Welcome to the tenth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

I set the final feast in this series in front of the sculpture in Calgary of the Famous Five, Women Are Persons!, by Barbara A Paterson. The Famous Five were the Albertan women who brought the Persons Case before the Supreme Court of Canada, recognizing that women were indeed persons under the British North-America Act 1867.

In the suffrage movement women used food and the role of hostess, keeper of the hearth and nourisher, as a tool in the push for women’s right through pink teas, suffrage teas and lunch rooms where they could fundraise, promote and strategize for women’s rights.

However it seems today food has been turned against us. Rather than being the fuel that allows us to accomplish great things, it is the thing we fear. We must limit what we eat to fit the image of the thin, the fit, the ambitious, the hard working, the responsible, the smart, the good woman. In starving our bodies into conformance we spend our time and energy focused on controlling food and controlling our behaviours. We are obsessed with the thought and image and preparation of food we cannot allow ourselves to have. There is no need for anyone else to assert control over us, we are contained, neutralized by our own hand.

It is not only a gendered issue, diet culture targets men as well as women, all ethnicities and economic groups in western influenced culture, but women have been the most prevalent targets, and the most ironic as the keepers of the cook pot.

Energy Requires Mass is a question. Placing the feast on the end of the teeter totter reminds us that in order to have the energy to move the world, we need mass to convert. We need to eat. We need to decide, do we want to look like we can do great things, or do we want to do great things?

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the ninth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

We make our marks in the world trudging through the deep snow. We expend energy keeping warm and keeping moving in our winter playground. What could be better than a hearty hot beef vegetable stew, or a lasagna, or poutine? Warm buttered biscuits, hot chocolate topped with thick whipped cream, fresh from the oven apple crisp with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream? The idea of hot, calorie dense comforting food becomes irresistible the longer we go before taking refuge and repast. Soon no tempting recreation will be able to distract.

I was thinking about the warring forces of self-preservation and will-power within each of us when I placed this hearty banquet in a winter play ground on a merry-go-round. While we may think we have body fat to burn and our best interests at heart – resisting the draw of food to attain/maintain what we believe are healthy weight goals – the fact that we are inordinately drawn to images of food indicates that our body thinks otherwise and has activated its natural self-preservation mechanisms. It is only a matter of time, exposure and repetition before the forces of nature prevail over force of will, particularly when self preservation is on the side of nature. Each time that merry-go-round brings that plate of food past you, the magnifying effects of the cold, physical exhaustion and your own emptying stomach will seemingly push that food off the merry-go-round and toward you. Force of will vs. force of nature, which will win?

Placing the banquet in that winter landscape for me is a wake up call. Even if one does win a war of wills with nature, what does one win in this environment? Exhaustion? Frostbite, Hypothermia? When one’s body suggests visions of feasts, one should listen. The world can wait until one is rested and replenished.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the 8th instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

Some people appear to have everything, but never seem happy. It’s like they feel that, even with all the blessings in their cup, it’s not quite as full as it should be, and possibly someone else has been sipping from it. Maybe they feel that they have worked hard but the exchange hasn’t been fair, they haven’t got a ‘just dessert’ for all their hard work.

You can never be too rich or too thin, as the old saying goes. For some people life is a series of competitive challenges to demonstrate their worth through the accumulation of accolades and status: The perfect family, a beautiful home in a desirable area, a lucrative and successful career, public respect and recognition, the admiration of society, a thin fit attractive body. For all that work, they expect to be rewarded, they expect to be happy.

I have often wondered why some people of my general knowledge, and even my acquaintance, seem to have it all and yet are not particularly happy people. Why is it that they fixate on someone else getting something, some reward they think they should have had, or at the very least the other did not earn as they did. Why don’t they feel happy, content, satiated?

Then I had an interaction where my own realization of the psychological effects of long term caloric restriction on my thinking led to a flash of insight into that paradox:

I was having a conversation with one such achievement oriented being, one whom I had always known to be very trim and athletic. We happened across the topic of cooking, and I recognized in that person the same obsessive interest in food that I had developed as a result of my years of caloric restriction.

I realized then the unacknowledged efforts this person had to go through to maintain their trim figure. They well and truly earned their body. However, to maintain it meant it was likely they were always living on the edge of hunger.

