Eating Disorders Are More Than a Feminist Issue: a Conversation with Amber Husain

Being reviewed: Advertisement When writer Amber Husain found herself unable to eat, she realized that decisions had already been made about how she ought to be protected from herself. Anorexia’s sanctioned interpretations are that the sufferer might be anything from simply vain; undergoing an adolescent—even infantile—rebellion; responding to family dynamics or patriarchy; “the ideal of the subservient female without any needs”; or “nothing but an icon of women’s diminishment in general.” Yet Husain identified with none of these. She knew there must be other explanations, just as there must be other treatments that center the suffering person’s humanity. In Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live, Husain eviscerates reflexive clinical and cultural assumptions about anorexia and the people who suffer from it. More broadly, by tracing stories of eating, hunger, refusal, and care across history, she depicts eating as an act of investment in the reshaping of the world. I corresponded with Amber leading up to the book’s publication to discuss food as inseparable from our political outlook, and as “fuel for the act of seeking.” Emily Wells (EW): In the prologue of your forthcoming book, you critique some of the dominant modes of thought around feminine restricted eating. Those taken to task include feminist thought (“There is a certain reticence, in feminist circles, of treating any difficulty with food as though it reached beyond the self; as though it might spring from any motive other than attention-seeking, self-destruction, or vanity”) and autobiographical writing about eating disorders (“The idea that simply changing one’s thoughts might suffice as a political solution would seem to be testament precisely to our era’s political torpor—a widespread failure to imagine ‘resistance’ as meaning anything other than privately transcending the dominant social narratives”). Instead, you consider whether anorexia is an “escape” from undesirable political conditions, even if such an act doesn’t serve as a political solution. In so doing, you call for the building of a more collectively organized world that considers how, as opposed to what, we eat. What is the threshold, if it exists, for “curling inward” versus “the imaginative work of turning outward”? Amber Husain (AH): Those two perspectives, the version of feminism you describe, and the autobiographical, are really part of the same phenomenon: the insistence that eating disorders can and must be explained only in terms of women’s relationship with themselves and their achievement of feminine beauty standards. This is in part a feminist perspective, in that it points to the pressure that patriarchy places on women’s bodies; but it is also, in some sense, a failure of feminism, in that it refuses the idea that women could have interests or motivations that surpass their own self-image. There may be many women who don’t! Still, to the extent that there are women who do, it seems important not to narrow the scope of explanation when we talk about struggles with eating. Food and eating are freighted with social significance in ways that relate to much more than the control of women’s bodies. Food is political, inasmuch as it is a source of human pleasure and survival that is grossly maldistributed. Both starvation and force feeding are used as weapons of war and social domination. Given how uncomfortable many of us are with the political order—how despairing, even—should we be surprised that some people’s depressive withdrawal takes the form of a withdrawal from food? As you say, such a withdrawal is not a useful political action. But it’s definitely politically significant. And if my own experience has taught me anything, it’s that it’s very difficult to heal or progress from a form of withdrawal like anorexia without hope that things might be better in the world from which you’re withdrawing. EW: I appreciate that you address the hunger strikes of the incarcerated as a willingness to die rather than live with what the world has dealt them, while also seeking that hope that things might be better. Regarding the vegetarian suffragette Constance Lytton—who was violently force fed while on hunger strike during her incarceration—you write, “an anorexic who on any level wants to be free of their condition isn’t looking to be forcibly fed. … Instead, they are probably looking for reasons to want to live.” I inevitably thought here of the Price sisters, who were force fed for 165 days while incarcerated for IRA activity; as a result, they suffered from disordered eating for the rest of their lives. Their force feeding was also what helped establish the practice as unethical in Britain. I recently spoke with someone in Belfast who described the sisters’ conflicted feelings that their experience was what led to their 10 male comrades being allowed to starve to death in 1981. Now, we watch these consequences play out for the Palestine Action hunger strikers, the first of whom, Heba Muraisi, just passed 70 days without eating. Do these politically significant actions challenge, as you put it, “the dogma that there is nothing to be done” about the forced starvation of the Palestinian people? AH: When I was finishing the book back in 2024, there still seemed to be a sense in mainstream media that you could get away with talking about the starvation of Palestinian people as the unfortunate outcome of some ancient, immutable conflict. You