Hungry (10 page)

In
Hunger Pains
, Mary Pipher addresses this stark irony. She writes, “Most of us worry more about our weight than our wages. We expend more energy on our appearance than on our empowerment.”

Oh, the places we could have gone!

“Women are standing on the scales when they could be dancing, measuring their waistlines when they could be writing poetry.”

Pipher found that four percent of women (all ages) feel comfortable with their weight. Line up a random one hundred women and girls, and only four of them are okay with their weight!

Many of us have been students of
Seventeen
magazine, like
Fat Girl
author Judith Moore; my sister-in-law, Elaine; and me. A constant theme of this magazine, aimed at girls much younger than seventeen, is weight loss. There are articles on other subjects, as there are articles in
Playboy
, but it seems to me that the reason for reading
Seventeen
is to measure yourself against perfection and come up wanting.

As Moore wrote, “I thumbed through
Seventeen
magazine for hints on how I might make myself more like the girls on the slick pages and the popular, vivacious girls who brightened my high school. I knew, though, deep down in my fat belly, that I would never be a May queen or cheerleader or
Seventeen
girl.”

You don’t have to be fat to subscribe to
Seventeen
as a monthly announcement of your faults. For me, it was to learn why I didn’t have a boyfriend and how the square shape of my face and thickness of my neck (not freakishly thick like a female linebacker, but no Audrey Hepburn) would be lifelong albatrosses, requiring constant attention to makeup and clothing style.

Thirty years later, Lisa pored over
Seventeen
, now one of the more benign of the celebrity-driven teen publications. Still, here’s a typical cover from the recent past:

Except for Taylor Swift, all of these stories could have appeared in the magazines that shaped my generation’s views of our bodies and our selves. (For us, the part of Taylor Swift may have been played by Cher.)

Ned has never read
Seventeen
. As a teenager, he didn’t subscribe to a magazine that made him feel bad about his hair or thighs. As a teenager he read his parents’
Life
,
Look
, and
Time
magazines. In pediatricians’ offices, he liked
Highlights for Children
.

In his
Highlights
years, Ned was a very picky eater, like me. “I like to think of it as being discriminating at an early age,” he says, sort of jokingly. But his family catered to him. “The boy” would eat meat only if it came from Bradshaw’s, a grocery store that had a butcher. On a visit to a cousin in Los Angeles, the family served a roast and Ned asked if it came from Bradshaw’s. His parents had told the cousin to say yes.

When Ned’s father had his first heart attack, on the heels of business setbacks, Ned started putting on weight. “The household was very stressful. I don’t know if that’s why, but my metabolism changed,” Ned says. “My best friend, Bill, was skinny as can be, but ate a ton more than I did and he had a fairly large head. We joked that his stomach must be where his brain was supposed to be.”

Spontaneous metabolic change is rarely the culprit. More likely, in Ned’s case, his body changed shape because he was growing up—and eating too much. He loved his grandmothers’ foods, even Brussels sprouts and cooked cabbage. “Grandma Annie made this terrific chicken with onions and we loved to dip challah in the fat and juice. She also made terrific schmaltz (chicken fat). I loved making scrambled eggs in schmaltz and then mixing with Miracle Whip. Hmm, no wonder I have cholesterol problems.”

Ned played tennis in high school, which helped keep his weight in check. “I would practice for a couple of hours daily and just eat an apple for lunch and was able to not feel chunky. The word for me was
husky
.”

Girls, no wonder so many of us have food issues. Even the disparaging adjectives are harder on us. Who wouldn’t rather be husky than fat?

Middle school is the worst of times for many kids. It certainly was for Lisa, at least until she developed full-on anorexia toward the end of high school. The ages of eleven through thirteen can make parents yearn for the diaper years. Your sweet child now often despises you, reminds you daily of your shortcomings, and forces you to relive your own painful adolescence. Which was why a big boost at work came at just the right time for me. At the start of Lisa’s middle school years, I got to be the restaurant critic for the
Mercury News
—“The Newspaper of Silicon Valley”—at the birth of the dot-com boom. Expense accounts rained cash, celebratory wines were uncorked, and every downtown in the area got rid of its hardware stores and put up wall-to-wall restaurants.

Suddenly I was very popular, holding the keys to many people’s dream job. Restaurant critics rarely lack friends. We have to be pretty grumpy or full of ourselves not to attract a flock of supplicants eager to drop everything and dine on the company credit card. Who doesn’t like to snoop, criticize, possibly be quoted as “my intelligent companion,” and let somebody else pick up the check? Which is great, except when they say something on the order of:

The last bit they really wouldn’t say. More likely, “Oh, Gilroy! I’d love to, but it turns out I have a ton of work. Please,
please
ask me again!”

These people are off the island.

Before I became a critic, Ned and I felt we were the ideal “intelligent companions.” We stepped forward when the
Mercury News’
former reviewer needed flexible, adventurous diners who would order whatever we were told, pass plates, and make apt, pithy comments. Only an emergency involving children would have caused us to cancel at the last minute, and it never happened, thank you very much. My predecessor, David L. Beck, returned the favor by thinking of us especially when reviewing a restaurant in our northerly corner of Silicon Valley. When David needed a family to investigate the enduring popularity of an old-line Mexican-American café (combo plates, chalupas, carved chairs), the Himmels gave him experience, enthusiasm, and two children with diverse eating habits. Jacob was polite and picky, while Lisa impressed David with her lusty embrace of enchiladas and the whole experience of eating out.

