The woman has a complex and contradictory relationship with food, divided between desire and guilt certainly more difficult than the man, less obsessed with the image of perfect bodies. This also depends on the fact that the woman is the first nurse : in the womb during pregnancy, in the breast after birth, later with the preparation of food for the children and family members.
The woman from nurse to worker
In many countries of the world with an agricultural economy, the cultivation of fields and the supply of food supplies are still entrusted to women. Even in our society, until a few decades ago, women took care of shopping and menus.
With the advent of the industrial era, the relationship between women and food has changed precisely because the role of women in society has evolved: she has left home to fill roles in the world of work equal to men. The preparation of meals often takes place in a hurry, food choices are guided by messages and images disseminated by the media that guide the shopping of superfluous, prepackaged meals, maxi packs of energy foods, with an often inadequate and unbalanced diet.
The obsession with diets: thinness versus obesity
On the other hand, in the twentieth century the canons of beauty have also changed, passing from an ideal of a robust and florid body to that of perfect female bodies identified in thinness: the thin are the efficient people, the winners. But, despite the aspiration to slim and perfect bodies, the reality is that in the world, as never before in history, we are witnessing an increase in overweight and obesity.
Western peoples are oppressed by fat to the point that a new phenomenon has become part of Western culture: diet. We talk about diet everywhere : many magazines, many websites, celebrities recommend diets of all kinds, uncompromising, restrictive, falsely rewarding, often accompanied by “magic remedies”, but neglecting any scientific basis.
Diet is huge business for weight loss multinationals! Diet has now become a collective obsession and, in the ranks of “diet followers”, there are mainly women: one in two women follows diets, indeed on a diet “most of the time”.
Woman’s friend-enemy food: eating disorders
Today women often put their image first and in homage to it they deny themselves food. For women, food has become a friend-enemy, a source of pleasure and guilt : on the one hand in our society the pleasure of food by women becomes an expression of luxury, sensuality and transgression, enjoyment and pleasure, as so many advertisements tell (consumption of succulent dishes; chocolate, etc.).
These conflicting messages have generated emotional conflicts in women: the confusion of food with feelings and emotional hunger are almost exclusively female characteristics . This obsession with thinness and an eternal diet has caused eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia and all food-related addictions to increase in Western countries. These mostly affect young women (nine out of ten patients are female), thanks to the growing attention given by the media to the myth of beauty and extreme thinness.
These are very serious pathologies that are increasingly widespread, triggered not only by deep individual and family problems, but also by a company and a fashion that reverberates the myth of extreme thinness on commercials and magazines.which is a passepartout for success in life, embodied by cover characters or TV protagonists and their perfect bodies in photos. Almost always these young women find it difficult to recognize their needs and get help, developing anxieties and defense strategies, reaching serious clinical pictures, making the road to recovery often long and complex.
How to restore a balanced relationship with food
The difficult task of women is to make peace with food, even if the commercial and information world certainly does not help. It is important to resume old habitssuch as returning to simple dishes, shopping consciously, regaining time to find loved ones and having a good meal together without feeling guilty: returning to the role of children’s food educators.
The bond of emotions with food is certainly strong and this is true for women more than for men, so we must try to convey these emotions towards the beauty of food : conviviality, partying, sitting together at the table, in that circle. where people meet, talk to each other, listen to each other. In this the woman must have the primary role: that of care and attention, of the transmission of knowledge and culture of food.
