Ravenous: on abolition and diet culture
There is something about being arrested that makes me ravenously hungry. More accurately, there is something about being freed from jail after being arrested that makes me aware of an insatiable hunger inside me that cannot be filled by anything but sharing a meal with friends.
There have been times when, after an arrest, I feel vast and bottomless; only an equally enormous, steaming plate of pasta and a brownie sundae can create the necessary sense of grounding after the unmooring experience of being in jail. There is something in a plate of fries, still shining with hot oil, that is the perfect antidote to the cold bench of a police van and the stale chill of a jail’s holding cell. There is something unruly in how they taste better stolen from a friend’s plate as you trade stories, breathing deeply once everyone is accounted for and able to gather around a table.
Or perhaps it is simply that laughter and good food stand in such diametric contrast to the goal of the prison system. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis explains that prison, “Functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited […] it relieves us of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.” Food — and reclaiming my body through it — is a path to embodiment in the fact of that abstraction. After several arrests for climate and environmental justice protests, I still relish this ritual each time.
Perhaps it is that there is a part of me that still views food as an extension of my rebellious acts, the ones that got me arrested in the first place. And the fries are simply a matter of “in for a penny, in for a pound.” Or perhaps the plate of fries is a more specific, more personal symbol. I want to tell you about my eating disorder—even though I can’t imagine anything more tedious than a white woman explaining her hangups about food. To be clear, it did not feel like an eating disorder at the time, but it was. I’m not sure any of us goes into a spiral with our relationship to our bodies and food intending to cultivate an eating disorder or knowing what one feels like.
I simply wanted, in the carceral way that the state demands compliance, control over a body that felt profoundly wild and dangerous. I believed the rules I created would provide me with the control that would ultimately lead to the pinnacle of wellness I’d been lusting after since my chronic pain began at 12. And rather than addressing the complex causes, it was easier in many ways to wage a years-long capitalism-fueled war of obedience and transactional compliance with my body. It was simpler to wrangle it into eating rules and punish it with overexercise than to touch my own pain with tenderness, to look into its face and surrender to the intimacy of being with myself.
The official name of my disorder was orthorexia, but I think of it like playing a slot machine that made me progressively sicker: a gambling addiction with my body as the lever. As long as I was willing to continue to pump money and attention and fixation and the “right” things into my body, I believed (foolishly) that it would eventually pay out a jackpot of indistinct “wellness” and I would know, at least for that moment, that I had been good and worthy and rightful enough. As with eating disorders, the opposite was true. Yet, as someone who had been experiencing chronic pain and disability from the age of twelve, the allure was undeniable. To offer up suffering in exchange for relief. To be willing to isolate myself in exchange for the ability to bask in the satisfaction in my temporary goodness.
As a recovering “pleasure to have in class” who has been chasing the high of goodness since childhood, unlearning obedience and becoming not just an anarchist, but an abolitionist, was a surprisingly easy transition for me—as long as the liberation at stake was someone else’s. My first official arrest was in March, 2006 at a Victoria’s Secret in Union Square in San Francisco. The company was sending out 1 million catalogs per day using paper sourced from endangered caribou habitat and traditional First Nations lands, and so I chained myself to a stone pillar in front of the store and was taken to a police station about a mile away, cited with interfering with a business and released. Since then, there have been a half a dozen or so additional arrests, give or take (at the time of publication).
Each of these left a traumatic residue. Despite my privilege, jail is ultimately a dehumanizing experience by design. It left the marks on my record, and the living memory of a dislocated shoulder, poorly healed. The unspoken understanding while in custody was that I was something less than fully human. Yet, given my beliefs, these comparatively small injustices I chose to endure have always felt worth the price I’ve paid to carry them with me. It is another form of withstanding small suffering for a greater sense of wellness.