heard all these value-neutral references to “humanitarian crisis,” “casualties of war,” the language of “tragedy,” as though events were subject to fate rather than political interests, political machinery, and a politically motivated capacity for violence. This rhetoric has since lost all viability. And while we’ll only know with time the full impact of the Palestine Action hunger strikers, one effect they have already had in the UK is to cohere in the public consciousness the role of the British state in the conflict: a state that first incarcerated these protestors for their position against genocide and is now letting them die. People won’t forget this government’s profiteering from the desecration of Palestine or their brutality toward those who took a stand against it, just as people haven’t forgotten the Thatcher administration’s treatment of Irish hunger strikers. It remains to be seen whether Palestine Action will be deproscribed, which is one of their hunger strikers’ demands, or whether the UK branch of Elbit Systems, the Israeli arms manufacturer, will fully close. What’s clear is what Heba Muraisi herself has said: though this may result in her own “devastating end,” she is choosing to continue because for the first time in 15 months, she is finally being heard. EW: Just a few days after our last correspondence, I learned that the hunger strikers broke the strike, after the UK government canceled an Elbit contract to train British troops. Now, I’m overwhelmed considering the lifelong health problems they will face as a result. You also wrote about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (1944–5), in which healthy men were monitored for the impacts of near starvation, as well as dietary rehabilitation. As they starved, the men were erratic, depressed, isolated, and preoccupied with food. Decades later, during your own treatment, a dietician offered the Minnesota study as proof that the behaviors associated with anorexic girls are simply side effects of hunger, and that “it is objectively possible to feel better simply by eating.” In the book, you aptly historicize the experiment. The investigators only looked for the effects of a biological process. And yet, the men who participated in the experiment were conscientious objectors to the war, whose initial sense of purpose deteriorated as they were dehumanized: “Though these were men whose decision to starve instead of going to war had been born of deeply pacifist principles, by a few months in, their interest in politics had been all but engulfed by thoughts about food.” Is it difficult to reconcile, as you put it, “the gap between the organized martyr and the chaotic private drama of illness”? AH: The case of the Minnesota men is such an interesting one, in part for how it has been taken up after the fact. The original researchers were only looking to establish the biological effects of starvation on the body, so it makes some sense that they would only see the test subjects’ strange behaviors as derived from a biological process. What makes less sense is how eating disorder specialists today are so committed to this biological reductionism. Modern medicine tends to view anorexia as a genetically inherited disease, one that is merely triggered by social factors (and even these social factors are narrowed down to only the pressure on women’s appearance). The fact that the Minnesota test subjects were all men seems to have led researchers to the conclusion that the beauty thing must, in fact, be barely relevant, leaving only the biology of starvation to take seriously. What they refuse to consider is that neuroses concerning food might be driven by meaningful factors beyond pressures on vanity (assumed to be feminine). They refuse to consider that the Minnesota men might have had more in common with anorexic women than their biological vulnerability in the face of malnourishment. My suggestion is the missing link might be their shared experience of profound disempowerment. This is self-evidently as powerful a driver of illness as any. When I distinguish the men’s organized activity—signing up to take part in a starvation experiment for what they perceived as the greater good—from the onset of their tortured and antisocial ways of eating, I’m distinguishing an active posture that requires a degree of power from a depressive reaction formation that springs from a relative lack of power. I don’t actually see a problem in reconciling the coexistence of these things. What begins as an active stance—the refusal of food for political reasons—can develop into something we might call illness. I just struggle to believe that this is simply a function of the starved body losing its grip on reason. To me, it looks more like something that happens as circumstances change, intentions are thwarted, and imaginative horizons compromised. EW: How do Simone Weil and Eleanor Marx contribute to your argument here, particularly in terms of their imaginative horizons? What did you hope to illuminate by setting Weil’s fatal commitment to shared suffering with the downtrodden alongside Marx’s recovery through nourishment and political commitment? AH: Both are quite good examples of people whose attitudes to eating seemed to change along with their circumstances. Eleanor Marx was sent to a doctor for something like anorexia at a time where her life seemed to be narrowing: she’d managed to leave home and get a teaching job, but her parents (Karl and Jenny) were worried that she had too much independence, too