In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, conducted on conscientious objectors during the late years of WW2 by Ancel Keys and documented in The Biology of Human Starvation (1950, Keys et al.), participants were placed on a diet that supplied just half of their caloric requirements for a period of 6 months. (FYI, most weight loss diets today recommend a similar ratio for caloric restriction.) The results of that experiment still supply much of our scientific knowledge about the effects of starvation on the human mind and body. Documented psychological effects of starvation on the participants included a fixation on images of food, cooking and eating, as well as an urge to collect recipes, cook books and even cooking implements. The effect was so powerful that during the course of the experiment several participants even changed their aspirations to pursue culinary occupations. In addition to food fixation, experiment participants were increasingly irritable, sensitive to any perceived injustice related to food portions, food waste or delays in food service. They were often judgemental of the physiques of others who appeared more well fed than they.

Back to my acquaintance then, I understood that as a result of this constant low level hunger it was possible they were always just a little grumpy, but didn’t necessarily know why. After all, they had everything one could possibly want, other than a regularly full belly. Instead, the hunger infiltrated their perspective on life; some one else was always getting the serving of success they should have had. They always felt just a little short changed. And honestly, I’d have to agree. Diet culture, the culture of thin and its promised rewards, had short changed them.

But this painting isn’t really about them, it’s a meditation on my dilemma with diet culture. Would I be so in love with my appearance – the socially prescribed attributes of a successful life of which physical appearance is a part – that I would sacrifice my mental health, my sense of gratitude and my happiness to that appearance?

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the sixth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

Daily Recommended Intake (or Dietary Reference Intake, or Recommended Daily Allowance) – Return on Investment. Healthy eating doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming, or so articles on eating on a budget claim. Canned and frozen foods are just as nutritious as fresh produce etc.

However for every ‘eating well on a budget’ piece of advice out there, one will find many more healthy diet plans that come with a healthy price tag too. The idea is you get back what you put in, and if you want to be skinny AND healthy, you’re going to need a specialized plan. Healthy eating, as promoted by health and diet culture, seems to be a bit of an exclusive affair:

At some point I decided I should be focusing on getting my body’s nutritional requirements, but didn’t want to risk gaining weight, so I was looking for a plan to do it within the lowest amount of calories possible.

This is why it is called health and diet culture, and not just diet culture. Because the pursuit of health has become tied to the cult of slim as it’s visible proof.

Enter my new salvation, (I will not name names here, but feel free to contact me if you want to know the name of the plan). This one was actually a set of menus carefully constructed to meet all of an individuals daily macro and micro nutrient needs within three different caloric levels (1500, 2000 & 2500). Significantly, there is not a caloric level which corresponds to the most common diet recommendation of 1200 calories/day, let alone the more extreme celebrity diets clocking in at 800 and 500 calories per day. The author specified that below 1500 calories per day one would require specialized medical instruction to meet their nutritional needs (mull that over). I didn’t have an objection to the plan itself (although at the time I thought 1500 calories was too many). I actually think the plan is quite an impressive effort, however the investment in terms of money and time is another matter. This investment is a problem with most popular ‘healthy’ diet plans.

The food in the painting represents the ingredients (in purchased quantities) for a single day’s menu, at 1500 calories. Not that I would be eating all that food in one day, the menu might only call for a tablespoon of an ingredient, but one must purchase bags of buckwheat, barley or nutritional yeast as opposed to tablespoons. That is a lot of different types of food to be purchasing and storing, for one days meals, if I want complete nutrition within 1500 calories. (I challenge you to go price the entire still life, see what it comes to in your local dollars, and report back.) Yes, you will likely be using those ingredients in multiple menu (should you carry on with the plan), and things like cocoa powder and chia seeds will keep well in the pantry. However, it is typical of every new diet to not only have you invest in an entire new pantry of food, but clear your cupboards of all your old food. Often the new foods are expensive, exclusive, trendy, and difficult to source if you are not in a large urban centre with access to specialty markets and international food imports.

The setting for this super market banquet is a historic Bank of Montreal building on Calgary’s Stephen Avenue. Many of these heritage bank building are no longer banks: a few have been repurposed as high end restaurants and this one currently houses a Good Life Fitness. I wanted a bank as the setting, and I liked that in life as in art, health and diet were being coupled with wealth.

In DRI-Return on Investment I was interested in exploring several thoughts:

Are diets and dieting promoted by the food industry? Who gets wealthy from advising consumers to toss their inferior food before reloading with expensive ‘healthy’ alternatives with every new diet?

