Okay, last week’s Thread on the diet foods we genuinely love was so much fun (and so friendly and so troll-free!) that y’all have persuaded me these should be a regular feature. They will usually be loosely inspired by the week’s essay, but we’ll also just see where the wind takes us — feel free to suggest your own ideas for Thread topics in the comments below!
I’m going to throw one more of these out to the whole group, and then starting next Friday, Threads will be a perk for paid subscribers only. So if you haven’t done that yet, know that you’ll get to rant on various diet culture/fatphobia-related topics in a safe, troll-free space while also supporting independent journalism on these issues at the same time. Win/Win! (More on why I’ve added paid subscriptions and what you get for $5 a month, here.)
Ground rules to keep things friendly:
No fatphobia: Avoid the use of “o words” and other stigmatizing language. (“Fat” is fine if you identify that way or use it as a neutral body descriptor.)
Avoid numbers: No calorie counts, pounds gained or lost, or other details that could be triggering to folks in eating disorder recovery.
This is an anti-diet space: No body shaming, and no promoting of diets or intentional weight loss in any way, please.
Virginia has the right to delete or block anyone for general troll nonsense.
And now I’d love to know:
Are there any processed foods that you wouldn’t let yourself have on diets and have now joyfully reclaimed? Anything that you’re surprised you feed your kids without guilt?
Or, any processed foods that you’re working on giving yourself full permission to eat? (We’re here to cheer you on, if so!)
I am parenting a teen through ED recovery and WOW have we been on a processed food journey. I'm so grateful that I've learned about the ideas that "all foods fit" and that, if she is to recover fully, she's gotta be exposed to as much as possible. So I've recently bought pop tarts (kinda underwhelming, honestly), Swedish fish (AMAZING), those "fancy" Pepperidge Farms cookies (also kinda disappointing), Klondike bars, Cheez-its and many, many boxes of Oreos (big cheers for these last three).
I have NEVER given up "processed" foods. The whole idea of "processed = BAD" is so bound up with classism to me. Like, the whole idea that well-educated liberal urbanites don't eat processed food, so if you do, especially while not being thin, you must be low-class. Which is why I BRISTLE whenever anyone poohpoohs processed foods. It reads to me as a passive-aggressive classist dig.
I love Cinnabon and those Pillsbury rolls that come in the cylinder-shaped container. Especially the Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that have Cinnabon icing. They're so gooey and wonderful. And I see pushback about this everywhere. One time I read a nonfiction book in which the author passed a Cinnabon in an airport, and was so knee-jerk about how gross and off-putting it was to him, as if anyone literate enough to read his book would automatically agree, and I couldn't help but notice that he had gone to boarding school, so I was like, "How much boarding school do you need to have attended in order to really hate Cinnabon with all your heart and soul?"
I went to an elite liberal arts college, and in the 26 years since I graduated, I have seen so much smug, self-satisfied rhetoric on the part of fellow alumni on this topic. Someone had a blog all about how they were raising their baby with only homemade food, and there was a post where the baby ate yogurt, and I thought, Do you milk the cows yourself and add the probiotic cultures by hand? Honestly.
Or there's this meme I've seen around the internet about "habits Americans have that people from other countries find weird" and they mentioned "canned bread," i.e. the Pillsbury cylindrical packages, with the implication that if you're worldly and well-traveled, if you're as sophisticated as a EUROPEAN and you aren't an UGLY AMERICAN, you will be grossed out by "canned bread."
Completely agree with your analysis; there is a ton of classism (and also racism) bound up in our disdain for processed foods. Also we should be heralding canned bread as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.
Absolutely agree. I was going to sit out this thread, because I grew up eating so many processed foods that it was just food in our household. I was raised lower-middle-class/blue collar, and in the 1960s-1970s US, so many processed foods seemed amazing to my parents. They were also often cheaper. I think I was in high school before I learned that Velveeta blocks were not cheese, but “cheese food”. (First time I ate scrambled eggs without Velveeta I thought something was wrong with them!)
My mom regularly served side dishes of scalloped potatoes from a box or Kraft mac and cheese or instant mashed potatoes. They saved her time and money.
I think there is a lot of patriarchal bullshit tied up in elitist shaming of processed foods, too. I often think of Michael Pollan calling out “women entering the workforce” as an event that destroyed American food culture. Hell yes, I want to save time and money with convenience foods. Packing school lunches is not where I find my bliss or how I show my love.
True - but his way of noticing without acknowledging that women in the workforce has been important, necessary and beneficial in so many other ways never felt productive to me.
Boxed mixes. Pancakes, muffins, whatever. I went thru a phase of thinking it was strictly homemade or nothing so I could avoid the negative “are those blueberries even REAL?” crap. I have forgiven myself for a) not being super mommy and making everything from scratch with my special recipe that I’ll hand down to the kids and their kids and b) thinking the boxes are generally more tasty anyway!
100% agree. I make pancakes and brownies way more often since I embraced the box mixes, which means I'm cooking more (and more happily) with my kids, which seems good for them in all sorts of ways. I think the simplicity of box mixes make cooking with kids so much more accessible!
Boxed mixes are amazing! And if you want to be additionally creative (though it's totally unnecessary!), they're a great shortcut to a rainbow cake, for example. My son wanted a "rainbow unicorn birthday" during the pandemic, so I bought a GIANT box of white boxed mix and added food coloring for layers. Otherwise, the whole endeavor would have been WILDLY overwhelming and I wouldn't have been able to manage. The box-mix cake was super delicious!
Boxed cake mixes are a life saver! I love to bake from scratch when the time allows, however I also have some amazing family recipes that rely on boxed Duncan Hines mixes. Pure delicious nostalgia.
