Reimagining Nutrition Narratives For Fat Black Children Like Ma’Khia Bryant

We are not born desiring or rejecting bodies according to their particular dimensions.

We are not born loathing or fearing or being comfortable with our own and other people’s thin or fat bodies. We are educated into these feelings.

In other words, our body responses, which register as sensations, affect, emotions, tacit leanings, tastes, and a whole realm of vaguely defined spidery feelings, are a social construct.

How we feel about things as adults is strongly impacted by the collective and familial circumstances, customs, and values of our upbringing.

Take food. Depending on our identities, geographical and cultural location, and more, we learn to enjoy or be revolted by the prospect of eating blue (mouldy) cheese, fermented tofu, whale meat, caterpillars, sweet potato leaves, Twinkies®, warm or cold beer. Sour gourd. Sheep eyes. Salmon caught out of season. Unblessed bread. Some things just feel right. Some things are obviously, horrifyingly, wrong. Yum or yuk? We know this in our bones.

Narratives that encourage us to regard body signals as innate wisdom, a sacrosanct guide to wholeness, are a problem. They rely on binary thinking that splits our body from our mind, and that erases context. This separation is a…