Are ‘healthy’ diet plans only for the comparatively wealthy, or is it that they are written by and geared toward the wealthy? According to an economic definition of middle class income as being between 75 and 200 % of Canada’s median household income after tax of $68400 in 2023, a middle class income is somewhere between $51000 and $137000. Working class incomes then would generally be below $51000 (although not necessarily). Most financial guides suggest a household grocery budget of no more than 15% of income for a family of 4. The average family (of 4) grocery spend is, as of 2023, about $313/week, or $45/day. That level of spending on food only fits current budget criterion for a household that, at $108507 CAD, has just crossed over into an upper middle-class income level. the pictured food here came in around $150 CAD, not including the dozen items I already had in my pantry. So taking into account the bulk nature of some of the ingredients, my guess is this would work out to about 60 – 65$ per day. For that same barely upper middle class household this would represent nearly a quarter of their budget. At the median income in Canada this represents over a third of household after tax income and 46% at the bottom end of the middle class income bracket. For a lower middle-class or working class family, not only is ditching a pantry of existing food financially wasteful, but the replacement cost for the proposed healthy alternative is a financially unsustainable way to eat

Are popular healthy diet plans sustainable? This still life presents the agricultural production of Canada and the world. Coconut, banana and avocado are commonplace in the modern Canadian diet. However Covid-19 and it’s supply chain disruptions presented the question of how sustainable or even accessible are ‘healthy’ diets that require a smoothly operating global supply chain providing international ingredients on demand to privileged markets? As supply was inhibited in countries used to near constant availability prices rose and accusations of gouging and profiteering flew. Sometimes the ability to pay did not matter as the goods simply weren’t there to be bought (looking at you toilet paper). However generally rising prices on limited supply means choice in diet becomes the prerogative of the even wealthier and more privileged. Meanwhile someone(s) happily made more money from less product.

Stay tuned for the next post exploring the time investment required by health and diet culture in DRI – The Most From The Least.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the fifth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

Every New Salvation comes along when you are suffering the consequences of your actions.

Maybe you’ve reached your goal weight or maybe you haven’t, but at some point you notice that the old equation of calories in and calories out stops working. Or rather, it works less effectively than it has in the past. Portions have to be smaller and the exercise has to increase to get the same effect as last year. Reduced caloric needs don’t answer the entire question. At this rate you can see that you will be living on baby food portions or working out more hours than you have available. It seems necessary though, because you don’t want to die early. You don’t want to suffer from obesity related diseases, or obesity related discrimination. The body has begun to ratchet up its defence mechanisms against starvation and so, tortured by visions of forbidden foods, you desperately looks for ways to hack the system.

Enter the diet gurus. They have done it and they can show you how to do it too. They’ve been telling people how to eat since 1558 when Luigi Cornaro wrote The Art of Living Long.

Every new diet becomes a new salvation. Each diet requires complete dedication and belief. They ask you to surround yourself with supporters and get rid of negative influences. They turn you into evangelists for the new diet, at least in the beginning while you still believe you have found the truth. Like Christ fasting in the desert you know the rewards of everlasting life and good health will be worth the struggle of remaining virtuous in the face of the temptations the devil within uses to lures you away from your diet & exercise regime. But you have the word on your side, the word of Paleo or Veganism, or Peiganism (what is left to eat at that point? Not much, which brings us back to Coronaro who in his later years limited himself to an egg yolk a day with a few spoonful milk, & bread) Keto, South Beach, Blue zone, All In, Raw Food, Intermittent Fasting, Time Restricted Eating, Master Cleanses and Cabbage Soup Diets. Whatever ails you, you can also find a diet guru to tell you what to eat to fix it. Look great, feel great, live forever, it’s all about what you put in your body, or what you don’t.

Eventually each diet fails to deliver, or starves us into breaking, or damages us further. And on to the next guru. the one that either interprets the old texts the right way, or the one that utilizes all the newest scientific discoveries to help us get and stay thin (and healthy, because that’s really what we want, we’re not that shallow right?). Maybe this one will work.

But what if we entertained the idea that our body was not evil, was not the devil luring us with temptation to eat things not on our list, and the diet gurus were not saviours? What if our body was trying to save us by telling us to break our fasts, while the gurus were the devils tempting us to harm ourselves with new damaging diets in the name of achieving worldly glory?

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the fourth instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

Titles titles titles, maybe Fame & Fortune or Food is the final title for this piece and maybe not. Some titles come quickly and others take a while to feel settled. I’ve played with a number of titles for this piece but I don’t think this one is settled yet.