Clearly, a diet is not prison. There is no orthorexia in any jail I have been to, with its bologna and mustard sandwiches on white bread. I have spent too much time peeling the slice of bologna off the bread, discarding it with my fingertips into the brown paper bag. I have spent way too much time spreading the same yellow mustard packet over the slices of Wonderbread and eaten that as a sandwich while I await arraignment. I cannot, and do not wish, to equate the two. And yet, they are born of the same spirit. They have the same practical origins in the US, which are anti-blackness, white supremacy, and capitalism. And they function in much the same way: through control, extraction, obedience, punishment, with the ever-present threat of ostracization, othering and unworthiness. The strategies of the prison industrial complex are devastating, even in their simplicity: to commit abandonment, isolation, violence, and demonization against prisoners — in the U.S., overwhelmingly Black — until sufficient atonement (as determined by a labyrinthine and nebulous system) and “appropriate” and “proportional” sacrifice is made.
Sometimes, I imagine how my life would be different if I hadn’t gotten my plea deal. I do not know who would have been made whole by my being convicted of a felony at 24 or by my spending five to eight years in prison. I would have missed my own wedding. And here is what my brain with its PTSD and survivor’s guilt wants to explain: I did nothing special to be spared. It was white privilege and telling my lawyer to reject my first plea deal and some arbitrary luck. I want to apologize for my freedom, to equivocate and explain how undeserving I am. But should any of us have to apologize or justify not being in a cage?
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Neither diet culture nor prisons accomplish their stated goals. Diets do not lead to permanent weight loss any more than prisons and policing lead to lower crime rates. At the root of these carceral attitudes is a question of what we take for granted and what we are willing to question. The same way incarceration shrouds itself in safety, diet culture wields health and wellness. In both cases, they are designed to create reward in the form of status for the compliant. Sabrina Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body, “In this way, the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.” Similarly, the prison industrial complex has done nothing to reduce crime rates or create safety in communities; rather, it functions primarily to create and reinforce those same hierarchies while extracting astronomical profits for the prison industry to create a smokescreen of safety and action.
Orthorexia, like any eating disorder, is not about food, but control. It is wrapped up in the purity culture of our evangelical nation—a lefty, hippie take on the puritanical attitudes that view certain foods as “sinful” and others as “good.” It takes a green juice-marinated view of sickness, health, pain, and healing that requires absolute obedience and offers the promise of well-being, longevity, beauty, and relief from suffering. Which is possible for a few, but (as with all experiences in a human body) temporary.
The term orthorexia was coined by Dr. Steven Bratman in 1996 and is marked by an obsessive preoccupation with healthy eating that ultimately constitutes self-harm. From the outside, orthorexia looks like what we are “supposed” to be doing with regards to food and eating, but has five warning signs when this behavior becomes an overwhelming fixation: a preoccupation with food and eating habits; extreme dietary rules; changes in mood and emotional distress; seeing food as “good” vs. “bad”; and food fixation that affects social interactions. While distinct from anorexia and bulimia, the primary function remains the same: restrict, isolate, exclude, and control.
As someone who has been arrested many times, I can draw a straight line between my eating disorder and the carceral attitudes of our society—especially toward the body. This is doubly-true for the bodies of marginalized genders and races.
On a collective scale, the antidote is abolition.
The corollary, on the individual level, is the socially-unacceptable unruliness of intuitive eating and the often messy process of restorative justice. A reliance on the innate knowledge of the body and self that not only does not require, but rejects outright, the expertise of those outside the self to create a relationship with food. This intuition threatens capitalism (and the diet and wellness industry), and ultimately the state itself. The untidiness of gathering for a meal with the express purpose of community, culture, and pleasure is at odds with the state’s coercive control of the body. Its purpose is not utilitarian: this food and this gathering are not aimed at productivity or efficiency, but enjoyment and camaraderie.
Which is maybe why that plate of fries after getting out of jail is so delicious. It is refusal to obey. It is the opposite of the scraps of food I’ve been offered in jail, when I’m offered food at all. It is hot and greasy and salty. It is imbued with the humanity of the person who prepared it, and energized by the company around the table. It is good enough to lick your fingers over. It is good enough to be worth stealing. It is resistance to how the state so often exacts compliance.
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In the U.S., we have become a people not only overpoliced and over-incarcerated (the United States has more incarcerated citizens than any other country in the world), but overly preoccupied with policing one another, even on an interpersonal level. We deem others’ choices “irresponsible” (without additional context) even in situations where it seems that individual choice has little to do with the matter. When others are imprisoned or die in medical poverty or simply exist in a body we deem immoral (i.e. fat or disabled), it appears as an opportunity to ostracize, dehumanize, and other.
