Category Archives: Personal

The Making Of Food

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Nutrition plays a vital part with our bodies, which keeps us growing, this educates and develops our knowledge with taste, smells and experience with foods.  Process of food changes within the social context that I am in, for instance, I relate food as a pleasurable and social situation making the process of food something I enjoy doing.  When making a homemade dinner I tend to add spices and different flavours to create a tasteful dinner which I appreciate it.

‘Cooking is a moral process, transferring raw matter from ‘nature’ to the state of ‘culture’, and thereby taming and domesticating it. This act may be as simple as plucking a piece of fruit from a tree and washing it, or cutting it with a knife, or it may be as complex as the greatest creations of haute cuisine, requiring hours of preparation. Food is therefore ‘civilized’ by cooking, not simply at the level of practice, but at the level of the imagination.’ (Lupton.D, 1996, 2)

Cooking is a process which is something I enjoy doing, for some people it can be seen as a hobby. It’s a way of learning, interacting, being creative and experimental with food.  The control is in your hands.

Do you find yourself appreciating a homemade dinner better than you would if some else makes it? Personally I find when making your own food you do appreciate the hard work which you put into the process of making it, to seeing the finished product, it’s a sense of achievement. What happens to when you switch the roles round? When someone else makes your food? Do you freak out and tend to question everything that is put into the recipe or do you naturally leave that person to it? These questions may just raise a few open discussions about how people process their food and the control they have, choosing to eat particular foods. With cooking your own food you have the choice to choose certain foods we like, our calories intake and portions sizes, having that control over the choices we make creates a balanced relationship with food. ‘We say “we know what we like”, but it would be more accurate to say “we like what we know”.’ (Fisher, Bender, 1979,113) With experience, we create judgement from presentation, to smells, creating an overall opinion before tasting the food.

     ‘from earliest infancy, the experience of easting is intertwined with their experience of close human contact with the provider of the food-the bodily warmth, the touch of the other’s flesh, their smell, the sounds they make- and the emotions and sensations aroused by this experience….enjoying filling the stomach…emotional and sensual responses to the person or people who provide the food’ (Lupton, 1996,7,8)

Our experimental explores the relationship between the Feeder and Gainer and how the control is completely in the feeders hand, this allows the feeder to produce the foods, adding a high calorie intake into each product.  Not only does this explore the relationship between the food and the Gainer, the Feeder develops an intimate relationship with the food. This is clear due to the overall control of the Feeder, due to them knowing the ingredients within the finished recipes, which may create an emotional attachment to certain recipes, making the Gainer eat more of what the Feeder likes, due to their personal experience with that particular dish.

Work Cited

Lupton,D. (1996) Food, the body and the self. London: SAGE Publications ltd

Fisher,P. Bender,A. (1979) The Value of Food. Third edition. London: Oxford University Press.

A personal relationship

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When we first researched into the feeder fetish I personally felt disturbed. It confused me as to how becoming hideously overweight and putting your health at risk could be in any way pleasurable or desirable, as Coultate and Davies state, ” excess body weight can lead to all sorts of health problems and life expectancy may be considerably reduced” (1994, p29). The health risks of being overweight are obvious to everyone and an important topic taught about in school. There is no longer an excuse of ignorance in a world when the risks are made clear in every walk of life, so are these risks to the body less important than the fetish? We all have different relationships with food and may know someone who has been affected by an eating disorder. It is a big topic of discussion as it is so central to life.

Personally, I enjoy food. I love going out for meals in restaurants with my boyfriend, friends and family as it is a great place to socialise whilst enjoying delicious food. I have never suffered with an eating disorder and have been lucky to maintain a healthy weight throughout my life. As a typical teenage girl I was always conscious of how I looked and tried to maintain a healthy figure and this continues to the present day. I will never be 100% happy with my figure; I am a perfectionist in every aspect of my life so my body is no exception. However I am starting to feel more comfortable in my skin now I have settled into a healthy size 10.  I feel like this is my natural, ideal size and wouldn’t want to be any bigger or smaller, (although maybe slightly more toned!).

Thinking about the performance and what I will have to go through if I am chosen as the consumer is slightly daunting. Although I love food, I often go through stages where I do not feel the desire to eat large amounts, often I do not want to eat at all. During the run up to performances and deadlines it has been particularly stressful and when I feel overcome with stress, my hunger levels drop dramatically. If I am stressed on the day of performance how will this affect my ability to eat and how long will I last before I cannot stomach any more?

Works Cited

Coultate, Tom and Davies, Jill (1994) Food: The definitive guide Cambridge: The Royal Society of Chemistry

Comfort Eating.

