First Chapter First Paragraph - The Eating Instinct

I am linking up with Vicki @ I’d Rather Be At The Beach who hosts a meme every Tuesday to share the First Chapter First Paragraph or two of the book you are currently reading or plan to read soon.

The book I'm sharing this week is one that I picked up randomly from the new books at a local library.  The title made me curious and I found myself quite interested as I stood there reading.  Finally, I got myself together and went to check it out.  As someone who has been on a 'getting healthier' quest - stepping up my activity and also changing a lot of my eating habits, I'm discovering things about my own 'eating instinct'.  Here's a sample of the book:

The Eating Instinct

by Virginia Sole-Smith

First Paragraph(s):

What does it mean to learn to eat, in a world that's constantly telling us not to eat?  It's a question I started asking five years ago, when my daughter Violet stopped eating as a result of severe medical trauma.  Suddenly, we had to begin again, to forget all the normal rules about breast-feeding and spoon-feeding, and gingerly pick our way through a surreal new world where food was simultaneously the enemy and our salvation.  But in many ways, this is also a question I've been asking my whole life, as a woman who came of age at the intersection of the alternative-food movement and the war on obesity.  As a skinny kid growing up in the 1980s, I thought processed foods were great; I felt sorry for my friends whose moms bought only weird brown bread for their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.  I'm not saying we never thought about healthy eating--the 1970s and 1980s also saw the birth of modern diet culture, with the rise of aerobics videos and fat-free everything.  And I certainly understood that fat was bad, and that was why we bought skim milk and diet soda.  But this was a more straightforward time for dieting; you joined Weight Watchers and ate SnackWell's if you needed to get thin.  You didn't have to reject an entire food-industrial complex or introduce exotic new ingredients into your diet.  Quinoa was still relegated to the dusty bin in a corner of our town's one hippie-run health food store.  

     But by the time I graduated from high school in 1999, we were buying mesclun greens and whole-grain pasta.  Obesity had become an official public health crisis.  Carbohydrates were the new 'bad food,' though fat was far from vindicated.  We were still a few years away from the landmark publication of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the conversation was beginning--on the coasts, at least--about the importance of organic farming and the need to eat 'whole foods' instead of processed ones.  As I'll explore in the chapters ahead, these twin anxieties about obesity and about the eco-health implications of our modern food system have transformed American food and diet culture.  Eating well has become wildly more complicated; it's now about 'eating clean,' it's about being a socially responsible consumer and an accomplished home chef.  Thinness has become our main measure of health, but also of personal virtue, of having the right kind of education, politics, and morality.

Blurb:

Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We parse every bite we eat as good or bad, and judge our own worth accordingly. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again — and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing.

The Eating Instinct visits kitchen tables around America to tell Sole-Smith’s own story, as well as the stories of women recovering from weight loss surgery, of people who eat only nine foods, of families with unlimited grocery budgets and those on food stamps. Every struggle is unique. But Sole-Smith shows how they’re also all products of our modern food culture. And they’re all asking the same questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?

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Would you continue reading?  I'm finding this book fairly fascinating in many aspects.