Content warning: The following article discusses eating disorders.
A proxy can refer to many things. In a literal sense, it means a person who acts on behalf of another. It can also be the imaginary friend that a child conjures when they feel they have no control over their surroundings.
When control eludes me, I’m a child again. And my proxy is the salad bar.
Perhaps it’s the way she’s always there for me, patiently holding her offerings at all hours. The art of salad-making turns lunchtime into a crucial period of meditation. Lingering on each ingredient causes me to slow down and think intentionally about what my body needs.
I start by entering the MP, always curious to see which leafy greens are on display. Sometimes, they mix in arugula, and my salad will have an extra bit of tang. Other times, a bed of spinach offers a more reliable and uniformly-shaped base. Spinach leaves fit nicely in my chopsticks.
After my leaves, I wander to the toppings and hit my go-to’s, such as tomatoes.
Tomatoes are rich in antioxidants like lycopene. They remind me of the Daily Mail article that claimed lycopene in pizza fights cancer. It was an obvious flaw on the journalist’s end, mistaking a correlation for cause-and-effect. But we readily rely on misinformed nutritional guidelines in our own lives more than we think. We search for answers on how we should fill our plates and expect to be able to fill in the gaps based on studies done by and for bodies other than our own.
My other nonnegotiables are broccoli and cucumber, mostly for the texture. Sometimes the cucumber is chopped into very small pieces, and I remember the last time I shredded cucumbers for my grandpa. I asked him how often he went to the dentist before realizing he didn’t have teeth.
After my nonnegotiables are taken care of, I experiment with the legumes. They often take special diligence to maneuver with my chopsticks, but the extra protein is worth it. The black beans and salsa almost resemble the quick toaster-oven tacos I’d share with my dad in high school. The ease of preparation suspended the moments we had together before our lives quickly slid past each other again.
I would be remiss not to include the satiating and protein-rich cottage cheese. While placing it strategically, I think of the Sneaky Cottage Cheese Salad my mom and I served to my step-grandma, who likes to have ice cream after dinner. Ice cream does not lend the same control that a salad does, so I often turn it down. Yet, ice cream was the most feminist choice my step-grandma could make that evening. In the past, she was bullied for her feminism, subject to jeers like “women from hell” while competing among the first women in cross-country skiing at Birken in Norway.
Sometimes at the salad bar I think of the inextricable influence of food on my body and athletic performance. Expectations are changing for how women can use their bodies. The Olympics are approaching gender equality as doors open for women to excel in athletics. When I was a student athlete in high school, my body served to make strides for my team. But athleticism has historically been deemed unfeminine. In Roxane Gay’s memoir “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” she examines how the world defines her hunger as a “self-annihilating impulse” that punishes a woman for taking up space, and also having a force. This expectation muddles the definition of women’s health, and this cluelessness might be a reason why 15 percent of women will experience an eating disorder, a severe disturbance in eating-related thoughts.
People tend to forget the extent to which we’re subject to the whims of the world. Up to 15 percent of women and people assigned female at birth of reproductive age have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition linked to infertility and weight gain. One in three adults have metabolic syndrome, which also makes weight loss extremely difficult. Nonetheless, one in three Americans claim willpower is enough to lose weight sustainably, a belief even more prevalent among young people. However, Oprah Winfrey’s experience relying on weight-loss drugs after years of weight fluctuation effectively demonstrated that willpower alone is often insufficient. The drugs helped her treat what she called “a neurological imbalance” and freed her after decades of frustration. The weight-loss drugs are the epitome of this ever-present reminder of our lack of control.
But Winfrey’s medicalization of body size itself can be very harmful. Darren Aronofsky’s film “The Whale” shows us how grossly we have misrepresented the lived experiences of fat individuals. Once we embrace body neutrality — the knowledge that we are worth more than what our body looks like at any given moment — we can fulfill our body’s true potential, through thick and thin.
After I’m content with my toppings, I have an assortment of dressings to choose from. Usually though, as the staff can attest, I go for soup as salad dressing. At that point, I question if I can still claim I’m eating a salad. There’s a tinge of shame, even if it is only soup.
One thing helping me be less rigid in my perception of health is learning about the prevalence of the unknown — whether it is the lack of consensus on a “healthy” gut microbiome or the mystique of the cellular mechanisms under the skin. The posters in middle school that stressed a uniform, “correct,” approach to diet and health were a fruitless attempt to distill this foggy understanding. Something deceivingly innocent like MyPlate can oversimplify something as biologically complex as eating.
Heading to the checkout line, I usually pair the salad with a fruit, yogurt or other snack to optimize a workout or study session later in the day. I’m grateful that the meticulousness of the salad bar always tunes me to my basic needs. I eat to study and move my body in the ways I love.
Maybe you eat for a different set of reasons; either way, people deserve to reap more pleasure from food. The salad bar could be a good place to start.
Contact Yanori Ferguson at yferguson@oxy.edu