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For me the feeder/gainer relationship is rather confusing. Firstly, as a 20 year old girl in the 21st century I find that despite my better knowledge, I judge my own appearance against the appearance of other women. At what is apparently an “average” clothing size 12 I spend a lot of my time looking at myself and wishing I could be a bit thinner here, or a bit more toned there. Why? “Advertising and media play an enormous role in perpetuating women’s obsession with thinness. The media constructs idealized images of the thin and well-toned body and also promotes consumer products that help people, especially women, achieve this well-maintained body” (Allen and Sachs, 2007, p. 3).Not only that but  “quick fix” diets, fat burning pills and exercise DVDs are forever thrown in the paths of the self conscious under the pretense that buying their product and following their schemes will guarantee a happier “you”. As Lupton points out “given the current elision of sexual attractiveness with a slim body, many individuals make efforts to conform to this ideal” (Lupton, 1996, p. 137) because while”A slender/attractive body is understood as a healthy, normal body…an obese/ugly body is understood as unhealthy and deviant” (Lupton, 1996, p. 137). Though media and fashion image has changed drastically sinse the publication of Luptons Food, the Body and the Self (1996), it is arguable that opinions on female body image have not changed much. So for me, to see people who want to be fat is a massive contradiction to the social norm.

(Barcroft TV, 2013)

The video above shows a female gainer who is striving to gain weight on a daily basis. Like many other gainer women she feels more attractive in her overweight state than she did when she was a more healthy size. Not only that but she relishes the idea of other people seeing her putting on weight and is of course reaping the financial rewards that publishing her weight gaining gives her.

In a strange way I find myself envious of women like this. Yes, they are over weight, but they are more comfortable in their own skin than many women who strive to be thin. They have pride in their bodies and the confidence to sexualize it, knowing that there are people out there attracted to their fat. They use their weight to their advantage, gaining pleasure not just from eating, but from seeing others get pleasure from their eating; from feeding and having control over it. Some of these women even turn their diet into a business, advertising themselves to the market of punters who find these grandiose women sexy.

Secondly, and indeed predominantly, I find myself somewhat disgusted. Being as obese as many of these gainers are or aim to be goes against all medical knowledge and in my personal opinion common sense. Is it not greedy and unfair that they can eat so much, to the point of gluttony and not spare a thought for the people in the world that could live off of the food they consume in a day, for months? And how is it fair that these women push their bodies to the point that they need the care of others to function on a daily basis?  Why anyone would put their life at such a risk on purpose is beyond my comprehension. Can they not see that they are diminishing both their quality and quantity of life?

I am aware that being as uneducated as I am on the subject it is easy to pass judgement in ignorance. But even if I was knowledgeable on the subject, I am very aware that as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am looking at the feeder/gainer phenominon through the eyes of one particular type of person. It just so happens that while we may all take different things from exploring this topic, our performance group all fit a relatively similar demographic; we are all 20 year old, white, westernized women, who have been influenced through various means over our lives to believe that to be fat is to be unattractive. To understand how gainer women feel would be rewriting a life’s worth of understanding of ourselves, our appearance, and societies views on female appearance and attractiveness.

With that in mind, I am stil grappling with the questions of whether it is better to be fat and unhealthy but happy and live a shorter life, or be thinner and insecure, but be healthier and most likely live longer?

Works Cited

Allen, P., & Sachs, C. (2007). Women and food chains: The gendered politics of food. International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture.

Barcroft TV (2013) Big Women Funnel Feeder: BBW Wants To Be As Fat As Possible [Online Video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jfxPWK47eLg [Accessed 21 November 2013].

Lupton, D (1996) Food, the Body and the Self. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Man vs Food

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Food is the main energy supply for growth, movement and repairing the body. From birth, living things start growing, gaining weight and changing.  (BBC, 2013)

But what happens when we challenge our bodies into eating large quantities of food or even the food that our bodies/taste-buds disagree with? This experiment is not only physically demanding its experimenting with the concept of ‘mind over matter’. Pushing our bodies until we physically cannot eat anymore, this may be shown through gagging, being sick or to the point where we cannot physically eat anymore.

Our initial was to experiment with was foods we didn’t like. This involved foods such as sardines, soup, tomatoes, bananas (these things were things which each individual brought to the experiment)  We started with putting foods out on a table, non of the foods weren’t particularly presented in the way you would usually eat them, this made me question the effect in which the presentation of the food effects us individually.  A item of food I brought to the experimental was soup which was in a tin this was then poured into a bowl in front of us and the sound which it made being poured in a bowl, was quite deafening, which  heightened the effect of the experimental  making it an intimate experience for myself. The use of hearing the food, crunching, slopping, popping, chewing draws people to watch and engage with that particular food, which is something we are looking at to explore in our future experimental.

