Virginia
You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, anti-fat bias, parenting, and health. I’m Virginia Sole Smith. I also write the Burnt Toast newsletter.
Corinne
And I’m Corinne Fay. I work on Burnt Toast and run @selltradeplus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus sized clothing.
Virginia
It is time for your September1 Indulgence Gospel!
We are going to answer your questions like we do every month. We have so many good ones. We’re going to get into fall shoes. I have a lot of thoughts about how do you give compliments and just a lot of good fall chat.
Corinne
This is also a paywalled episode. That means to hear the whole thing you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. It’s just $5 a month or $50 for the year.
Virginia
Or, if you want even more: You can now join Extra Butter at $10 a month where you get everything the regular paid folks get plus monthly live Ask Me Anything chat swith me and even more Indulgence Gospel.
Corinne
Who doesn’t want extra butter?
Virginia
I literally just ate lunch, and I put extra butter on my toast.
Corinne
Sounds really good.
Virginia
Okay, I have an update for you, Corinne. Are you ready?
Corinne
I’m so excited.
Virginia
I have something to show you, which is I finally got around to ordering—
Corinne
Oh my gosh, it’s beautiful!
Virginia
Your Indulgence Gospel t-shirt! Which I will put in the mail to you this week.
Corinne
Oh my God! It’s so cute.
Virginia
Isn’t it so cute? For listeners who don’t know, some very devoted fans of the show—friends of the show—designed their own Priestess of the Indulgence Gospel t-shirts. It’s not official Burnt Toast merch, but they are lovely and the proceeds are being donated to the National Network of Abortion Funds. I also ordered them for my kids, who were confused. My 10 year old doesn’t like baggy clothes—it’s like a whole thing—but she’s wearing it as a pajama shirt. It’s so cute.
Corinne’s really cute. They have a little crown made out of pizza on them.
Virginia
A pizza crown. The fabric is really nice. We’ll report back on the sizing—I felt like my sizing was pretty good, so fingers crossed.
Corinne
That is a very exciting update.
Virginia
What else is new with you?
Corinne
Well, fall here is really nice and also always feels too short. It’s like four weeks where like the temperature is actually, nice during the day and then it gets really cold at night. The green chile is roasting and there’s a Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in October.
Virginia
I guess I kind of thought New Mexico didn’t have fall at all! That’s lovely.
Corinne
It is lovely. It’s not New England fall, but yeah.
Virginia
I like a place that’s ready to claim its own type of fall.
Corinne
Yeah, you might prefer green chile to pumpkin spice.
Virginia
I mean, I don’t hate pumpkin spice but does it need to be in everything? One of the questions for this week that I didn’t bother to put on the list was Pumpkin Spice related and I was like, I don’t feel qualified to speak to that. But there was a really fun episode of It’s Been A Minute where she talked about the history of pumpkin spice. So if you are a pumpkin spice lover, or like me, you have complicated feelings about it, I recommend that episode.
Corinne
I’ll check that out.
Virginia
What else is new with me? I think I’m done with Twitter.
Corinne
You know, I think Twitter is over.
Virginia
I think it’s done, right? I think we can be done.
Corinne
I was looking on Twitter for something we’re going to talk about later. And first of all, I had so much trouble finding it on my phone because it’s not called Twitter anymore. Who wants to be like pulling up a website called x.com? It sounds sounds like you’re searching for—
Virginia
For porn.
Corinne
Like a porn.
Virginia
I just broke 10,000 followers on there this year, which feels like a milestone. But with troll management, I’ve been feeling like I really need to streamline all these platforms because I cannot be worrying about trolls in all the places. So I changed my account to protected—I couldn’t quite bring myself to delete. I closed DMs, and I tweeted something that was like, “Okay, I can’t quite press delete, but I’m not looking at this anymore.” It’s been great. I haven’t even thought about it. And you may be upset about this, but I’m considering also whether I’m going to be done with TikTok soon. I don’t know.
Corinne
I’m in favor of people getting rid of whatever social media they don’t want to be on. I was never a big Twitter poster, but I kind of miss the commentary. It was so funny. It was really so smart sometimes, and now it’s just bad to use. I don’t know where that commentary has really gone, either. Substack, I guess.
And also like Threads had a meteoric rise. And is anyone still using Threads?
Virginia
I don’t know. I am on all of those places. I am doing nothing with any of them right now. I have this compulsive need to be there, but I similarly just turned off comments on my TikTok, because that was getting really spammy. I was getting a bunch of trolls there. So now I’m just on Instagram and maybe that’s good. I’m curious to hear what people’s thoughts are about this. I was thinking maybe we do a Friday thread on this soon.
Corinne
Yeah, that’s a good idea. What’s everyone doing about social media?
[Post-recording note from Virginia: We’re doing this thread on Friday! Hold your comments on this till then, so we can have a good deep dive!]
Virginia
We’re in a weird moment with it. If I’m thinking of it from a business perspective, honestly, none of it serves me! Twitter stopped being remotely a driver to Substack because there’s bad blood between the companies. Even Instagram and Tiktok are not big drivers of traffic to Substack. So if I’m just using it for fun? I don’t know. I like puzzles more, I think.
Corinne
Yep.
Virginia
Alright, the last thing I wanted to talk about before we dive into questions is Philly Fat Con. Corinne, do you want to tell people what Philly Fat Con is?
Corinne
Yes. So this year is the first Philly Fat Con. In the past, there’s been a really amazing, plus size clothing swap in Philly. This year Burnt Toast is an official sponsor of Philly Fat Con. It’s a two day convention curated for fat people, by fat people, taking place October 28 and 29th in Philly. There’s a really amazing list of speakers, panels, fashion, healing from fatphobia, fat influencers, yoga, dance, meditation, and twerking.
Virginia
Corinne and I can’t be there this year, but we were really excited to have Burnt Toast be a sponsor and there will be a Burnt Toast subscription discount coupon available for folks who attend. We’re very excited to be supporting and hopefully in future years we can be an in-real-life a part of it. I
Corinne
A bunch of people who are active in the @selltradeplus community go. And the clothing swap seems really cool. They have a mending table!
Virginia
I love that. It seems like such a great resource. So if you are in Philly, or anywhere Philly-adjacent, October 28 and 29th. You should check it out!
Alright, should we do some questions?
Corinne
Hi Virginia and Corinne,
How do we all feel about the standard practice of including the number of servings on a recipe, not to be confused with the serving sizes as determined by the FDA. I’m talking about when a pasta recipe calls for 12 ounces of pasta—three quarters of a box—and says it’s for four servings. My partner and I inevitably always end up eating the four servings of pasta between the two of us and then feel weirdly guilty for no reason. I’m a recipe developer by trade, so I obviously have an agenda here. But my question is, are serving information on recipes inherently anti-fat? Is there a better way to do this while still informing people on what quantity of food they’re preparing?
Virginia
The first thing I’m going to say on this is I have never in my life cooked three quarters of a box when I could cook a whole box of pasta. What are you doing leaving me with a quarter of a box of pasta to deal with? That’s just irritating.
Corinne
I definitely have quarter boxes of pasta in my pantry from this very fucking thing.
Virginia
It’s so rude.