much of a boyfriend, etc., and that they needed her at home. When they took her to a doctor, the doctor prescribed food but also that she should get out more, which can’t have hurt. It seems significant that the recovery of her spirits, and the dawn of her real career as an activist, coincided with her finding like-minded and energetic people she could talk and scheme with. As though she needed to fly the actual Karl Marx’s nest a bit before she could become a good, effective Marxist. Simone Weil is an inverse case. Her early writings as a Marxist philosopher are much more positive and pragmatic than her later ones (as a student, she was shirty with her classmate Simone de Beauvoir over not being materialist enough, not concerned enough with the social situation that meant people were starving). But her life after that was an almost cartoonish sequence of political disappointments and failed efforts to be personally “useful”: as a factory worker, and then as an aid worker in the Second World War. I wouldn’t want to reduce her intensifying spirituality to an escape from Marxist materialism. Still, she did end up saying things like the poor needed poetry more than bread, and going on a personal hunger strike with no real demands attached: one that ended up killing her far more quietly than any act of protest might have. EW: You discuss Audre Lorde’s treatment of food in her autobiographical novel Zami as one example of what it might look like to have nice things while also demanding political change. Lorde contrasts the light, garnish-adjacent foods of white lesbians’ parties, where, you write, “this sensual void drains a party’s potential to make anything meaningful happen,” versus the rich foods of the Black lesbians’ parties, which “don’t just nourish their guests—they install an expectation of abundance.” Lorde’s vision of food—and political demands that food be distributed so that all stomachs be filled—counters the medieval holy anorexics, who you also discuss, who likely experienced anorexia born from psychic conflict over their lives of privilege amid widespread food inequality. How did you select which cultural throughlines to present to the reader? AH: Because the book explores its central questions through a narrative, i.e., through my own inquiry into what makes eating feel more or less possible—what makes a meal inspiring and what makes it demoralizing—all the cultural, historical material that makes up the book’s substance, its evidence, etc., flows directly from that personal narrative. For example, I write about Audre Lorde in relation to feasting and abundance because the chapter on gorging is set around a meal I had in New York after teaching a class on Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic.” I think there was something about writing this way—through a process of intimate association—that felt very generative and supportive of one of the book’s central insights: that ways of eating aren’t just personal or private but form cultures that ramify through history. Similarly, with the holy anorexics, these felt very much in “the discourse” when I was trying to make sense of my own struggle to eat and its relationship to middle-class guilt. I’d seen Rudolph Bell’s book cited in several recent examples of popular nonfiction, often distinguishing religious fanaticism, or sometimes feminine “protest,” from clinical disease. All that labeling, without much effort at historicization or sociological analysis, felt weird to me at the time, and was grist for some of the questioning and thought that both aided my recovery and made me feel like there might be more to write about here. Other examples relate to experiences further back in my past. When I reflect on my experience as a student, eating freely, I talk about the formative influence of Nigella Lawson, about the ancient Roman emperors I was studying, and about Elvis Presley: not necessarily the figures you might find together if I’d written a straightforward “Key Moments in Western Food History” book. … EW: Certainly not. I found it heartening to have your personal narrative illuminated by these historical examples of those whose eating “prime[s] our vision” for a better world. The reader is invited into your search for a recovery that finds solutions outside the self. This, however, is not the kind of recovery pitched by the Maudsley Model of Anorexia Nervosa Treatment for Adults (MANTRA), the treatment protocol that was available to you through the NHS. How did this model contrast with your more freeing experience, participating in a clinical trial to study the potential of psychedelics for anorexia patients? AH: I’ll preface this by saying that there were some similarities, as there are between MANTRA and most other first-line treatments for anorexia. They both address anorexia as a neurobiological and neurocognitive malfunction in the individual, which needs to be fixed through a kind of retraining. MANTRA, as I experienced it, goes for scare tactics and the enforcement of discipline. Psychedelic-assisted therapy, on the other hand (as it is practiced or trialed in Western clinical settings) attempts to “shake the snow globe of the human brain: trying to loosen up mental rigidity by administering a drug, almost as though it were any other kind of pharmaceutical. I say almost because there is still a key difference between psychedelic therapies and others, which is that they’re based on a degree of epistemic humility, as well as a sympathy with humanity. That is, it remains an