The Eating Instinct

August 13, 2018
In this deeply personal and well-researched indictment of American diet culture, parenting and food writer Sole-Smith explores hunger, satiation, and the myriad other reasons humans eat, or don’t. After a medical trauma left her month-old daughter Violet unable to eat and reliant on a feeding tube, the author realized that the primal instinct to self-nourish is “also surprisingly fragile,” easily influenced by vegetable-pushing parents or the sugar-fearing wellness industry (“These twin anxieties about obesity and about the eco-health implications of our modern food system have transformed American food and diet culture”). In retraining her child to obey hunger cues, Sole-Smith found that most adults also need “a set of rules to follow, a literal recipe for how to develop this basic life skill.” She profiles self-styled health gurus who have secretly suffered from eating disorders (such as Christy Harrison, host of the Food Psych podcast), and tracks how patients who have undergone bariatric surgery learn to love and listen to their bodies even “after having a part cut out of it because a doctor told them it couldn’t be trusted.” Sole-Smith argues that “nutrition has become a permanently unsolvable Rubik’s Cube,” but by looking beyond willpower and nutrition fads she helps readers examine their own relationships with food.

September 15, 2018
An exploration of eating issues in relation to our body image-obsessed culture.In her debut, Parents magazine contributing editor Sole-Smith offers shrewd insights into far-ranging concerns about struggles with food. She confronts a variety of healthy eating trends and challenges the persuasive yet often ambiguous messaging supporting these trends, including the recent spate of celebrity-endorsed product lines. The author also relates her recent struggle as a parent trying to feed her infant daughter, Violet, in the midst of an early medical trauma. Diagnosed with a rare congenital heart defect, Violet underwent several difficult surgical procedures, forcing her to often rely on a feeding tube. In her attempts to encourage Violet to develop natural hunger instincts through organic nutritional substances, Sole-Smith was slow to realize that her instincts as a food and diet specialist were undermining Violet's natural--and, in her case, ultimately healthy--craving for something sweet and satisfying: chocolate milk. The author chronicles her conversations with individuals and families across the country: low-income parents struggling to provide healthy and affordable meals for their families; picky eaters and their challenges; individuals dealing with a newer and more complex issue such as avoidant-restrictive food intake disorder; and other food writers, some of whom feel pressured to promote and live by the latest healthy trends. Though Sole-Smith's observations are more thought-provoking than prescriptive, her narrative leads readers toward a better understanding and acceptance of individual instincts. "We must decide for ourselves what we like and dislike," she writes, "and how different foods make us feel when we aren't prejudging every bite we take. It takes its own kind of relentless vigilance to screen out all that noise. It requires accepting that the weight you most want to be may not be compatible with this kind of more intuitive eating--but that it's nevertheless okay to be this size, to take up the space that your body requires."A well-informed and only occasionally overreaching consideration of a broad, complicated topic; a worthwhile read for anyone with anxieties about food.

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November 1, 2018

The story of freelance writer Sole-Smith's (New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Slate) daughter is harrowing and will quickly draw readers into this survey of American eating culture. Unable to eat properly in her first few weeks of life, the author's daughter had a feeding tube inserted. Their journey to remove the tube and learn to eat "normally" again leads to question, what is "normal" eating anyway? Modern Americans, particularly women and children, are bombarded with conflicting messages of what they should eat and when. Sole-Smith covers many topics from picky eating to gastric bypass surgery and particularly focuses on societal messages around what children and pregnant women should eat but also address other adults and different socioeconomic classes. VERDICT As noted early on, this book discusses topics that might be uncomfortable for some readers, and as such is not for everyone, particularly those with a difficult history with food. That said, readers wishing to learn more about disordered eating as well as those looking to be more mindful about food and the social messaging around it, will find this work useful.--Cate Schneiderman, Emerson Coll., Boston

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2018
Journalist Sole-Smith, a contributing editor for Parents magazine, peels back the complex layers of America's relationship with eating. Her personal journey of researching food, eating habits, and the culture surrounding food began during an ongoing medical crisis that required her to retrain her infant daughter to eat. Her family's personal struggle with the topic is woven throughout the book. Folding her journalistc research into food-related social sciences, and history into her memoir, she also uncovers the impacts of race and economic status on the advertisements people see, the foods available to them, and how all of this affects their eating habits. Picky eaters, foodies, food historians, parents of preemies, and readers who rarely even think about food will all find the statistics Sole-Smith uncovers to be interesting and surprising. Unlike Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation?, 2001) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma?, 2006), Sole-Smith focuses less on what we eat and more on how we eat. What is similar is the author's discovery of fascinating and at times unpleasant facts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)