Once we had established the different types of food, all of us waited nervously awaiting to see if we would get the food which we didn’t like. This particular part of the experimental was challenging as we were anticipating what was to come, not knowing the unknown was a big part of this experimental. A member of third year drama assisted us in our experimental, who made the decision to what each of us should eat, and this was to experiment with the audience and our interaction with one another. The use of having assistance allowed us to not have any influence in picking foods that people like or dislike.  The highlight of this experimental for all of us was to challenge our bodies to eat sardines. This personally was very challenging as I was nearly sick, this concept of pushing my body to eat something that I do not enjoy and necessary created a response. Although the concept of this experimental was not to be sick, but to push ourselves the awfulness of this experimental creates impact when something bad is happening. Most people associate food as pleasure, something we enjoy doing and when someone is not enjoying or reacting in a way that doesn’t seem the ‘norm’ people tend to be interested and engage with the content, how much is too much?

Work Cited

-BBC – Learning Zone Class Clips – Why do we need to eat? – Science Video. 2013. BBC – Learning Zone Class Clips – Why do we need to eat? – Science Video. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/why-do-we-need-to-eat/2288.html. [Accessed 22 October 2013].

Feeders, Gainers and Me.

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“Society’s relationship with food has not been purely for fuel for a number of years. Hence, the obesity epidemic. In this talk we will explore the increasing complicated role food holds in today’s society, from comforter, to body art and even as a sexual fetish, as seen by the growing popularity of feederism and feeder pornography” (Taylor 2013, p. s221).

Eating and the consumption of food are beginning to openly transgresses from the boundaries of  the animalistic instinct of survival to those of sexual gluttony and fetish. In our modern, western society, obesity is an ever prevalent problem, with larger percentages of the world’s population becoming overweight. Naturally, food creates and aids other food related disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, however it the conscious and deliberate weight gain for sexual pleasure and gratification for both the gainer, and those who encourage or enforce the feeding that constitutes the Feeder and Gainer fetish; feederism.

http://youtu.be/NfxFn1IqHo4?t=31m48s

Feeders and Gainers see the stomach as a sexual organ; the bigger and more movement it is capable of, the sexier and desirable it is. In “most cases, at least in heterosexual relationships, feeders or encouragers are men, and feedees or gainers are women” (Bestard in Prohaska, p. 104), and therefore can be seen as an advancement of sexual domination and submission, but this is furthered with the introduction of food permanently altering the appearance of the sexual partner, rather than simply during the act of sex itself.

Although championed and favoured by some, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance “believes that feederism is a behavior based on power on the part of the feeder only, and that this coercive relationship is demeaning to people of size” (Prohaska 2013, p. 104). However, in documentaries which are available online those in Feederism relationships seem outwardly happy and confident with their partner, and not all demeaned by their slimmer partner of their feeder. Although Feederism is slowly coming out of the shadows and becoming better known within wider society, it is still seen as a taboo (as are many sexual fetishes).

Those who judge the fetish from the outside often view it as ““an underground sexual practice that involves women who allow themselves to be force-fed through a funnel by a dominant male master, who derives sexual excitement from watching his submissive servant grow fatter as he forces her to eat more and more”” (Murray quoted in Prohaska 2013, p. 105), however, those who are are active within this underground community feel “the need to keep their behaviors a secret to family members and other significant people in their offline lives (Bestard in Prohaska 2013, p. 105). When these hidden relationships are broadcast for the whole of society to witness, they are often met by ridicule from those who don’t understand the sexual desires behind the fetish. Despite this, there is a large online community, which has a further reach than that of a private couple; where people can pay to speak to and see these Gainers on an intimate basis (source: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/my-big-fat-fetish/4od).

The use of food, being fed, and high calorie food played a heavy influence on our final experiment. Admittedly, we are not fully exploring the sexual fetish of Feederism; this is impossible for us, and any attempt of it would be a poor and disrespectful imitation – we are not sexually attracted to one another, and we do not hold food in the same sexual regard as those within the Feederism orientation. Instead, we are taking the frame of Gainers and Feeders to guide our experiment and help shape our relationships between our own established ‘feeders’ and ‘gainers’. The Gainers are pushed beyond their comfortable limits when being fed, and this is something which we wish to re-create.

Three people feeding, and three being fed. With no control over what goes into their mouth, or in what quantity.


Works Cited
Taylor, Valerie H. (2013) ‘Food Fetish: Society’s Complicated Relationship with Food’, Canadian Journal of Diabetes, XXXVII (2) April: p. s221.
Prohaska, Ariane (2013) ‘Feederism: Transgressive Behavior or Same Old Patriarchal Sex?’, International Journal of Social Science Studies, I (1) June, pp. 104-112)