As far as we have come since the days of epic Darwinian struggles for survival among the world’s first peoples, the primitive urge to eat still governs the daily lives of everyone from the successful businesswoman hurrying out of her corner office for lunch to the person standing on the street corner begging for grocery money. Granted we have found increasingly high-tech ways to meet the demands of our growling stomachs, but nevertheless, food and meals remain essential parts of our routines, and how we treat meals directly affects our relationships. In my experience, family dynamics best exemplify this relational quality of food.

For the first seventeen years of my life, my family sat down to dinner together at approximately eight o’clock every week-night. My dad started cooking about an hour beforehand. He would usher everyone out of the kitchen as he retrieved his spices from the cabinet, and by the time my mom got home from work, my brother and sisters and I had already put out place settings and taken our designated seats at the table. The occasional late-night basketball practice interfered from time to time, necessitating that a hastily-warmed can of soup should suffice for the offending family member, but almost without fail, the six of us took sixty minutes out of our days to sit around the dining room table, talk about school and work, and eat. It was a simple, rather old-fashioned ritual that seemed to serve as the gravitational pull that prevented all my family members from flying out of orbit into their own crazy rotations. But then my sister stopped eating, and with one of us not taking part in the dinner ritual, our familial law of gravity started to fail.

When my sister developed anorexia, the character of meals changed drastically: Dinners became an ordeal, a test of wills as first my dad would order her to eat, gradually raising his voice, and then my mom would plead. However, no amount of shouting or negotiating could prompt my sister to eat her mashed potatoes or finish her chicken.

She eventually became so ill that her doctor insisted she go to the hospital. During her month-long stay, only five of us gathered around the table for family dinners as uncertainty and emerging secrets hovered over my sister’s empty seat like thunder clouds. Her bedroom began to smell of something terrible, and when my dad followed the smell to her wardrobe, he found breakfasts of bagels and apples molding in the back of her drawers. Somehow food had become her enemy, and meals had become games of hide-and-seek with her uneaten portions.

When my sister finally came home, my family started sharing meals again, but we still couldn’t just relax around the dinner table like we once did. The family became hyper-fixated on food as we constantly asked, “Who ate…how much…when?” My parents and sister spent countless hours coming up with meal plans, determining things such as what ratio of chicken to rice we should have in our stir fry. In my sister’s mind, the meal plans were endlessly negotiable, and up until the moment the food touched her lips, she would haggle over how many vegetables she had to consume in order to get out of eating a meat portion. One night my dad became so upset about the whole situation that for the first time in my life, he ate in the family room while the rest of us ate silently in the dining room. Our attitude toward food, and the tension we let it engender, drastically affected our relationships with each other.

Nearly two years have passed since my sister’s first hospital visit, and she has made almost a full recovery. Family dinners have regained much of their former charm, and it seems that helping my sister with her struggles has brought us closer together. However, tempers still flare up over an occasional uneaten hamburger bun. Whenever we worry too much about what we put into our mouths, we forget how the words that come out affect the ones we love.

As my family and I have seen, individual and group attitudes toward food affect relationships. Some people treat food as an annoying necessity they gulp down alone if and when they want, while others regard it as a savored part of a daily ritual. Eating alone or not eating at all can lead to isolation and stress, but sharing food can build community. Essentially, how and where we eat matters in ways that go far beyond our physical health, for the dynamics of mealtimes and our outlook on food play a critical role in our relationships with those closest to us. Though meals have changed over the centuries in so much as we no longer cook over open fires or use stone tools, in our increasingly fast-paced, highly competitive world, we need the connection of shared meals as much as ever. And we need to maintain a healthy attitude toward food, neither obsessing over nor ignoring its importance, to help us maintain healthy relationships.

I love the way a baby’s belly swells out beyond
     the symmetries of body, beyond
any self-conscious urge to suck it in and appear
     trim, past the rim of a plastic diaper,
the elastic waistband of tiny sweatpants, beyond
     any boundary, round, full, swollen, contentedly
plump.  The way their miniature hands reach to touch it,
     rub it, hold it, as if the belly were not connected
but something separate, wholly unique,
     that curved ball of flesh somehow able to rise away
from the rest and float through space—little inverted nipple
     of umbilical cord snipped
like the capitol of a country of skin, a foreign land, a new
     planet rotating through air, their marveling
as if it were able to fly and grow, fly and swell, that independent
     yet so dependent nation, the belly.

I love the belly, any belly, the one a child rubs, the one
     bulging beyond an elderly man’s leather belt,
the ones we pinch and measure, the bellies we touch
     at night when we’re alone or in the morning
waking up from glorious sleep, the swollen arches
     of bellies after huge dinners, festivals
of feeding, the bellies that slap together in throes
     of sexual pleasure, the sticky, lubricous glue
that says so emphatically for a moment desire has finally
     ceased.  I love the rippled musculature that drove
Whitman wild, the great sacs of godliness pregnant women
     lumber with, carrying around chambers
of heavenly grace, the beer bellies of alcoholics in too-small
     t-shirts, the tremendous bloat of gluttons
fumbling to button their tent-sized dinner jackets:  praise

the great eaters and their behemoth bellies!  Praise not Jonah
     but the whale!  Let all things too-large, compelled
by an unfillable hunger hear this praise!  Let them live
     without the guilt of exercise ads, let them live
without shame of their swollen stigmata.  Let their weight,
     their bellies, be praised.  But let this love also extend
to the flat bellies of poster girls, those small, too-delicate convex curves,
     the concave shapes of anorexic urges.  I sing this:
let them swell too, let them realize the glory of rumble and fart, manufacture
     beautiful mounds of crap, swift streams of piss
flowing through those artfully carved bellies.  I love the way
     all bellies work the same:  tiny tummies of little babies,
normal bellies of plain people hidden behind their shirts,
     the vast, expansive bellies of muscular athletes,
petite bellies of tiny women accustomed to miniscule dinners—
     maybe biscuits and a few green beans.

I love the belly!  Praise the belly!  The hunger we love, the belly
     that asks to be filled, to be filled with slick plums, fuzzy
peaches, great slabs of beef, brittle bones blessed with baked chicken,
     green brains of broccoli, those long thin crisp carrots,
high piles of calorie-rich chocolate cake, deep vats of sugary sherbet,
     sweet and simple vanilla ice cream, that silly fruit
the fantastic banana, big bowls of spicy chili, the perfectly circular
     globes of cantaloupe, those lobsters, crab, even the snow-white meat
of grilled filet of sole:  all for the belly!  The belly, tummy, stomach,
     maker of waster, mulcher of everything we throw down
our throats.  I love the way the belly devours and devours and asks
     for more, the way we open our great maws, strain
jaw bones wide like a snake and swallow whatever we desire,
     making it clear that appetite is everything, that in this all-consuming
hunger, the world and us are inseparable, delicious, and one.

 Originally published in Poetry East, 39, Fall 1994, pages 64-66.