ABSTRACT
This personal essay reflects on my experiences as a Jewish lesbian in an eating study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the summers of 1984 and 1985. As the “normal volunteer” in a pool of female patients battling anorexia and bulimia, I had the opportunity to clarify my appetites, tastes, and general health in a clinical protocol. It was a point in history when many gay men were marked publicly with the “wasting” appearance of AIDS, and many straight women struggled with eating disorders; yet few studies examined lesbian health, body size, self-image, or eating patterns. Aware of such politics, plus the debates over what constituted healthy eating in white America, and the new conditions allowing lesbians to signify as healthy when once defined by science as “sick,” at age 23 I began to examine the positive, sensuous food messages from my Jewish heritage. The essay moves from the NIH setting of “hospital food” to the interconnectedness of dating, eating, and ethnicity, themes of Jewish lesbian identity that were visible in new 1980s publications from lesbian presses. Against this backdrop, I also recall the sometimes-humorous food politics in lesbian group living at the time: how the well-meaning, rigid shopping scruples of some households unintentionally marginalized women of colour and Jews. Drawing on actual events from the mid-1980s, I revisit my own concerns (during graduate school in women’s history) that diet culture and medical nutrition studies serve mainstream notions of female health. In contrast to the patients I befriended at NIH, I lived an out lesbian life that was centred not on self-denial but, instead, a robust embracing of all my appetites, from culinary to sexual to scholarly. This essay is intended as a conversation starter on diversity in food studies, for allies to the LGBTQ community.
