Do you ever go to places just because there's pizza?
This time last year I had the awesome opportunity to go to a party hosted by Heritage Radio Network in the super hipster super cool backyard of Roberta's Pizza in Bushwick Brooklyn. It was a sunny day and I got to eat pizza and feel good about myself.
Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement, spoke. I was worried it was going to be a lot of fat-shaming "obesity epidemic" bologna but there it was: the intersection of my passion for the local food movement and my fairly newly discovered interest in the body positive movement said in one perfect sentence.
"We spend more money getting thin than nourishing ourselves."
Carlo Petrini hit the nail on the head. I honestly can't remember if I heard this in Italian translated to English or if Mr. Petrini was actually so pissed off about it that he knew how to say in English.
We waste our time, our resources, our thoughts. Many women spend these precious commodities wanting to destroy their bodies and hating their bodies. Instead of learning to love our bodies and actually take care of them, humans have learned how to get six-pack abs in 6 days.
I have spoken before in my posts about how companies stand to profit from women's low self-esteem. And, if you knew me in college, you would also know that companies are also making big money from making less nutritious food. This less nutritious food isn't even always more pleasurable. I'm looking at you, Dominos. Your pizza doesn't taste good.
In my own journey toward learning how to eat intuitively, I had to shut off the Michael Pollan documentary in my head.
In reality, loving and accepting all bodies and making good food available are two sides of the same coin.
I'm really big fan of the story of stuff and Bill Mckibben's book, Deep Economy. Look I read the book but for simplicity's sake, wikipedia defines deep economy as:
"one that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material;that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability as least as important as increases in size."
Supporting organic and locally grown foods is all about trying to "vote with your fork." It's about supporting the kind of world you would like to live in economically. Supporting health at every size is similar.
When you support this movement, you are supporting a world where women don't feel like they need to be thin. It supports a world that cares about helping people have quality lives instead of thinner lives.
Locavores see delicious and nutritious food as high priorities for society. Quality and variety foods are promoted in lieu of corn subsidies for high fructose corn syrup, a well known hamburglar of health.
The body positive movement similarly cares about creating sustainable healthy lives for people that aren't just quick weight-loss products that don't last in the long term.
The body positive movement sees happiness and satisfaction as its end goal. Weight-loss products and the diet industry often emphasize short-term solutions that are unsustainable. Even the cookie diet is hard to stick to.
Sustainability is a priority for the locavore. We can't continue with a monoculture. All the methane that all the cows we're eating are releasing has long-term effects on global warming.
I'm not just bringing all this up because I want to justify my really expensive college education in which I watched a bunch of food documentaries on Netflix for research papers, but maybe, a little bit.
Pollanistas, meet the body positive movement. I think we're going to be friends.