This so-called irresponsibility is considered a crime against not just society, but the state itself. And this is also how the left exacts its own purity culture: by creating the illusion that personal choice and lifestyle activism will free us from, well, everything: from climate change to cancer. Whether it’s raw veganism or yoga or going plastic-free (none of which is necessarily bad on its own), the crunchy left has its own fixation on piety and fitness and “wellness” habits that confuse lifestyle politics for systemic change and are little more than personal choice, at best.
My orthorexia told me that all of this was an investment in myself—a mark of care for myself. Instead, it left me busy (making all that green juice is time consuming!), broke, and isolated. When my friends were all going out for pizza and beer, I was going to my ninth yoga class of the week or prepping my cleanse meal of brown rice and lentils for the next day. Sometimes, I’d sneak a cup of coffee in the middle of one of my cleanses, and utter the phrase that now makes me shudder: “I’m being so bad.” In fact, each cleanse was just another punitive way of keeping myself in line. Out of a desperate desire to be well—to be free of chronic pain and disability—I had poisoned myself with the belief that who and what I was needed fixing.
Though the exact cause is unknown, risk factors that increase an individual’s chance of developing orthorexia include: low self-esteem; a chemical imbalance in the brain; perfectionism; a strong need for structure in one’s life; and difficulty controlling emotions. As a perfectionistic trauma-survivor who has clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder, I was a prime target for orthorexia. Or perhaps this is how I was conditioned by society as a young woman: coached to aspire to an unnatural standard created by advertisers and influencers.
As a child of the 80’s, I grew up marinating in diet culture. The first time I remember adults around me dieting, I was in preschool—younger than my son is now. I didn’t understand what it meant other than these adults wanted the number on their bathroom scale to be a smaller number than the one they saw. But I did know we couldn’t eat out at our favorite Italian restaurant as often, which I remember thinking seemed like a bad trade-off. Everyone seemed to want a different body than the one they had, which made no sense to me, since I loved every pillowy inch of these people. I, on the other hand, was often the subject of praise for being tiny (partly due to a genetic condition that made me smaller than everyone else my age). The first time I remember wanting my body to be different than what it was, it was the summer after fourth grade. I was at a pool party with some family members and my uncle (by marriage) told me that I had great thighs. I longed to disappear, and whether that meant starving myself to evaporate completely or becoming large enough that my thighs would no longer count as “nice,” I wasn’t sure. But I never wore a bathing suit around him again. I punished myself internally for years, blaming myself for how he had made me feel in my body. As though I were something even at ten, available for the taking.
This is what the carceral mindset does. Even though I knew in my heart that he was being creepy, I punished myself for transgressing the unspoken boundary of having a body that created attention for itself in this way.
I grew up believing that police were safe; that they kept us safe; that if I were in trouble, I should find a police officer to help me. I know better now. I try to teach my son the truth without frightening him more than I need to. But he lives in the world. There is no shielding him completely. In the car on the way to a doctor’s appointment the other day, he told me about a friend at school who told him that cops were good because they stop people from stealing and doing bad things. I took a deep breath. Instead of reacting, I asked, “What do you think?” He didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure. “What do you think, mama?” “Well, Papa and I believe that we should make sure that people have enough so that they don’t need to steal, instead of spending that money punishing people.” He was quiet for a moment. From the front seat, I could hear the gears in his kindergarten mind cranking away. “So, the police do more harm than good.” I do not tell you this for clout or for you to witness my child’s uncanniness at five. But because it is proof that understanding that police do not keep us safe is not such a stretch. It is proof that our minds can imagine another way. We could dream an entirely different way into being within a generation.
With food, my son is free to take thirds or fourths, or to leave the table after three bites. I would rather teach him to trust his own hunger. I keep my mouth shut even if I spent more time than I’d like to admit making the dinner he did not eat.
