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There’s a steady drip of milky liquid from the feedbag that hangs precariously on the IV pole next to your bed. Down, down, down it goes — the plastic coils of the feed tube run from your nose, down your esophagus, into your stomach. The yellow-cream-colored drip has been the only foodstuff in your belly for the past month as you were kept alive with machines that breathed for you, waiting for a bilateral lung transplant everyone worried would not come soon enough. Your hunger was kept small with the liquid that spilled into your stomach 12 hours a day.

It’s 18 days after the operation and your re-entry into the waking world has involved relearning how to breathe, swallow, talk, move your hands and feet, stand, and walk. The dietician has already been around with a handbook of recipes and a list of things you can no longer eat, as well as the phone number of a psychologist who specializes in post-transplant body dysmorphia. Even looking at you now — 92 lbs., with thighs so thin I can wrap both of them with my hands — she warns of the impending fat that will soon encase your body and how many patients have a difficult time adjusting to the post-op weight gain.

I ask: Will he be able to keep on the weight? Because of his condition, he’s never been able to properly digest the foods he eats and was really losing weight when his health deteriorated. 

Oh, yeah! I have tons of patients who actually become ob*se after the transplant, if you can believe that, she laughs. But with diet and exercise you can lose it all again. 

When she leaves, I hold your hand. I am livid about how the pathologizing of fat is so insidious, so second nature that despite the fact that your neck can barely support the weight of your head, your dietician is more concerned with the fat that will make its home on your body. 

It’ll be months before your face gets rounder and you start to miss the sharp edges of your old jawline and I’ll have to remind you about how incredible it is to hold you through all your shapes.

It’s a year later and we are home and in quarantine and safe despite the crises of the world outside. Fat stays with us: in the elaborate meals we cook, the ones you dreamt up when the tubes were snaked down your nose. Fat lives on your belly, thighs, cheeks. You never felt so soft, so plush before. I wonder if this is what touching me has always felt like — playful, tender, a joyful jiggle. 

What a blessing I’ve bestowed upon you for all this time.  

I’ve just finished lecturing an intro to feminist theory class on the history of the American calorie. Scholars have written about the racist, classist, and gendered dimensions of the BMI scale, while historians have written about the profound impact of Wilbur Atwater’s calorimeter experiments — a ten-year project largely funded through state military and university contracts. Atwater’s data would be crucial to U.S. military intervention at home and abroad to calculate efficient means for feeding troops, prisoners, and colonized subjects in occupied territories. But it would be home economists to popularize the calorie’s vernacular use. 

I wonder if this is what touching me has always felt like — playful, tender, a joyful jiggle. What a blessing I’ve bestowed upon you for all this time.  

We work through how the ontology of the calorie has been rehearsed in the private homes and kitchens that transformed into laboratories of life-management systems — more formally known as home economics programs. Spearheaded by white women of America, practiced in academia and public schools, reinforced by advertisement and public agencies, circulated from port to port in the guise of food literacy and anti-hunger campaigns that welcomed U.S. military satellite colonies and repurposed agricultural waste. We witness how an emergent language of vitality takes shape in the home to describe the contours of the new American woman, the healthy-citizen body, and the nation she keeps. We witness how that language marks our worlds today.  

I ask my students to think about the first time they learned about calories. 

Who taught you? 

care-takers, teachers, state-funded dieticians, friends, influencers, memes, tv shows…

How old were you? 

11, 10, 13, 8, I can’t remember a time before…

What impact did that knowledge have on you?

Started using calorie tracking apps, all my friends would pinch each other’s rolls, I learned to feel bad when eating, I couldn’t eat in public for a long time…

A student stays on to talk to me after class has ended.

I know you’re not a therapist or anything like that but, how do I help my mom see that she’s fixated on health as meaning being skinny? She wants me to stop taking my antidepressant because she says it’s making me fat. I don’t know what to say to her.

I don’t know what to say either when a mother can only see herself through the distorted prism of a system meant to break you. Does it help to know that women’s hunger has been strategically mapped as obscene and criminal as a tool of empire and domination? Does it help to know that centuries of colonial ideology and race science are built into how we relate to our bodies? That there are material rewards for performing thinness-as-health that make the problems even more invisible and difficult to talk about? Because haven’t we all been learning and relearning our entire lives how living in a fat body is like dying?

I will say it plainly now: fatphobia is killing us. The possessive investment in thinness is killing us. Obscuring the racial and colonial origins for a global hyperfixation on “health” is killing us. 

I am so tired but am ready to do the work, still, because a world where we honor our appetites is one worth fighting for and dreaming about.