pretence.  As Christine she sent her trim latte back: too cold. The next day it was a pita pocket, they knew she wanted it toasted, but they put lettuce in it anyway. Lettuce. Cooked. Disgusting! Next thing, she couldn't go back to Subway, they had banned her. Well, they banned Fiona, bad tempered cow. 

Anna, Lisa, Linda. The more she lied the more invisible she felt, and the more unsatisfied. She was hungry. So hungry! She was always hungry. But nothing was ever enough. A wrap, a soy trim latte, a baked potato with the works. Did she want plain or wholemeal? Did she want olives? She didn’t even know. 

One morning at the end of winter she stood in front of her wardrobe, trying to pick an outfit. It was no good. She needed someone else’s clothes. How could she leave the house without a disguise? 

She slumped down at the kitchen table, and cried. How could this happen? Who was she? She should probably call in sick.

But instead she rang her own number at work, over and over, listening to her voice on the answerphone.