The language that we use around bodies connotes something moral and carceral, which are two sides of the same coin in the US. The way we are asked to pay for our crimes and the way our punishment is exacted for transgressing against the mores of our society into criminality (of the law or of the body) presumes malice on the part of the transgressor. Or perhaps, whether in crime or in food, our bodies represent a moral failing: gluttony, sloth, greed. In our diets, we “work off” what we’ve eaten by exercising. In prison, we pay a “debt to society.” Each, a form of penance, that separates us from society. And none of this makes us—as a society—whole, because it isn’t designed to; but it does leave us starving, distracted, fragmented, and dismantled. If anything, the consequences reduce us to the most transactional elements of ourselves and our relationships. We become nothing more than the time we serve or the calories we don’t consume. The solutions we take for granted do nothing to restore us, individually or collectively, but exact more and more.
One thing I’ve come to believe is that no one can know someone who has been to prison and not be moved to abolition. I know this isn’t strictly true. I know that these stories, this humanity, does not always move people to this political conviction. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I don’t understand how knowing someone who has been to prison cannot move a person’s heart to abolition. Abolition is, after all, a matter of creating the conditions for a world without prisons. It is a matter of creating a world for all to thrive.
The arguments against the abolition of both prisons and diet culture often cloak themselves in hand-wringing concern over things like safety and health. The what-aboutism neglects the fact that neither diets nor prisons actually accomplish their stated goals of safety, well-being, and lasting rehabilitation. In diet culture, people believe they are able to ascertain health from body size and shape—and from there, establish a condescending “concern” for the assumptions about health, which may or may not be accurate. When I was at my smallest and (from the outside) maintaining a strict regime of “healthy” habits, I was deeply sick. I was taking up to three 90-minute yoga classes per day, consuming endless amounts of green juice and other markers of “clean” eating, and then binging alcohol whenever I wasn’t on a cleanse. My cleanses felt like penitence for all of my “unhealthy” choices and the foods that, left to my own devices, made me feel most satisfied. The only reward was the light (and light-headed) feeling of over-doing it with exercise and restrictive eating that I could not identify as hunger. For all of my talk of liberation and my activism, I had devised an Instagram-worthy prison for myself, so perfectly curated that from the outside, it looked like success and perfect control. From the inside, it only felt lonely and obsessive, and never perfect enough. For everyone’s concern over health, I was not any healthier. I did not have less pain from scoliosis. I did not avoid getting colds or having allergies. My mental health issues were not, it should be obvious, resolved in any way. But that did not keep me from thinking that I could “win” at having a body.
In a carceral society, that concern-trolling takes the shape of asking what we do about the mass murderers and rapists. Should we simply let them roam free, after all?
First of all, if you believe that we are actually holding rapists accountable in the US, then boy-howdy, do I have some terrible news for you. Because the numbers simply do not bear that out. According to the Washington Post, only 1% of rapes lead to felony prosecution; which means that the criminal justice system does not actually spend the vast percentage of its time, energy, and resources prosecuting (to conviction) crimes like rape and sexual assault. And those resources are tremendous. I live in Oakland, California, where our city’s police budget represents 22% of the budget for the entire city for a total of $335.8 million for fiscal year 2021-2022.
Abolition is a matter of imagination. It asks what would need to be different in order to deconstruct this system. My imagination wanders from there. Who would I be without the police and prisons? Who would my friends be? How might our communities be different without the specter of the prison industrial complex?
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Anyone who sets out to create abolition is doing so without a map, against the express wishes of the state. It is an act of faith, the definition of karma. It is a means of travel before it is a destination. Sometimes, we believe in it before we even wholly agree with it. Before we have alternatives in place or the scaffolding necessary to support it, it can feel like a cognitive leap to believe that abolition can succeed, without a current working model on a large scale. But this is no excuse not to begin to tear down this system. It begins with a belief that we can be safe without what the police have asserted as their value proposition: safety and peace, executed with the deterrent protection and punitive correction of carceral punishment. Where can we begin? With questioning whether that value proposition is what they have ever truly offered anyone but an elite and select few. It begins with the belief that we can, collectively, be whole, accomplished, loved, seen, care-for, and worthy without the adherence to an evangelical and fanatical devotion—whether to the police or to thinness—that many of us have been suffocating in for our entire lives. It is the belief that we can extend care and mercy and grace to one another without transactionality. That we can keep each other safe. That, in fact, we are the only ones who have ever kept one another safe. All of this may test our imaginations, and it should. It is an individual and collective longing not to be disposable, not to be so easily ostracized or cast-out for the small crimes for which so many have been rendered disposable. What would this require from us, collectively?