I've come full circle from being a full "Michael Pollan Fan" to eating whole fruits and veggies, whole grains etc. AND loving the ease and convenience of frozen veggies, pre-made pancake mix, and my COSTCO sized bag of peanut m and m's in the freezer (the freezer gives them an extra satisfying crunch!). For me, it's both/and. I've found somewhat of a balance, and while I'm not great at it, I'm at least on the journey.
Side note- I'm thinking of subscribing, and trying it out for a month first. Do I get access to back issues at all? I'm interested in some articles you wrote earlier this month... Keep up the wonderful work Virginia!
I am also on that reformed Pollan fan journey and YES to frozen M&Ms. Also yes to paid subscribers getting archives access! Thanks so much for reading.
As far as Michael Pollan goes, I have a gorgeous framed letter print poster in my office (I’m a registered dietitian) that says “Eat food, not too much, mostly chocolate”!!! Seeing it gives me SO much satisfaction.
Yes! Do you remember Snackwells Devil's Food Cake? It was like eating cardboard and I can remember my mom saying, "These are delicious...I feel like I'm overindulging." <insert eye roll> I would eat the whole box, feel unsatisfied because they weren't real food or chocolate for that matter. lol
S’mores! I went camping with my family last weekend and on our last night I made myself a s‘more. For years I have denied myself s’mores while camping, but doing the work of intuitive eating and discarding diet culture I thought I’d give it a try. It was so delightful in every way. I can’t wait to go camping again and try out giving myself free access to s’mores the entire trip!
Although it's advice that I first read in the 1980s, in Fat is a Feminist Issue, it's taken me until now to stock my house with lots of snacks and sweets. I have a candy jar, big storage bins full of sweet and salty snacks, usually dark chocolate almond bark in the fridge. This works for my kid and me -- we have the assurance that we can eat what we want, when we want to eat it.
Thank you - this was worth reading. It seems more that she’s acknowledged how much the world has changed than that she has changed, though.
Despite my critique now, it would be hard to understate how powerful Fat Is A Feminist Issue was for me when I first read it, as a high school student in the late 1970s. It prompted me to give up dieting and toss my scale a few years later! It is arguably one of the texts that pushed me to a career of feminist writing.
I also think Fat is a Feminist issue was a great introductory text! Found it at a thrift store. For me it's in the same category as Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth. I have now moved past it (I think Christy Harrison says it's still a book about 'loving yourself thin') but at the time it was a really important stepping stone.
All of them. Seriously. I always have chips and candy in my house. It's the most radical thing for me now. I let my kid make a marshmallow and sour patch kids snack bowl yesterday. I don't like cooking so when I do it's invariably from something frozen (frozen veggies and fruits, frozen protein, etc.). For actual health reasons, my husband and I have to incorporate certain foods that otherwise I'd not give a wit about but other than that? No more making food the enemy.
I will say, my kids both have ASD and are extremely picky eaters, so that’s really helpful to me in terms of thinking of all food as equal. I struggled a bit when all my son would eat was brownie Z-Bars, but I didn’t want to build an anxiety around it so we just keep them available. Some days he has four bars and nothing else, some days he has none and eats a stalk of celery with peanut butter and a pint of halved raw cherry tomatoes two at a time. He’s gonna eat (or not eat) what he wants, and nothing I do is going to make a meaningful difference. I have to let go of my own food issues to not pass them on. (Which everyone here knows. ha)
For myself, I’ve accepted processed breakfast foods. Cereal, those little Belvita breakfast cookies, yogurt with little mix-ins. I struggle with breakfast in terms of time and wanting to eat, so something palatable that I can eat quickly and also enjoy is huge. Enjoying what you eat makes it easier to eat, who knew?
I love Cheerios so much. I know they don’t sound like a demonised processed food but they totally are. I can’t remember what’s wrong with them but trust me, some people have found it. (I also love cheez-its and I am going to try a Doritos Locos taco from Taco Bell someday I swear.)
Cheerios Shaming is so hilarious to me. I feel like not having Cheerios in the house is like not having bread, milk or eggs. Like how are these people functioning?!
My son ate a Belvita packet every day for years and somewhere along the way he started calling them "foot cookies" (because to a small child they looked like feet?" I kinda miss that habit because not having to make decisions before coffee is amazing.
Definitely still early on the food reclaiming and food neutrality adventure, but WHEW, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles chips. I can't wait for the day those are guilt-free.
American Cheese, it’s gold, man! There’s nothing like it in a cheese omelet or a grilled cheese - ooey, gooey, good! (And yeah, if you asked me a year ago, I would have said it was “poison.”
American cheese--the Land o' Lakes block from the deli. I used to eat American cheese on saltines as a kid, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. About a year ago I bought some American for the first time in a looong time and redid the childhood snack. It's not quite as transcendent as I remembered, but it sure is comforting.
Omg, I thought I was the only one who did this saltine American cheese thing? It was my 1990s version of charcuterie. Sometimes I even melted the cheese for 10 seconds in the microwave. Sublime.
Cheese on saltines was my snack every day when I came home from school and I'm pretty sure that was processed American cheese although maybe it was cheap cheddar. I took great pride in cutting neat little squares and laying them out on the plate. My mom was really good at making hors d'oeuvres and I suppose I was modeling myself on that.
Foods available in my house that adults and/or kids (ages 6 & 8) eat but you would not have seen here five years ago: Eggos, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, cheez-its, cheetos, frozen french fries, bagel bites, nutrigrain bars, cup o'noodles, kraft mac & cheese, that kraft parmesan cheese knockoff in the green can, and I am sure there are more.
Here's the thing--none of us go for these foods all the time and open packages have been known to get stale just because no one chooses them and all options are open. When I never bought cheez-its, I couldn't "trust" myself with them and now they are always here and I have some when I feel like it but I legit just don't feel like it that much because I'm busy eating some other kind of cracker with cheese on it.