David, like Lisa, had a good appetite. But after five and a half years of eating his way around the San Francisco Bay Area restaurant boom of the early nineties, expenses paid by a newspaper that couldn’t stop making money, David’s waistband was tightening. He is a handsome man and a natty dresser. About to turn fifty, he realized that with his family history of heart disease, he might have had enough tiramisu. None too soon. The year David went back to working as an editor, he had to go in for angioplasty.

When the Features editor asked if I wanted the restaurant gig, I said something like Robert DeNiro in
Taxi Driver
: “You talking to
me
?” Except not hostile, just astonished. I loved the entertainment and social sides of restaurants as well as the food, and criticizing them among friends, much the way it’s done on Yelp and Chowhound. But to do it in front of 300,000 subscribers people and take the consequences? Bay Area residents are religious about food. Followers of one denomination or the other who disagreed with me surely would call and yell at me and trash me in print. Readers take joy in knowing more than the critic. I know this, I do it myself. (“Famous Critic says these are the best hamburgers west of the Mississippi! Can he be serious? What an idiot!”) More important, the responsibility of affecting livelihoods and business dreams weighed on me, especially having come from a small-business family. Restaurants are such a tough way to make a living. Even in a good economy, one in four restaurants closes or changes hands before the first year is up; three out of five fail within three years. People who study organizations often pick restaurants because, like fruit flies, they die so fast. How would I feel if my review put Mom and Pop out of business?

Reviewing restaurants wasn’t on many publications’ to-do list in the heady post-Watergate years, when I went looking for a job in journalism. Affirmative action had barely pried open hard-drinking, smoke-filled newsrooms to women and minorities. There were bottles in the drawers and ashtrays on the desks. At the
Mercury News
, female editors and reporters (then dubbed the “Vagino-Americans” by some of the men) lobbied management for parity in merit pay, and for hiring more women in editorial jobs outside of the Living department—home of Miss Manners, gardening, recipes, and heartwarming feature stories. Until recently, it had been called the Women’s Section. In 1979, when I came along, no woman had ever worked on the copy desk. A U-shaped bunker in the far corner of the newsroom, the copy desk was where grizzled reporters went when they got too old to chase fire engines and police cars. Two “slot men” sat in the middle and dealt stories to the guys on “the rim.” Theirs were the last eyes on every story, the bulwark against bad grammar, pretentious vocabulary and misspelled names. They were just about all smokers, grumpy about being pushed aside, about the newspaper business not being what it used to be, about having a woman in their midst, about the 49ers losing, whatever. When you walked into the newsroom, a dark cloud hung over one corner, not only because of the smoke. That was the copy desk.

I applied for a job, having corrected copy and written headlines at smaller papers, and having friends who could vouch for me at the
Mercury News
. In the interview, the classically crusty managing editor asked if I planned to have children. While I sat there dumbly, trying to remember if he could legally ask me that, he amended: “Oops, can’t ask that. Heh, heh.” I was twenty-nine and had been married three months. He could guess I would have children, but he needed to hire a woman and at that moment there weren’t a lot of seekers for the copy desk. The job was gruelingly sedentary and the hours were unattractive: 2:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., Friday through Tuesday. Walking into the building on Friday afternoon, the Monday morning of my week, I passed jolly coworkers heading in the other direction, wishing each other a nice weekend. At dinnertime, we rim guys ate and talked football in an empty cafeteria. The smoke gave me a headache. But my first day on the job, we worked stories ranging from county twelfth-graders’ worrisome test scores to Jones-town one year after the mass suicide to the Iran hostage crisis. Two weeks in, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that the students occupying the U.S. Embassy in Tehran release the women and black hostages. What a rush! Within a year I was promoted to slot man, and two more women had been hired.

All this is sad and quaint now, with newspapers seemingly at death’s door. I was supremely fortunate to get in after Watergate and out before the crash, and I worry about sustaining a democracy without the newspapers’ vibrant reporting. But there were always people smarter than me in journalism, and there are today. They’ll figure it out.

After I’d served two and a half years on the copy desk, Jacob was born. The ideal would have been a part-time job with flexible hours, creativity, and responsibility. It didn’t exist in the newspaper industry, which was among the slowest to adopt family-friendly attitudes. I could work part-time as a copy editor, but the desk was a slave to weekends and nights. Also, the copy desk worked every holiday. The most senior people got first shot at the few holiday-off shifts. I could look forward to Thanksgiving at home in twenty years.

When the Sunday Opinion editor job came open, I jumped. It was a one-person, daytime show, with somewhat flexible hours, Tuesday through Saturday. It was a full-time job, though, and Jacob was only six months old. I asked if I could do it part-time and, thinking managers were doing me a favor by even considering my request, I didn’t ask about getting an assistant to work the remaining hours. The company was happy to oblige my generosity.