With ‘Tell Me What You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live,’ Amber Husain Meditates on Hunger and Healing

You only need to scan the front page of any major newspaper to see how conflicted our society currently is about food. Even as restaurants emerge as sites of political resistance and food writing expands in exciting new directions, food insecurity is still all too common, both in the United States and around the world.

With her new book Tell Me What You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live (Simon & Schuster), writer Amber Husain wades into all of this with care, working to determine what it really means to be nourished. Partly inspired by Husain’s own journey toward healing from anorexia, Tell Me What You Eat mixes thoughtful research with insightful cultural criticism that references everything from mid-century lesbian dinner parties to Black Panther breakfast programs.

This week, Vogue spoke to Husain about pushing beyond the limits of traditional disordered-eating recovery, feminized preoccupations around hunger, and finding inspiration in modern-day mutual aid.

Vogue: How did the spark for this book come to you?

Amber Husain: The first spark came to me at a time where I was feeling a great sense of liberation, not just from the years of anorexia and inertia and depression that I describe in the book, but also from the tired and honestly quite boring narratives that attach themselves to those things, which had kind of dominated my early experience of conventional treatment. When I first started thinking about the book, I had just been through this quite unusual path to feeling better that had given me a totally new perspective not just on my own condition, but on food and eating more generally. I felt really inspired to share that perspective on what our relationship with food might mean. Obviously, it means different things to different people, and they’re all valid, but I think it was more the principles from which we start to think about those things that had shifted for me.

You talk so eloquently about instances of political or moral starvation, from Samuel Legg to Gandhi to Simone Weil; was there an example that resonated with you most as you wrote?

It wasn’t so much the stories of people who were hungry that resonated with me the most, although there is a story in there about Eleanor Marx that I found really inspiring. [It’s about] her recovery from what you could describe as anorexia, not so much through a process of medical intervention but through a process of becoming politically inspired and doing work for her dad and doing things that were kind of intellectually her own with interesting people.

The stories of people who ate joyfully and in a very inspired way kind of spoke to me the most. In the chapter on gorging, I describe a scene from Audre Lorde’s Zami where she talks about going to a party where there’s more than enough food, and how it just changes the whole atmosphere in the room. It’s not even necessarily that political a moment, but it then becomes really tied up with her political work. It’s not that hard to create a beautiful life through food, and yet on a political, systemic level, we find it so difficult.

What do you think is most commonly misunderstood about the refusal to eat?

I think there are a few ways that you could talk about this, because there are common misunderstandings in medicine and then there are common misunderstandings in popular discourse. There is this tendency to frame eating disorders as a purely biological phenomenon in a way that kind of evacuates them of all meaning, or actually repels the attempt to create meaning. I think it serves a pragmatic purpose, because it makes eating disorders feel more treatable by the tools that medicine has, but the problem is that there are conventional treatments that are not particularly effective.