open question what the patient will discover when they undergo a psychedelic experience, which means they’re not limited to simply finding flaws within themselves. In fact psychedelic mushrooms are often credited with instilling a profound sense of love and connectedness between living (and also nonliving) beings and entities. I felt this disposition very profoundly in the way I was treated by the doctors, researchers, and therapists running the trial. Rather than being infantilized and told I was irrational and that I had to accept the world as it was and act “normal,” I was treated with total respect, and encouraged and supported to ask big questions, not just about my condition, but life in general. I wouldn’t say it “cured” me. But it did set me on a curious and self-compassionate path toward reckoning with my despair at the world, and reevaluating the potential for hope that effectively did. EW: How psychedelic treatment is often discussed culturally reiterates the biological reductionism you’ve described in conventional anorexia treatment: “creates new neural pathways,” etc. But you just described potential benefits in the novel, subjective experience of being shaken up and open to whatever you might encounter. Do you feel like the experience informed the creative process of writing the book? AH: I really do. Not in a “drop acid and write poetry” kind of way, but just inasmuch as what the therapy achieved was to precipitate a process of open-minded inquiry, and that’s exactly what the book is. It’s a creative, digressive search for understanding, full of moments of surprise, being smacked by my own unconscious, by latent insights from memory, cultural memory, the history of humanity. … If I’d healed through conventional treatment, I can’t imagine for a second being moved to write about that. Like, “I had this well-defined illness and the doctors fixed it”—who cares? That tells us nothing about the world, or about the weirdness of life, and I don’t think it makes for interesting literature. It might appeal to some people’s morbid curiosity, or their sense of comfort in familiar narratives and institutions, but I think we can do better than that. EW: You address some of the more insidious cultural characterizations of anorexia, and how they inform the self-understanding of those who suffer from it. One such characterization is the easy association between anorexia and fascism, both historically and in contemporary feminist thought. What did you hope to dispel here? AH: There’s a strange tendency within contemporary feminism to cast the anorexic as both a victim and a villain: certainly a victim of patriarchal body fascism, but also one who, by failing to resist this fascism, thereby inflicts it on other women. The assumption is that women necessarily exist in a competitive, comparative relation to one another; and this means that if you capitulate to norms, you’ve become a propagandist for them. It’s important to dispel this idea. First, because it obscures the million other reasons a person might develop anorexia, and the million other ways in which people relate to one another. Second, because of the way it justifies the total (and counterproductive) dehumanization of anorexic patients. Written off as tyrannical “disturbers of the peace,” anorexics become fair game for all kinds of institutionalized violence: on a psychological level bullying, infantilization, and subjection to scare tactics, and on a material level force feeding, punishment and restrictions on freedom. All this in the name of the social “order,” the familial “peace”! EW: You talk about how hard it is to defend your own veganism against cultural suspicion. But there are two visions of abstention from animal products, as you explain. The first is aimed at individual virtue, the “woolliest sense of doing the right thing, a substitution of packaged political feeling for serious political commitment.” The second envisions animals as some members of the Paris Commune did, “either as respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life.” I’ve been thinking of this distinction so much lately, as the right wing has largely won the food culture war here in the US: animal flesh has been rebranded as “healthy” and those who abstain from it generally do so for sustainability reasons. How might we come to view dietary abstinence as a value of a less exploitative world, where fewer humans or animals are treated like meat? AH: The golden question! A politicized relationship with food has to be dialectical—with political commitments and ways of eating mutually informing one another, little by little. Clearly just “going vegan” isn’t enough to make people care about animals as a class, or indeed care about class politics more generally, and nor are socialist values enough to make people go vegan. But if you’re a little bit open to either, you can watch each tendency grow around the other. The political project is about finding where we can have a little purchase on people’s openness, whether it’s by making nonanimal food more accessible and appealing, or seeding the pleasures and promises of social justice in people’s imaginations. MAHA isn’t effective because it makes a compelling case for the health-giving properties of meat, it’s effective because it says that you can still have nice things without any need for major social change. But what if we started to see the social change that made bigger pleasures available to people—would they still be so obsessed with fucking steak? I imagine not.