Wheat thins! Gave them up when I was following strict rules for “health” (actually dieting). Now I eat some most days with cheese and they are perfect. My toddler actually doesn’t even like them.
One food I’m working on is little debbies. My mind sees them as the worst for some reason and I won’t give them to my kiddo either (I give him lots of different foods). For some reason they are a different type of food to me??
I hope you find a way to enjoy Little Debbies because they are SO GOOD! I love the oatmeal cookie sandwiches, we always had a box or two around because my dad packed one in his work lunch every single day for years.
Ritz crackers... I love them, my kids love them, but I still have a hard time bringing them into my house because I just feel like they're so nutritionally empty, I guess? Sigh.
Midwestern Christmas cookie is two ritz crackers with pb in the middle dipped in chocolate with red/green sprinkles. Usually are gone first from the cookie tray!
Topped with cheese, dipped in chili, straight out of the wrapper, Ritz is the food of the gods and I maintain the Costco box sized inventory of them at all times in my abode.
When I first started my anti-diet journey there were so many! The main ones were chips and french onion dip, Welch's gummies, pop-tarts, "kid's" cereal, and slice/bake chocolate chip cookies. Also Taco Bell.
Stream of consciousness writing and journaling in general really helped me to work through any guilt I had with eating the foods I wanted.
Oreo soup! I used to break a bunch of oreos up into 3-4 pieces and put them in milk and eat them like cereal. I still enjoy oreos happily now but haven't done it this way since I was a kid, so am going to push myself to do it soon! <3
I eat Kraft mac & cheese at least a couple times a month! I love it plain but use butter and half & half instead of just plain milk to make the sauce a little creamier. We didn't eat it a lot at home growing up, but my cool older cousin would make it for us when she baby-sat so it's got a special association for me.
Reposting in the right place—my guilty pleasure is always a spoonful (or five) straight from the pot. Especially if it’s been sitting and has congealed a bit or whatever that stuff does over time. Better than from a bowl any day.
Ok, my favorite food snack (as a very young kid) was Bugels and cheese. My mom would cut up some Colby cheese into small pieces and I’d put a piece inside of each Bugel and joyfully eat. I’d love to eat that snack again, I don’t know if Bugels even exist! I think about this snack every time I listen to Julia Turshen’s awesome podcast where she asks her guests, “what was your favorite thing to eat growing-up?”. Bugels & Cheese!!!
Wow, I need to find Bugles ASAP! And according to my mom, this snack was called “googles & cheese” since apparently I couldn’t pronounce the B. And this was early 80s, long before Google!!! 😂
Animal crackers used to be one of my main binge foods in college. I'd get them from the vending machines and use them to dull my inadequacies and I loved the gummy residue around my teeth gave me something to work on. Now we have a gigantic tub of them in the basement that we never dip into for some reason (I think because it doesn't come in pre packaged bags, so, forget it.) The one time we dug into them was a few weeks ago when we had to go into the basement when the tornado sirens were going off and we were all amped up and they were delicious.
Fruit snacks! These may have been my two year olds first “two word” phrases and he chose wisely I’d say. They are so good, and I love having them in our home and enjoying them with my kids.
I also would never envisioned celebrating this before reading your work Virginia, so thanks for all you do. I am a newb but I am getting the hang of it!
I recently gave myself permission to buy the store-made chocolate chip cookies at Costco and I’m so glad I did. They are so delicious and satisfying, and scratch the same itch as homemade cookies without having to turn the oven on.
Microwaved popcorn that isn't mostly plain. When I dieted, I would buy the Orville Redenbacher stuff that's barely flavored, almost no butter or anything to make it taste, you know, good. I don't eat it that often because it gives me some digestive trouble, but now I buy the butter kind because it's what I really love and what I crave when I want popcorn. (Movie theater popcorn is my favorite thing, when I'm actually going to movie theaters!)
Morning Star veggie sausage! I grew up mostly vegetarian and this was a weekend breakfast staple and god I love it. I don’t love a lot of fake meat (oddly most of it is TOO meaty) but Morning Star products have a flavor profile that is baked into my DNA.
My husband is a vegetarian and he has the "too meaty" complaint about Impossible Burgers, but he loves Beyond Meat. The Morningstar Farms frozen products are a staple in our household.
I feel like the act of feeling guilty about this type of food, which carries the whiff of "health" in addition to being processed, is like ADVANCED diet culture. Like, beginner diet culture involves feeling guilty about straight up "junk food" like candy and chips, but the more advanced level is attaching shame to stuff like this. Certain people take the opportunity to point out, "You know, that stuff isn't actually healthy," if you're seen eating any packaged food product that is associated with health claims of any kind (even just meatlessness).
Which brings to mind the question: What foods are there that diet culture has NOT fostered guilt about? Anything besides leafy greens and water?
This is exactly it. Totally advanced diet culture wherein you learn that absolutely everything is bad for you except (organic) arugula and air. It’s so insidious and to me also really mirrors the GMO conversation in that genetically modified food is not inherently bad and we’ve been doing it basically forever via selective breeding which feels “natural” only when compared with doing essentially the same thing in a lab. All of this also feels super connected to the larger conversation of “wellness” and “wholeness” which has a lot of connections and roots in fascism and purity culture at large. Oh ye whole thing is just mind boggling on so many levels.