The economic pressure to get thin, and then to remain thin, is experienced at different intensity levels across society. There is an economic price in many occupations for not maintaining the current socially acceptable level of thinness. Thinner employees are often hired and promoted ahead of and valued higher than their heavier counterparts. This is supported in both research and anecdote. Having been larger and smaller, I have seen the difference in treatment from both sides in the workplace.

Where there is a competitive advantage in thinness, any one who feels the pressure of getting and keeping a regular pay check will also feel the pressure to present the image of the perfect (thin) employee. We then have two basic needs competing against each other, the need to eat and the need to be able to afford to eat. While size discrimination is prevalent across occupations it is most directly evident in the performing arts. To explore this conundrum created by diet culture I tapped the experience of Dawn van de Schoot whom I met through the Kitchen Feminism project. As an actress her experience was that, although she knew the harms of diet culture, everything just went so much more smoothly if she were thinner. Roles for thin actresses were/are more plentiful than for mid to large actresses.

In that context the pressure to ‘keep food on the table’ means that one feels one can never actually eat the food that one is now able to afford. To regularly eat to satiety, to enjoy the rewards of success, risks losing all that one has achieved, and all the rewards that are accorded to that achievement.

Further to that, I would like to add that not only do the performing arts disproportionately suffer from the toxic influence of diet culture, but by virtue of its role in creating the stories of our society, it also projects that influence outward across industries in which appearances and thinness should have little to no bearing on job performance:

Did I ever suffer or benefit from thin privilege or fat phobia in the workplace? Yes, both. However mainstream media entertainment leads us to be terrified of even the tiniest deviation from the thin ideal. The mythology says women (and increasingly men) risk loneliness and unemployment if I we get any bigger than a single digit dress size. Spouses will leave, no one will hire us and people in the streets will make fun of us. You know what? None of those things came true in my life despite having been anywhere from a size 6 to a size 22. But I can imagine that an actor or actress in Hollywood might not find work, that spouses also invested in image as status might leave, and random people on the internet might make fun of larger celebrities in what is effectively the street of our current online culture. In short, the dysfunctions of one particular section of society, by virtue of its role as the mirror of society, can magnify that dysfunction to all parts of society.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the third instalment of a series of blog posts going in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The first is here. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

The banquet piece of party food in The Social Circuit was situated in the weight and cardio room at a local public fitness and aquatic centre in Calgary. However, The Social Circuit is not about the struggle to lose weight and get in shape. Although many who are attempting this will identify with the image, it is actually about that point when the weight loss has been achieved, the struggle is supposed to be over and congratulations are due. But happily ever after never quite seems to arrive.

The Social Circuit is also about the slow and unrecognized slide into eating disorders. Unrecognized in part because it seems logical and necessary behaviour at the time, if one wants to retain the reward of their efforts (a regular pant size, social approval, good health, eternal life…). However, these behaviours are so pervasive in western society that we don’t typically recognize them as disordered unless accompanied by a Body Mass Index in the underweight category. I deliberately ‘stopped’ losing weight when I got down to a ‘normal’ BMI, to avoid the dangers of becoming anorexic, or so I thought.

Some behavioural symptoms of anorexia include fear of gaining weight, skipping meals, not wanting to eat in public, a preoccupation with food, binge eating accompanied by bulimia (self induced vomiting, but also over-exercise and/or laxative abuse) and social withdrawal:

Going out to celebrate a birthday involves a host of dangers: turning down a slice of cake that I reallllly do want to eat, or conversely suffering the judgements about if I should be eating the cake (if anyone thinks I need to watch my weight, such is our culture), or being hungry but not having foods there on my safe list (orthorexia). Maybe I will not eat all day to save up calories for the event (skipping meals)? But then maybe the gathering will trigger a binge (as the body, which thinks it is starving, fights me for control). If there is alcohol consumed that can introduce a whole other level of issues around binging and bulimia. Outside that, the price of joining in the celebration could be hours of repetitive exercise (exercise bulimia) to burn off an afternoon’s indulgence.

The fear of social eating seems justified since the body’s response to the end of caloric restriction seems to be to hold on to as many added calories and as much water as it can. This can result in sudden and dramatic overnight weight gains that may have taken months to take off in the first place. Logically speaking, it’s unlikely there are enough calories in one indulgence to warrant the weight gain, given our understanding that 3700 calories = 1 pound (for reference, that indulgence would be like eating a dozen doughnuts at once, not something I’ve ever done). But logic can’t stand up to the scale, and off to the gym I go for atonement. About the time the last pound has come back off it is time for the next celebration.

