A year ago, I was with my family, marching among tens of thousands on Boston Common. This weekend, I was out and about in the neighborhood again, bundled up with my family, and enjoying the sense of camaraderie and community.
I’m also getting ready to go back to work, leaving the long days (in both good and bad ways) of hanging with my baby behind.
Here’s what I’m eating and reading this week:
Weekly Menu Plan
All the options below are dairy-free and soy-free recipes now that we’re managing a dairy- and soy-protein intolerance in our little one.
Sunday: Turkey taco leftovers
Monday: Sausage and tomato pasta
Tuesday: Turkey meatballs with lemon rice from Cook’s Illustrated one-skillet meals cookbook (recipe also found here)
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Pan-seared salmon, roasted sweet potatoes, and roasted broccoli
Friday: Chicken, olive, and lemon pasta
Saturday: Vegan butternut squash and spicy peanut soup from Joanna Chang’s Flour, Too cookbook
What I’m reading and enjoying this week:
A lot of the conversations I’ve had with clients in the week since coming back have included thoughts and discussions of sexual violence, both personally and within our cultural context. This was a good read: We tried to warn you.
Anti-vegetarianism as sexism in disguise. This brought up a bunch of thoughts for me. I agree with the thought that “what’s scary is the idea that compassion is effeminate and thereby un-American.” But also in the work I do with eating disorders, the intersection between body image and weight concerns and adopting a vegetarian eating pattern is concerning. I see something potentially problematic in the “59 percent of vegetarians and 79 percent of vegans are women,” stat.
A group of women rejecting weight-loss culture in Minnesota
Some book-to-TV projects I’m interested in: The Wangs vs The World (though I haven’t yet read the book yet), Millie Bobby Brown in a Sherlock Holmes series (I’m a big fan of most things Sherlock Holmes), and an adaptation of Dietland, which I just finished reading.
Winter baking projects that have gone well (before we went dairy- and soy-free):
Milk Street’s French Spice Cake (a favorite of Charlotte’s) and seriously some of the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve had in awhile (with toffee and brown butter: I used Butterfinger)
Book Review
Title: Dietland
Author: Sarai Walker
Date: 2015
Format: eBook
This book was a fun one to read: strongly aligned with the non-diet philosophy I take in my own nutrition practice working with clients with eating disorders, negative body images, or damaged relationships with food and dieting. It’s a very body-positive book with an emphasize on validating fat bodies.
I usually recommend a lot of books to my clients that are non-fiction and first-person narratives of authors describing their intuitive eating journeys. This book was a fun one because it was 100% fiction. It’s fun to see these themes played out in a literary sense in addition to the writing I often see in memoirs and blogs.
I’m also curious to see how the novel is treated as a TV show, which I’m hearing buzz about.
It’s not a trigger-free book: there’s discussion of sexual violence, fat phobia and the challenges of living in a bigger body, and descriptions of violence within the setting of women fighting back.
The book feels split in some ways, too. There’s a narrative that focuses on the central character and her own exploration of non-diet themes and life events, and her narrative intersects with the activities of more militant women acting in a bigger fight. I found myself more interested and drawn to the parts that focused on the individual experiences.
I think Dietland will be a popular choice given the success of and interest around The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, but if you’ve read or found yourself interested in books like The Power last year, this would be a good one to pick up before it hits the small screen.