What I find so interesting about this whole thing is I definitely learned / hear a lot about processed foods being bad but (and you talk about this, Virginia) there is just this whole new wave of packaging/marketing about "better" (read: more expensive, "organic" sometimes meaningless other labels) processed foods.. like, Annie's cheddar bunnies instead of Goldfish, Annie's mac n cheese instead of Kraft, Kashi cereal bars instead of NutriGrain bars, Kind choc chip bars instead of Chewy, etc etc etc... some of it has some value like I do prefer things that are full fat and have sugar instead of fat free and sugar free/aspartame loaded, because I do think it's healthier for my toddler to have "real" ingredients but I just get freaked out by all the chemicals ... anyway, our house is LOADED with processed foods and we usually have both the more expensive versions and the less expensive versions because we dont' consistently shop at any one store so when I go to Whole Foods we get the Annie's products and when I go to Giant we get the classics ;) so to speak.
I think I'm of the millenial crew that used processed foods to diet.. like my friend ONLY ate gummy candy for like, a month, as her diet... then she only ate tastee de light for a month on another diet, then JUST peanut butter but the Skippy light peanut butter .. so I think my relationship with processed foods is unhealthy in that often I'd have processed foods to replace meals (never as extreme as that friend but I'd have a bag of Doritoes instead of dinner in law school, for example) so for me I'm working on finding the healthy balance between how and when to eat processed foods as part of my intuitive eating journey.
A part of me believes that processed food has always been a part of my life - I mean, bread, pasta, dairy, all are processed, and a belief that I have had ultra-processed foods in my life, meaning baked goods, chips, ice cream, snack foods, puddings, etc., in addition to foods that nourish my body to reduce disease risk, etc. Yet, it's the "belief" those need to be limited that I'm losing. Yay!
I give my four year old all the snacks that weren't allowed in my house in the 90's. Goldfish, frozen chicken nuggets (thawed, of course), cheetos etc. It continues to be strange to have these things in my house because they scream no! to me. Also, Friday donuts have become a ritual for us. I can remember as a kid thinking donuts were the shit. I could eat an entire box then and now. I'm still working on giving myself permission to eat one. It's also hard as hell to find the cut off point for her when I know she could possibly make herself sick or become a crazy sugar-crazed toddler if she eats a few. It feels really good to see her enjoy these foods guilt free.
I have been on a chipotle obsession for months now. I get the burrito bowl with extra steak and spicy salsa with a lot of chips. I have been feeling guilty about it, not because of the food, but because of the expense. It’s like multiple times a week. 😬 But it’s definitely my comfort food. I call it my emotional support chipotle.
I’ve loved canned corned beef hash since I was a kid. My parents served everything at home and we had a very diverse mix of foods. My dad was a great cook and loved hash, too, but he would make the “real stuff” out of leftover corned beef, with fresh potatoes. I’d be like, “Cool. Uhh, can I get that can of Prudence, though?” Which he was fine with. I still buy canned hash and eat it if it’s something I want to have. It’s a very shamed food, but I don’t buy into food having good/bad labels anymore. That has helped a lot in my recovery. It’s still hard, though, to listen to the judgments others make about how simply liking the taste of a certain food reflects on an individual’s sophistication or “palette.” 🙄
I've never dieted per se, but I did avoid highly processed foods for the most part for a while back before I had kids.
I like cheese spreads. My current favorite is Trader Joe's Unexpected Cheddar. I never really gave up crackers like Cheezits and Saltines. I buy my fair share of Girl Scout Cookies when the season comes around.
I also have given myself permission to eat "corner store food" when I really want to, usually when I'm at a job with limited break time, because sometimes I just can't bear to pack myself lunch in the morning/night before. Things like Lunchables and bagel dogs and microwaveable egg-and-sausage biscuit sandwiches and things like that.
And Pringles. Sometimes all I want for lunch is a purchased tuna sandwich in a triangle box, a bottled iced tea, and some Pringles.
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I was just talking with my friend last night about the joys of those processed snacks invented in the first half of the 20th century, back when we were learning how to mass produce foods and use all these new technologies. It's interesting to think how processed foods used to be seen as very "wave of the future" in contrast to how they are viewed today. Shouldn't it be exciting that we have all these ways of feeding more people more easily and affordably? And making sweets accessible which was not always the case for a large chunk of history!
I grew up with a mom who loved to try new foods and gimmicky limited edition snacks and flavors, and this love has been passed down to me. I seem to really enjoy all the stuff that other people hate, like candy corn, Necco Wafers, and Tootsie Rolls. I bought like 5 types of Moon Pies in Nashville last year, which has to be the most oldey-time snack ever, and I concluded that the vanilla reigns supreme. Also, when I studied abroad for a semester in college, the things I found myself craving were very American processed foods, particularly Bisquik pancakes, Reese's everything, and seasonal stuff that normally would have been available in the spring like Conversation Hearts and Girl Scout cookies.
I am parenting a teen through ED recovery and WOW have we been on a processed food journey. I'm so grateful that I've learned about the ideas that "all foods fit" and that, if she is to recover fully, she's gotta be exposed to as much as possible. So I've recently bought pop tarts (kinda underwhelming, honestly), Swedish fish (AMAZING), those "fancy" Pepperidge Farms cookies (also kinda disappointing), Klondike bars, Cheez-its and many, many boxes of Oreos (big cheers for these last three).
I absolutely love that you're supporting your teen this way and with so many delicious foods.
I have NEVER given up "processed" foods. The whole idea of "processed = BAD" is so bound up with classism to me. Like, the whole idea that well-educated liberal urbanites don't eat processed food, so if you do, especially while not being thin, you must be low-class. Which is why I BRISTLE whenever anyone poohpoohs processed foods. It reads to me as a passive-aggressive classist dig.