Such a shift rarely occurs by shouting down or overthrowing the entrenched power system by force. Success and progress within social movements occur by eroding the support from those responsible systems. This happens in waves, often; little by little, then in great leaps and bounds. I first learned the term “spectrum of allies” in my training as a nonviolent direct action trainer in 2007 with The Ruckus Society. This analysis places those affected by an issue along a spectrum, from active support to active opposition, with passive support, neutral parties, and passive opposition in between. By identifying those who will be affected, we can understand where and how to shift power toward our position; we do not attempt to move active opposition to active allyship, but rather to move stakeholders one position at a time toward active support of the issue.
This approach is one reason why “body positivity” feels hollow and often ineffective. We cannot shift from diet culture and body hatred to body positivity overnight; the expectation of positivity is too much. Instead, there has been a movement toward body neutrality, an acceptance of what is, rather than an insistence on celebration. When it comes to the body, neutrality can be a more useful place to start. And with that in mind, we can see that perhaps body positivity is the wrong goal entirely. Body positivity is yet another commodification by capitalism of our relationship to our bodies that sets us up to succeed or to fail. The real goal is not insisting that we find our individual bodies attractive, but instead a collective recognition of fat liberation, disability justice, and decarceration.
In order to exert control, first we must sever empathy. We must intentionally forget interdependence and interrelationship in order to create the duality necessary for cops and diet culture to exist. There needs to be good and bad, a villain and a hero, in order to support the logic of these systems. We must create an other. The only way both can remain profitable economies is to not only meet their demand for, but to make scalable, suffering and sacrifice. In order to exist, they must constantly reinforce the belief in control and punishment as solutions. This turns us into warring factions within our own bodies and erodes class solidarity with white nationalism so we can be more easily fractured and therefore controlled. Kept poor, distracted, exhausted, isolated, broken, and hungry.
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Direct action aims to do four essential things. Foremost, to disrupt business as usual. The disruption is the point, whether we are blocking a freeway or shutting down a bank. Also: to build power, to raise the stakes, and to communicate our message. Sometimes, in order to clarify the emergency nature of the issue at hand — the climate crisis; labor rights abuses; police murder of Black people — direct action is necessary. It is not merely a tactic to exact a particular outcome, but a strategy of escalation and disruption that serves as a warning shot to others. Risk is a part of this. In exchange for this strategy, those of us who engage in direct action continually make ourselves—collectively and individually—a target.
Which is not to say I never feel doubt or hopelessness in my work. The belief that interrupts the doubt or resistance is this: Incarceration does not keep us safe; it keeps us separate. Diet culture does not keep us healthy; it keeps us lonely. When I want to apologize for surviving and escaping the system again and again, I remember that none of us deserve to live under a police state or under the thumb of diet culture. Recovery is cyclical. I am caught between impeccable self-care as an act of rebellion and self-respect of myself just as I am. I feel the panic of a metaphorical prison any time I make any kind of rules for myself. It is a process.
As someone with multiple disabilities that cause me real, physical pain, my relationship with my body remains fraught. But I have reached a certain peace that is built on listening and on refusing to punish the body when it asks for help and care. For years, my internalized ableism told me that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Too many people promised me that with appropriate effort and restriction that I could heal myself. That, through obedience, I could make my pain go away. That one day, I could wake up cured. But it only gave me new ways to fail and evidence, in my ongoing pain, that I had not only failed, but maliciously sabotaged myself. I could either betray the false hope of “wellness” or betray my intuition which tried desperately to convince me that maybe I wasn’t totally fucked if I ate that donut. I wanted what was promised to me, so I chose to betray my intuition, over and over again.
