Here's How I'm Rebuilding Food Trust Through Trips To The Grocery Store
My journey toward rebuilding trust in food - and my local food system - looks like adding child-like delight and wonder to my grocery store visits.
Welcome to the fifth installment of my Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI. This vertical is a monthly series of experimental audiotextual (audio + text) essays. The full essay is available for paid subscribers. You can listen to this month’s edition by scrolling down to the bottom of the article and hitting play.
I. What Is Food Trust?
I define “food trust” as a type of relationship with food and food systems that is grounded in delight, joy, and the belief that wanting food and eating food are fundamentally safe and positive acts.
For me, food trust looks like trying to have an overall feeling of positivity toward the food spaces (including grocery stores, corner stores, bodegas, cafes, and restaurants), food providers (family, friends, grocers, the workers at the nearby 7-11) and the food itself that is part of my local food system.
It’s important to me that my trust in food and food systems/spaces be non-hierarchical, meaning that I equally trust and delight in my desire for a chimichanga from 7-11 as I trust and delight in my desire for rainbow chard at the nearby co-op.
You probably noticed - either intellectually, in your body, or both - that what I just described doesn’t align with the nutrition norms and eating mores of our culture (you might have even felt a wave of panic or anger at the idea that we could “indiscriminately” trust food). American nutrition education offers useful information about food, but can also tend to reproduce problematic binaries, like “good” and “bad” food as well as “right” and “wrong” eaters.
Dr. Naya Jones points out in an amazing article that American nutrition education tends to separate “knowers” from “learners,” where “knowers” are often people with racial and class privilege, and “learners” are, well, everyone else, mostly Black and Brown women and their children. I grew up in a community of people that would be labeled as “learners.” I was in the population of children targeted for food education programming. Because I was fat, I was also a target of fatphobia. I was in the pathway of the perfect storm that would ultimately deeply damage my relationship to food.
II. “We’re Not Supposed To Eat Hot Dogs!”
I — like most of us — was born with the inherent ability to trust food and eating. As I aged, however, I lost that trust through ongoing exposure to fatphobia, diet culture and the toxic parts of hegemonic/mainstream American nutrition.
I learned not to trust grocery stores - an integral part of my local food system - as a little girl. I remember giving my grandmother a stern lecture in the refrigerated section of our local grocery store. She was a first generation Mexican immigrant, my primary caregiver, and a very talented chef. I couldn’t have been older than 10. “We’re not supposed to eat hot dogs!” I said, incensed and incredulous that she didn’t already know this information.
Where had I learned to be so upset about hot dogs?
The answer to that question is simple: I learned to be so upset about hot dogs when I was introduced to American food values and food education.
Before that, my grandmother had, overall, modeled food trust during our grocery store visits. She was really obsessed with me not having sugar, but food was never presented through the lens of fat or calorie content. My grandmother also didn’t read labels. She relied on her sense of what was familiar and what she knew tasted good.
At around the age of 7 or 8, however, my elementary school nutrition program began to teach me that I had to learn how to navigate the grocery store vigilantly because there were things there that were “unhealthy” and would hurt me. This was also around the time that I was internalizing fatphobia: the belief that being in a larger body is unnatural and bad, and that fatness is caused by eating too much “unhealthy” food. American nutrition was a metaphorical key that fit perfectly into the metaphorical lock that was diet culture/fatphobia.
This concomitant education - in American nutrition, diet culture and fatphobia - led to a terror of food and a fear that neither I (nor my fat, Mexican immigrant family) could be trusted to make the “right” food decisions.
I began to resent my grandmother, and I began to fear the traditional Mexican food she made because I believed it was “keeping” me fat. Grocery stores also became really, really scary to me because each aisle and item represented the