I love Cinnabon and those Pillsbury rolls that come in the cylinder-shaped container. Especially the Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that have Cinnabon icing. They're so gooey and wonderful. And I see pushback about this everywhere. One time I read a nonfiction book in which the author passed a Cinnabon in an airport, and was so knee-jerk about how gross and off-putting it was to him, as if anyone literate enough to read his book would automatically agree, and I couldn't help but notice that he had gone to boarding school, so I was like, "How much boarding school do you need to have attended in order to really hate Cinnabon with all your heart and soul?"
I went to an elite liberal arts college, and in the 26 years since I graduated, I have seen so much smug, self-satisfied rhetoric on the part of fellow alumni on this topic. Someone had a blog all about how they were raising their baby with only homemade food, and there was a post where the baby ate yogurt, and I thought, Do you milk the cows yourself and add the probiotic cultures by hand? Honestly.
Or there's this meme I've seen around the internet about "habits Americans have that people from other countries find weird" and they mentioned "canned bread," i.e. the Pillsbury cylindrical packages, with the implication that if you're worldly and well-traveled, if you're as sophisticated as a EUROPEAN and you aren't an UGLY AMERICAN, you will be grossed out by "canned bread."
Completely agree with your analysis; there is a ton of classism (and also racism) bound up in our disdain for processed foods. Also we should be heralding canned bread as one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.
Absolutely agree. I was going to sit out this thread, because I grew up eating so many processed foods that it was just food in our household. I was raised lower-middle-class/blue collar, and in the 1960s-1970s US, so many processed foods seemed amazing to my parents. They were also often cheaper. I think I was in high school before I learned that Velveeta blocks were not cheese, but “cheese food”. (First time I ate scrambled eggs without Velveeta I thought something was wrong with them!)
My mom regularly served side dishes of scalloped potatoes from a box or Kraft mac and cheese or instant mashed potatoes. They saved her time and money.
I think there is a lot of patriarchal bullshit tied up in elitist shaming of processed foods, too. I often think of Michael Pollan calling out “women entering the workforce” as an event that destroyed American food culture. Hell yes, I want to save time and money with convenience foods. Packing school lunches is not where I find my bliss or how I show my love.
For sure! The patriarchy ruins everything.
There's a difference between noticing and criticizing.
True - but his way of noticing without acknowledging that women in the workforce has been important, necessary and beneficial in so many other ways never felt productive to me.
I feel like you'd love the book Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution by S. Margot Finn!
Ooh, this sounds right up my ally. Thanks for the rec.
*alley
Boxed mixes. Pancakes, muffins, whatever. I went thru a phase of thinking it was strictly homemade or nothing so I could avoid the negative “are those blueberries even REAL?” crap. I have forgiven myself for a) not being super mommy and making everything from scratch with my special recipe that I’ll hand down to the kids and their kids and b) thinking the boxes are generally more tasty anyway!
100% agree. I make pancakes and brownies way more often since I embraced the box mixes, which means I'm cooking more (and more happily) with my kids, which seems good for them in all sorts of ways. I think the simplicity of box mixes make cooking with kids so much more accessible!
I love muffin mix of all kinds! So easy and yummy. I like to bake them in a bread pan to make the process even quicker.
Boxed mixes are amazing! And if you want to be additionally creative (though it's totally unnecessary!), they're a great shortcut to a rainbow cake, for example. My son wanted a "rainbow unicorn birthday" during the pandemic, so I bought a GIANT box of white boxed mix and added food coloring for layers. Otherwise, the whole endeavor would have been WILDLY overwhelming and I wouldn't have been able to manage. The box-mix cake was super delicious!
The Krusteaz cinnamon coffee cake is killer!
It is the best. We get the gluten free version and it is one of my favorite foods ever.
Boxed cake mixes are a life saver! I love to bake from scratch when the time allows, however I also have some amazing family recipes that rely on boxed Duncan Hines mixes. Pure delicious nostalgia.
I've come full circle from being a full "Michael Pollan Fan" to eating whole fruits and veggies, whole grains etc. AND loving the ease and convenience of frozen veggies, pre-made pancake mix, and my COSTCO sized bag of peanut m and m's in the freezer (the freezer gives them an extra satisfying crunch!). For me, it's both/and. I've found somewhat of a balance, and while I'm not great at it, I'm at least on the journey.
Side note- I'm thinking of subscribing, and trying it out for a month first. Do I get access to back issues at all? I'm interested in some articles you wrote earlier this month... Keep up the wonderful work Virginia!
I am also on that reformed Pollan fan journey and YES to frozen M&Ms. Also yes to paid subscribers getting archives access! Thanks so much for reading.
As far as Michael Pollan goes, I have a gorgeous framed letter print poster in my office (I’m a registered dietitian) that says “Eat food, not too much, mostly chocolate”!!! Seeing it gives me SO much satisfaction.
I love that! And totally need to find a copy of that for my kitchen…
https://www.ohladycakes.com/shop/mostly-chocolate
Honestly, I feel like so much diet food *is* processed food. That said, BAKED CHEETOS.
Yes! That was our discussion last week... and reclaiming the processed diet foods can be just as important!
OMG, Baked BBQ Lays for me! 😍
Yes! Do you remember Snackwells Devil's Food Cake? It was like eating cardboard and I can remember my mom saying, "These are delicious...I feel like I'm overindulging." <insert eye roll> I would eat the whole box, feel unsatisfied because they weren't real food or chocolate for that matter. lol
S’mores! I went camping with my family last weekend and on our last night I made myself a s‘more. For years I have denied myself s’mores while camping, but doing the work of intuitive eating and discarding diet culture I thought I’d give it a try. It was so delightful in every way. I can’t wait to go camping again and try out giving myself free access to s’mores the entire trip!
omg i love s'mores so much my birthday present this year was an indoors s'mores maker.