After I gave birth to my son, my hunger was insatiable. There was no diet or “pre-baby body” or “bouncing back”. There was an all-out, no-calorie-left-behind endless buffet of food which began when I first opened my eyes and lasted, without exaggeration, all day. I was either feeding my child or myself at all hours of the day, often both simultaneously. After feeding him at 3am, I would slink down to the kitchen to fortify myself with lactation cookies made with barley malt, flax meal, and double the chocolate chips. It felt like a race to feed myself enough to feel satisfied. Enormous bowls of fried rice, thick lentil stews, triple cheese baked ziti, and smoothies were my calorie-dense go-tos. The recipe for my smoothies was: a whole can of full-fat coconut milk; an entire avocado; chocolate protein powder; and whatever frozen fruit I had on hand. This made two smoothies, both of which I would consume in a day (one in the morning, one in the afternoon), in addition to three or four full meals each day. I had never known hunger like this, and it would not be ignored. Breastfeeding, for me, was a war of attrition. I could barely keep up. I tried (and often failed) not to need a snack in the middle of a shower. There was no intuition or plan to follow besides feeding my body whatever it asked for.
It seemed nothing was enough to rebuild my body after a difficult pregnancy, a birth that nearly ended my life, and a child who could not get enough. This time required me to set down any notions of good or bad, right or wrong, even healthy and unhealthy. It required me to make up for years of care that I’d denied myself. It offered me a true understanding that I had made a miracle with my body, and that anyone who wanted to gripe at me about cellulite or saggy anything or a number on a scale was not only terminally missing the point, but could eat shit. In retrospect, it should not have taken making a human and his placenta; enduring 20 hours of birth and 40 stitches; and providing 18 months of breastfeeding to arrive at this simple understanding. My body is allowed to evolve. My hunger is real. I am worthy of being satisfied without justification.
Food I have consumed while writing this essay: a bowl of pineapple chunks, 2 mint Milano cookies, half a papaya, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of Maui onion chips, several veggie hot dogs, half a cinnamon roll with cream cheese icing, cases worth of Pamplemousse La Croix, several pieces of spinach-mushroom quiche, and approximately 8,000 cups of coffee. And here, I notice my mind’s desire to hedge or explain or contextualize all of that; to apologize or minimize. I am neither good nor bad, I want to say. I am neither restricting myself, nor am I completely out of control. I want to explain to you that I am the exact perfect balance of indulgent and intuitive, while including food that makes it appear as though I value my body. This is the insidious nature of eating disorder recovery. It is a forever thing. It is a metaphorical cage that still makes me feel as though I am facing judgment and punishment. It does something radical to my brain to include this list. And now, I am thinking about eating deep fried pickles. And now, I am wondering about my metabolism. The avalanche of thoughts doesn’t ever truly end. But I have, at least for this season, managed to set down the misery of intentional weight loss and anything that smacks of a wellness fad. I choose recovery and to forgive myself for the self-abandonment I committed against this home of skin and bone. Anyone who has ever uttered the words, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” has clearly never eaten an entire plate of fries at the Irish Bank Pub after getting cited and released for occupying a bank with her best friends. Perhaps it is a psychosomatic response, but I am always ravenous. Pancakes. Veggie burgers. A plate of pasta the size of my rib cage. I welcome anything starchy and greasy. Something soft. Something warm.
I choose, every day, to fortify my body. I choose not to call that a crime. The crimes I choose are ones of necessity: the ones that bring me face to face with a justice system that is anything but just.
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Sources
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/by-eating-disorder/other/orthorexia
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/orthorexia-nervosa-101
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6370446/
https://integrativelifecenter.com/what-are-the-five-warning-signs-of-orthorexia/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696560/
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/eating-disorders/what-is-orthorexia
https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12311750/ :~:text=While%20those%20cuts%20did%20happen,following%202021%2D2022%20fiscal%20year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than-percent-rapes-lead-felony-convictions-least-percent-victims-face-emotional-physical-consequences/
https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/that-diet-probably-did-not-work :~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20weight,people%20maintain%20that%20weight%20loss
Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
We Do This Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, Sabrina Strings

Christy Tending (she/they) is the author of High Priestess of the Apocalypse. Their work has been published in Longreads, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, and has received a notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. They are the recipient of a residency at Yaddo and the Birdcoat Editors’ Prize in the Essay 2024. They live in Oakland, California with their family. You can learn more about their work at christytending.com. Photo by Molly Kate Photography.