Given that having friends and a family means an annual cycle of birthdays and other celebrations, there seem to be only two equally insane options, exit your health or exit your social circle. Of course, if we could separate the concept of health from diet culture, if we could recognize that the behaviours required to maintain a tight control of body weight are symptomatic of disordered eating, the right choice might be easier to make.

My point is not that I developed anorexia (although I recognize many of the physical, mental and emotional symptoms), but that many of us, myself included, may be much closer to developing anorexia than we should be comfortable with.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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Welcome to the second instalment of a series of blog posts going more in-depth into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. You can read the first instalment here. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

On the other side of Reader Rock Gardens, separated by an iron fence on the peak of the hillside is Union Cemetery, founded in 1890 looking north and west across the bustling centre of Calgary. A Story As Old As Time pictures the fence that divides the gardens from the cemetery, and you can see gravestones in the tree window to the right of the cupcake. As you can guess this makes The Party Ended Too Early the next mise en scène in this series. (Side note, the paintings are not necessarily conceived of as being in a definite order, however these two definitely begin the series.)

There are many entry points for the individual into diet culture. It could be argued that evading the pressure to participate in diet culture would actually be an exceptional circumstance for most in western culture, tied as the image of the thin body is to conceptions of morality, meritocracy, productivity, beauty, desirability, good health, self control and personal responsibility.

This painting is complicated for me, so forgive me if words don’t do it justice (probably why I’m a painter, not a writer). It marks the transition of my own participation in diet culture from the recreational dabbling of my adolescent preoccupation with appearances and an emulation of the postures of adulthood, into an awareness of mortality, grief, loss and fear of discrimination that pushes one into a serious commitment.

The numbers on the grave stones are not dates but the ages of those beloved people lost too soon to morbid obesity. Obesity was not the cause of death, but rather was the visible sign of their health complications. The pain of losing them is mixed together with the pain of witnessing: the extremes they went to in conforming to societies expectations, the frustration of their aspirations to triumph over their biology, and the suspicion that had they been able to visibly conform to societies perception of ‘taking care of their health’ when seeking medical care, they may have still been with us today.

Did their struggles against underlying health conditions and natural body shapes help or hinder their health in the long run? I know now that the vast majority of diets end up in weight gains as opposed to losses. Chronic high levels of stress hormones in the system contribute to insulin resistance, high cholesterol and blood pressure as well as weight gain; caloric restriction is one of the conditions which triggers the release of stress hormones. In short, did encouragement to participate in diet culture contribute to their early demise?

But that is late knowledge, and as painful as that is in itself, thinking that knowing more then could have kept them with us, it is past time now. The easy answer, the dominant socially acceptable one, was diet to reduce body size, the visible sign, of ill health. It offered promising protection against the the biases of society and ultimately against the uncertainty of life and death.

Work In Progress Slideshow:

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Welcome to the first instalment of a series of blog posts going into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below:

Project Background: You can read more about the project background here.

I began this series thinking about the link between love and hunger, two of our primal drives. I was still thinking about gardens as a pseudo natural space after having painted a small homage to Bosch in Tempting Fruit (2022), and I thought what more romantic garden image than Fragonard’s The Swing (1767)? The woman in that painting, the garden interloper’s object of desire, decked out in pink and lace and frills, reminded me of an extravagant cupcake, designed to evoke that ancient desire to consume – ate ;-).

My garden was based on Reader Rock Gardens Historic Park in the City of Calgary. It was an internationally renowned garden established by William Roland Reader, the Superintendent for Calgary Parks (1913 – 1942). During Reader’s life the garden had and trialed 3000 – 4000 plant species from around the world as well as Canada. Although declared a city park after his death, the garden languished for decades until an initiative in the mid 2000’s had it restored and reopened. Incredibly some of those early plants have survived and can still be seen in the park today.

It seems our drive to survive can carry us beyond all expectation. Our lives frequently follow the age old story of love, mating, procreating, protecting, providing and nurturing. In all of those stages we have evolved to guarantee the safety of our species, our mates and progeny, by putting up extra stores of energy to survive those times when we are neglected by the world and resources are slim.

When foods are engineered to be as appealing as possible, while every instinct we have encourages us to ‘put by’ a little extra, is it any wonder the dress maker’s tape has to go round further and further?

And so begins my journey through health and diet culture for the purposes of this series.

The Work In Progress – Slideshow

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