Although it's advice that I first read in the 1980s, in Fat is a Feminist Issue, it's taken me until now to stock my house with lots of snacks and sweets. I have a candy jar, big storage bins full of sweet and salty snacks, usually dark chocolate almond bark in the fridge. This works for my kid and me -- we have the assurance that we can eat what we want, when we want to eat it.
Fat Is A Feminist Issue was so ahead of its time!
Except that ultimately, the goal was still to make us thin. :-/
Oh yes, that part was not so great. Just the making peace with food!
This is a good read. The book originally may have promoted the idea that such practices would lead to thinness, but this piece indicates that Orbach's thinking continued to evolve. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/24/forty-years-since-fat-is-a-feminist-issue
Thank you - this was worth reading. It seems more that she’s acknowledged how much the world has changed than that she has changed, though.
Despite my critique now, it would be hard to understate how powerful Fat Is A Feminist Issue was for me when I first read it, as a high school student in the late 1970s. It prompted me to give up dieting and toss my scale a few years later! It is arguably one of the texts that pushed me to a career of feminist writing.
I also think Fat is a Feminist issue was a great introductory text! Found it at a thrift store. For me it's in the same category as Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth. I have now moved past it (I think Christy Harrison says it's still a book about 'loving yourself thin') but at the time it was a really important stepping stone.
*understate should have been overstate. Oops.
Just wanted to say that this thread convinced me to subscribe. What a bunch of cool, hilarious, supportive people! See you all next week.
This fills me with so much joy, thank you!
All of them. Seriously. I always have chips and candy in my house. It's the most radical thing for me now. I let my kid make a marshmallow and sour patch kids snack bowl yesterday. I don't like cooking so when I do it's invariably from something frozen (frozen veggies and fruits, frozen protein, etc.). For actual health reasons, my husband and I have to incorporate certain foods that otherwise I'd not give a wit about but other than that? No more making food the enemy.
So here for this!
I will say, my kids both have ASD and are extremely picky eaters, so that’s really helpful to me in terms of thinking of all food as equal. I struggled a bit when all my son would eat was brownie Z-Bars, but I didn’t want to build an anxiety around it so we just keep them available. Some days he has four bars and nothing else, some days he has none and eats a stalk of celery with peanut butter and a pint of halved raw cherry tomatoes two at a time. He’s gonna eat (or not eat) what he wants, and nothing I do is going to make a meaningful difference. I have to let go of my own food issues to not pass them on. (Which everyone here knows. ha)
For myself, I’ve accepted processed breakfast foods. Cereal, those little Belvita breakfast cookies, yogurt with little mix-ins. I struggle with breakfast in terms of time and wanting to eat, so something palatable that I can eat quickly and also enjoy is huge. Enjoying what you eat makes it easier to eat, who knew?
I love Cheerios so much. I know they don’t sound like a demonised processed food but they totally are. I can’t remember what’s wrong with them but trust me, some people have found it. (I also love cheez-its and I am going to try a Doritos Locos taco from Taco Bell someday I swear.)
Cheerios Shaming is so hilarious to me. I feel like not having Cheerios in the house is like not having bread, milk or eggs. Like how are these people functioning?!
It SO does! Love all of this and putting Belvita breakfast cookies on my shopping list...
Belvita and milky coffee are made for each other
My son ate a Belvita packet every day for years and somewhere along the way he started calling them "foot cookies" (because to a small child they looked like feet?" I kinda miss that habit because not having to make decisions before coffee is amazing.
Definitely still early on the food reclaiming and food neutrality adventure, but WHEW, Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles chips. I can't wait for the day those are guilt-free.
You will get there and it will be glorious!
American Cheese, it’s gold, man! There’s nothing like it in a cheese omelet or a grilled cheese - ooey, gooey, good! (And yeah, if you asked me a year ago, I would have said it was “poison.”
American cheese--the Land o' Lakes block from the deli. I used to eat American cheese on saltines as a kid, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. About a year ago I bought some American for the first time in a looong time and redid the childhood snack. It's not quite as transcendent as I remembered, but it sure is comforting.
Omg, I thought I was the only one who did this saltine American cheese thing? It was my 1990s version of charcuterie. Sometimes I even melted the cheese for 10 seconds in the microwave. Sublime.
Cheese on saltines was my snack every day when I came home from school and I'm pretty sure that was processed American cheese although maybe it was cheap cheddar. I took great pride in cutting neat little squares and laying them out on the plate. My mom was really good at making hors d'oeuvres and I suppose I was modeling myself on that.
Oh that does sound so comforting.
I have also recently reclaimed American cheese - SO GOOD in omelets or in a grilled cheese with white bread 🍞
Foods available in my house that adults and/or kids (ages 6 & 8) eat but you would not have seen here five years ago: Eggos, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, cheez-its, cheetos, frozen french fries, bagel bites, nutrigrain bars, cup o'noodles, kraft mac & cheese, that kraft parmesan cheese knockoff in the green can, and I am sure there are more.
Here's the thing--none of us go for these foods all the time and open packages have been known to get stale just because no one chooses them and all options are open. When I never bought cheez-its, I couldn't "trust" myself with them and now they are always here and I have some when I feel like it but I legit just don't feel like it that much because I'm busy eating some other kind of cracker with cheese on it.
Wheat thins! Gave them up when I was following strict rules for “health” (actually dieting). Now I eat some most days with cheese and they are perfect. My toddler actually doesn’t even like them.
One food I’m working on is little debbies. My mind sees them as the worst for some reason and I won’t give them to my kiddo either (I give him lots of different foods). For some reason they are a different type of food to me??
I hope you find a way to enjoy Little Debbies because they are SO GOOD! I love the oatmeal cookie sandwiches, we always had a box or two around because my dad packed one in his work lunch every single day for years.
