The philosopher Roland Barthes makes a distinction between eating, the act of putting a material into your body, and consuming, which involves the ideas about what your food is. To Barthes, food itself is an institution: an assemblage of physical properties, social aspects, images, dreams, and values; eating is “a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signaling other behaviors.”1 If eating is indeed an assemblage of fantasies, Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Eight Bites” asks what it means to not eat, or to eat restrictively. Adding nuance to the discussion of food as practice and institution, Machado considers how restrictive eating interacts with institutions of gender, ideals of body, and longing for self-control. Moreover, her prose juxtaposes the subject matter at hand, and challenges readers to enjoy: she writes in a way I want to inhale; I consume her words with eagerness.
In “Eight Bites,” a woman watches her three sisters one by one undergo bariatric surgery, or weight loss surgery, and become eerily content; they speak with “a single mouth that once ate and now just says, ‘I feel really, really good.’” But while the narrator envies her sisters’ slimness and constant state of bliss, Machado depicts a loss, mourning their ability to experience pleasure from food. While the woman feasts on a cavalcade of oysters, her sister downs water and begs her to narrate the sensations she gets from eating them. She responds: “They are the sum of all healthy things: seawater and muscle and bone…very few calories. An indulgence without being an indulgence.” Although the woman is physically able to savor food, an ability her sister now longs for, she does not allow herself to; she is constrained by shame, experiencing the feast of oysters not as an opportunity for pleasure but a mindless low calorie meal, redeemable primarily for being low in calories.
In a moment of irony, the woman wonders where her and her sisters’ bodies “that needed the surgery” came from, citing their mother’s iron will and policy of only eating eight bites per meal. The embodiment of restrictive eating in this story, her mother represents what Pierre Bourdieu terms the “ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness.”2 During a scene of mouth-watering food, the narrator recalls her mother and mourns her own inability to restrict her eating, eating eight bites, and eight more, and eight more: “the salad leaves were dripping vinegar and oil and the noodles had lemon and cracked pepper and everything was just so beautiful, and I was still hungry.” Again, Machado juxtaposes the beauty and potential for pleasure from the meal with the woman’s inability to let herself enjoy it. When she finishes eating, she becomes so angry, she cries. It is here that the woman decides to undergo bariatric surgery herself; if she cannot make eight bites work for her body, she will make her body work for eight bites.
When the woman tells her daughter about her plan to undergo surgery, her daughter is furious for a plethora of reasons. She does not understand why her mother would hate her body enough to surgically remove much of it, to no longer be able to “eat like a normal human.” She values food, providing the poetic quip that “language is infused with food like everything else, or at least like everything else should be.” As a reader, I loved the daughter, who is outspoken and living in Portland with her not-so-secret girlfriend. The daughter allows herself to desire; she is not ashamed of her anger. Still, she is insecure, she feels hurt. She asks her mother if she hates her body, too. Just as parents––and due to structures of inequality in caregiving, mothers in particular3––teach their children eating habits, so too are values of slimness and practices of restrictive eating taught.
Machado writes womanhood as something that is embodied moreso in the way it is sought after than the way it is experienced.
Machado uses this eerie tale of body and spirit to argue for food as an opportunity for enjoyment, while depicting how institutions of gender and our internalization of social and parental values make this difficult, skewing our worldview as a whole. She contrasts seemingly impossible expectations of physical appearance without medical intervention, and the self-enforcement of eating exclusively in moderation, with scenes of denied feast, savor, and enjoyment. Machado writes womanhood as something that is embodied moreso in the way it is sought after than the way it is experienced. Underlying the restrictive eating and surgical decisions of the woman, her sisters, and their mother, desiring to exert self-control and maintain ideal womanhood, are lost potentials for experiencing food as pleasure and community.
Still, it must be noted that there are no men in this story; it is an investigation solely of the feminine experience of body regulation and desire for control. While this aligned with my personal life experience, and I enjoy Machado’s woman-centered writing as a whole, there is definitely more room for discussion regarding how the construction and internalization of masculinity impacts body regulation and the inhibition of enjoyment from food. I do not necessarily see this as a flaw in “Eight Bites,” but rather an opportunity for others to add a masculine perspective and further nuance to the discussion of how internalized values of restriction impact the institution of consumption.
Overall, I love Machado’s invitation to enjoy, and I appreciate her warning against letting ourselves be ruled by internalized standards of restriction. Considering again Barthes’ argument that eating sums up and signals other behaviors, Machado offers a much-needed perspective of how restrictive eating sums up and signals other restrictive behaviors, and how we lose ourselves in the process of chasing self-control.
While the woman recovers from surgery, she notices a physical presence looming in her home. For years, she tries to rid herself of it. She is cursed. When she dies, the figure holds her, picks her up from her bed, and takes her outside to breathe in the salty air once more.
Footnotes
1. Barthes, Roland. 1961. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.”
2. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. “The Power of Taste.” Boston Review, December 1.
3. Fielding-Singh, Priya. 2021. How the Other Half Eats. New York: Little, Brown.
See Also: Machado, Carmen Maria. 2017. “Eight Bites.” Gulf Coast Magazine 29(2), https://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/29.2-summer/fall-2017/eight-bites/.