Ritz crackers... I love them, my kids love them, but I still have a hard time bringing them into my house because I just feel like they're so nutritionally empty, I guess? Sigh.
They are so buttery delicious! And great with cheese or as a vehicle for so many other things... (But also fine to eat straight!)
It’s so 70s but Ritz crackers with any kind of tuna or chicken salad thing is BALLER. Like, magically delicious.
Yes! I even love getting fancy tuna packed in olive oil and putting it directly on the Ritz cracker... So, so good
They are the best. Pro tip: top them with a few chocolate chips. Still empty but it’s seriously my favorite pandemic “recipe” so far.
OMG, this is legit genius. (Could we add a layer of peanut butter? Did I just make it even more amazing or too much paint on that canvas?)
Midwestern Christmas cookie is two ritz crackers with pb in the middle dipped in chocolate with red/green sprinkles. Usually are gone first from the cookie tray!
Or marshmallow creme? Savory s’more?
Ok that sounds amazing. I will have to try it!
Topped with cheese, dipped in chili, straight out of the wrapper, Ritz is the food of the gods and I maintain the Costco box sized inventory of them at all times in my abode.
When I first started my anti-diet journey there were so many! The main ones were chips and french onion dip, Welch's gummies, pop-tarts, "kid's" cereal, and slice/bake chocolate chip cookies. Also Taco Bell.
Stream of consciousness writing and journaling in general really helped me to work through any guilt I had with eating the foods I wanted.
Love that!
Oreo soup! I used to break a bunch of oreos up into 3-4 pieces and put them in milk and eat them like cereal. I still enjoy oreos happily now but haven't done it this way since I was a kid, so am going to push myself to do it soon! <3
OMG, yes. Like Oreo ice cream but more efficient.
Kraft mac & cheese - I like to add garlic powder & bacon. So good!
I eat Kraft mac & cheese at least a couple times a month! I love it plain but use butter and half & half instead of just plain milk to make the sauce a little creamier. We didn't eat it a lot at home growing up, but my cool older cousin would make it for us when she baby-sat so it's got a special association for me.
so good with "everything bagel" seasoning!
Reposting in the right place—my guilty pleasure is always a spoonful (or five) straight from the pot. Especially if it’s been sitting and has congealed a bit or whatever that stuff does over time. Better than from a bowl any day.
Nothing guilty about that pleasure!
No, my only guilt is that it’s the same spoon I serve everyone with. Sorry not sorry :) Only immediate family, of course!
My kids will only eat the Annie’s but I have to have Kraft—and I think it’s just whatever you grew up with.
Ok, my favorite food snack (as a very young kid) was Bugels and cheese. My mom would cut up some Colby cheese into small pieces and I’d put a piece inside of each Bugel and joyfully eat. I’d love to eat that snack again, I don’t know if Bugels even exist! I think about this snack every time I listen to Julia Turshen’s awesome podcast where she asks her guests, “what was your favorite thing to eat growing-up?”. Bugels & Cheese!!!
Bugles do still exist! We had some recently - love this idea of adding cheese!
Wow, I need to find Bugles ASAP! And according to my mom, this snack was called “googles & cheese” since apparently I couldn’t pronounce the B. And this was early 80s, long before Google!!! 😂
If you add cheese, can you still put them on your fingertips to make Disney villain nails?
Sadly, no. But you can fill Bugles with cheese and then put pitted olives on your fingers instead!
Animal crackers used to be one of my main binge foods in college. I'd get them from the vending machines and use them to dull my inadequacies and I loved the gummy residue around my teeth gave me something to work on. Now we have a gigantic tub of them in the basement that we never dip into for some reason (I think because it doesn't come in pre packaged bags, so, forget it.) The one time we dug into them was a few weeks ago when we had to go into the basement when the tornado sirens were going off and we were all amped up and they were delicious.
Fruit snacks! These may have been my two year olds first “two word” phrases and he chose wisely I’d say. They are so good, and I love having them in our home and enjoying them with my kids.
I also would never envisioned celebrating this before reading your work Virginia, so thanks for all you do. I am a newb but I am getting the hang of it!
Yay, I love this!
I recently gave myself permission to buy the store-made chocolate chip cookies at Costco and I’m so glad I did. They are so delicious and satisfying, and scratch the same itch as homemade cookies without having to turn the oven on.
Those are soooo good. Have you ever sandwiched a scoop of ice cream between two cookies? Also delish …
I love where your head is at! Going to have to try this.
Microwaved popcorn that isn't mostly plain. When I dieted, I would buy the Orville Redenbacher stuff that's barely flavored, almost no butter or anything to make it taste, you know, good. I don't eat it that often because it gives me some digestive trouble, but now I buy the butter kind because it's what I really love and what I crave when I want popcorn. (Movie theater popcorn is my favorite thing, when I'm actually going to movie theaters!)
Morning Star veggie sausage! I grew up mostly vegetarian and this was a weekend breakfast staple and god I love it. I don’t love a lot of fake meat (oddly most of it is TOO meaty) but Morning Star products have a flavor profile that is baked into my DNA.
My husband is a vegetarian and he has the "too meaty" complaint about Impossible Burgers, but he loves Beyond Meat. The Morningstar Farms frozen products are a staple in our household.
I feel like the act of feeling guilty about this type of food, which carries the whiff of "health" in addition to being processed, is like ADVANCED diet culture. Like, beginner diet culture involves feeling guilty about straight up "junk food" like candy and chips, but the more advanced level is attaching shame to stuff like this. Certain people take the opportunity to point out, "You know, that stuff isn't actually healthy," if you're seen eating any packaged food product that is associated with health claims of any kind (even just meatlessness).
Which brings to mind the question: What foods are there that diet culture has NOT fostered guilt about? Anything besides leafy greens and water?
This is exactly it. Totally advanced diet culture wherein you learn that absolutely everything is bad for you except (organic) arugula and air. It’s so insidious and to me also really mirrors the GMO conversation in that genetically modified food is not inherently bad and we’ve been doing it basically forever via selective breeding which feels “natural” only when compared with doing essentially the same thing in a lab. All of this also feels super connected to the larger conversation of “wellness” and “wholeness” which has a lot of connections and roots in fascism and purity culture at large. Oh ye whole thing is just mind boggling on so many levels.
Morningstar Veggie Corn dogs are legit delicious.
I like these a lot. They go really well with a toasted frozen waffle.
We had Morning Star grillers last night for the first time in years and there is just something comforting about that flavor!
What I find so interesting about this whole thing is I definitely learned / hear a lot about processed foods being bad but (and you talk about this, Virginia) there is just this whole new wave of packaging/marketing about "better" (read: more expensive, "organic" sometimes meaningless other labels) processed foods.. like, Annie's cheddar bunnies instead of Goldfish, Annie's mac n cheese instead of Kraft, Kashi cereal bars instead of NutriGrain bars, Kind choc chip bars instead of Chewy, etc etc etc... some of it has some value like I do prefer things that are full fat and have sugar instead of fat free and sugar free/aspartame loaded, because I do think it's healthier for my toddler to have "real" ingredients but I just get freaked out by all the chemicals ... anyway, our house is LOADED with processed foods and we usually have both the more expensive versions and the less expensive versions because we dont' consistently shop at any one store so when I go to Whole Foods we get the Annie's products and when I go to Giant we get the classics ;) so to speak.
I think I'm of the millenial crew that used processed foods to diet.. like my friend ONLY ate gummy candy for like, a month, as her diet... then she only ate tastee de light for a month on another diet, then JUST peanut butter but the Skippy light peanut butter .. so I think my relationship with processed foods is unhealthy in that often I'd have processed foods to replace meals (never as extreme as that friend but I'd have a bag of Doritoes instead of dinner in law school, for example) so for me I'm working on finding the healthy balance between how and when to eat processed foods as part of my intuitive eating journey.
A part of me believes that processed food has always been a part of my life - I mean, bread, pasta, dairy, all are processed, and a belief that I have had ultra-processed foods in my life, meaning baked goods, chips, ice cream, snack foods, puddings, etc., in addition to foods that nourish my body to reduce disease risk, etc. Yet, it's the "belief" those need to be limited that I'm losing. Yay!
I give my four year old all the snacks that weren't allowed in my house in the 90's. Goldfish, frozen chicken nuggets (thawed, of course), cheetos etc. It continues to be strange to have these things in my house because they scream no! to me. Also, Friday donuts have become a ritual for us. I can remember as a kid thinking donuts were the shit. I could eat an entire box then and now. I'm still working on giving myself permission to eat one. It's also hard as hell to find the cut off point for her when I know she could possibly make herself sick or become a crazy sugar-crazed toddler if she eats a few. It feels really good to see her enjoy these foods guilt free.
I have been on a chipotle obsession for months now. I get the burrito bowl with extra steak and spicy salsa with a lot of chips. I have been feeling guilty about it, not because of the food, but because of the expense. It’s like multiple times a week. 😬 But it’s definitely my comfort food. I call it my emotional support chipotle.
I’ve loved canned corned beef hash since I was a kid. My parents served everything at home and we had a very diverse mix of foods. My dad was a great cook and loved hash, too, but he would make the “real stuff” out of leftover corned beef, with fresh potatoes. I’d be like, “Cool. Uhh, can I get that can of Prudence, though?” Which he was fine with. I still buy canned hash and eat it if it’s something I want to have. It’s a very shamed food, but I don’t buy into food having good/bad labels anymore. That has helped a lot in my recovery. It’s still hard, though, to listen to the judgments others make about how simply liking the taste of a certain food reflects on an individual’s sophistication or “palette.” 🙄
I've never dieted per se, but I did avoid highly processed foods for the most part for a while back before I had kids.
I like cheese spreads. My current favorite is Trader Joe's Unexpected Cheddar. I never really gave up crackers like Cheezits and Saltines. I buy my fair share of Girl Scout Cookies when the season comes around.
I also have given myself permission to eat "corner store food" when I really want to, usually when I'm at a job with limited break time, because sometimes I just can't bear to pack myself lunch in the morning/night before. Things like Lunchables and bagel dogs and microwaveable egg-and-sausage biscuit sandwiches and things like that.
And Pringles. Sometimes all I want for lunch is a purchased tuna sandwich in a triangle box, a bottled iced tea, and some Pringles.
Oh! And Spam! Spam fried rice and spam-and-eggs in the morning are two really quite glorious things.
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I was just talking with my friend last night about the joys of those processed snacks invented in the first half of the 20th century, back when we were learning how to mass produce foods and use all these new technologies. It's interesting to think how processed foods used to be seen as very "wave of the future" in contrast to how they are viewed today. Shouldn't it be exciting that we have all these ways of feeding more people more easily and affordably? And making sweets accessible which was not always the case for a large chunk of history!
I grew up with a mom who loved to try new foods and gimmicky limited edition snacks and flavors, and this love has been passed down to me. I seem to really enjoy all the stuff that other people hate, like candy corn, Necco Wafers, and Tootsie Rolls. I bought like 5 types of Moon Pies in Nashville last year, which has to be the most oldey-time snack ever, and I concluded that the vanilla reigns supreme. Also, when I studied abroad for a semester in college, the things I found myself craving were very American processed foods, particularly Bisquik pancakes, Reese's everything, and seasonal stuff that normally would have been available in the spring like Conversation Hearts and Girl Scout cookies.