Jessica Anne Clappison was born on October 29th, 1996. This was also the day she began her relationship with food. While she has no memories of her food preferences as a baby, she can recount her standard diet from her elementary days. As a young child, she did not have a diverse selection foods she enjoyed. Her diet mainly consisted of chicken nuggets and bread. Jessica’s favorite meal at this time was white noodles with butter and salt. In contrast, she viewed overly flavored dishes, vegetables and even fruit with great disdain. However, her mother did not pander to these picky food habits. Her mother, Melinda Clappison, is great cook who has made extravagant and diverse dinners throughout Jessica’s life. Melinda has a Hispanic background, so she often prepares traditional Mexican dishes as well as concocts her own flavorful meals. Interestingly enough, while her mother loves different foods, her father, John Clappison, is a picky eater. Potatoes, burgers, and bread are his staples. He refuses, to this day, to eat anything he considers "ethnic", claims he needs meat with every meal and insists rice and soup are not real foods. The word "ethnic" means something different for everyone. In Jessica's family, what are considered "ethnic" foods are foods that are not plain, sugary or mild dishes. Despite being raised with these opposing food ideals, it was ultimately her mother’s diet that Jessica picked up on. Jessica’s picky food habits could not survive with her mother’s cooking in addition to her mother’s constant insistence to try new foods. Jessica fell in love with many types of foods as she aged including Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean and Mediterranean. Jessica even preferred these foods over her previously favored plain foods. Despite such a wide selection of food she will eat, she does have some rules. Jessica refuses to eat spicy foods, since they cause her lips to swell painfully. The pain she experiences from spicy foods causes her to find eating them tortuous. Jessica avoids foods that are too greasy, not because she does not like them, but because they do not agree with her stomach. She also avoids pork when she can help it because pigs are just as smart as dogs and eating pork fills her with guilt.
Despite such drastic changes in food choices over her life, one thing had lasted until very recently: her sweet tooth. Other than her mother, Jessica’s whole household loves sweets. However, Jessica’s previous feelings for desserts were not exclusively of love. Sweets are referred to by her mother as “crack”, implying that they are addictive and horrible foods. According to Rachel Hertz from, That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion: “We learn both the meaning and safety of food from our peers…” (Hertz 9). As a culture, there are core fundamentals that most people find unacceptable, gluttony is one of them. Jessica’s mother learned from the wider food culture that over indulging in fattening foods, namely sweets, is a deplorable thing to do. Thus, she instilled this lesson onto Jessica by giving desserts the nickname “crack”. This nickname for desserts often made Jessica feel ashamed when she consumed sweets, but did not stop her eating mass quantities of them. Her house has always had sweets available. Her sister loves baking and her mother always has ice cream in stock for her father. Whenever she would eat dessert in her house, her mother would yell at her: “Are you eating crack again?” While the yelling was in a joking manner, she disliked when her mother pointed out her consumption of sweets. As a result, her devouring of desserts was out of control when she was alone, especially as a child. When she was free from her mother’s gaze, she used the rare opportunity to stuff herself to the point that she would sometimes feel ill. One specific memory she has from overeating sweets was from her elementary days. During the school year, she had to wake up her mother to see her off to school. Knowing her mother would not wake until she retrieved her, Jessica would often take this the opportunity to eat baked goods in solitude. One morning, Jessica consumed half a pan of brownies before waking her mother up. On her walk to the bus, Jessica felt horribly ill. She had eaten far too many brownies and puked before even making it to the bus stop. As she aged, Jessica learned to control her sweet intake and continued to love sweets until a recent diet change.
Jessica never thought about what she ate until six months ago. As long as the food tasted good, Jessica would eat anything. She continued this diet for nineteen years, since it never seemed to bear any consequences for her figure. Everything changed once she decided she wanted a fitter physique over the summer. With this decision came research to best achieve this goal. What she learned from the research drastically changed the way she viewed food. To her horror, she found that diet partnered with calorie counting were major attributes to achieving a fitter physique. Today, because US citizens have such easy access to so many foods, many people view calories as an enemy set out to fatten the populace. Calorie counting is a recent trend that aims to limit ones intake of these supposedly evil calories. She also discovered that her diet was horribly unbalanced and was introduced macro nutrient rules. Jessica had to cut out many of her favorite foods in order to achieve her goal. The pizzas, grilled cheeses and fries she once ate gleefully had transformed into her calorie, fat and carb dense enemies. After the research, she started to look up food’s nutritional value on her phone then log it on her calorie counting app before putting any food on her plate. The diet was hard for her to maintain. She had been used to eating all the tasty snacks and foods she ever desired. Michael Moss’s paper, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, points out how food industry products have become addictive and how many individuals call for food companies to “pull back on their use of salt, sugar and fat” (Moss 2) The food industry spends millions to engineer a “bliss point” for their products that “create(s) the greatest amount of crave” (Moss 6). Jessica’s body craved having large intakes of sugar and salt since it was used the constant intake of addictive snacks and foods its whole existence. Her diet change was a battle to defeat her poor nutrition habits, which made it significantly harder to maintain. In addition to the hardship of attempting to defeat a sugar and salt dependence, Jessica received opposition from her friends and family about her diet change. In their opinion, because she was already skinny she had no reason to think of her nutrition and therefore should not limit herself. The opposition from others as well as her own cravings made her think of quitting the diet many times, an eventually she did. However, the diet was not as tortuous as those who oppose it make it out to be. She could still consume many foods she enjoyed and she had not experienced as much stomach pain as she used to with her old diet. Jessica’s food journey has come with many changes. The child who ate only plain noodles turned into the teenager who liked noodles from many different cultures to someone who avoided noodles unless they were whole grain and she had not met her carb intake. These changes came about from her mother’s as well as society's guidance on what to eat in addition to the information she learned from research about what foods are best for a muscle bound body. Even more changes were to come after taking a class at her college called Eating Industrial.
Many of Jessica’s previous ideas about food have changed even further thanks to her recently finished class. Jessica used to believe that the body needed protein from meat to build muscle and would eat meat with every meal. She now knows meat does more harm than good and that vegetables provide just as much needed protein. This knowledge has not stopped her from eating meat completely, but has reduced her meat intake. Jessica also now has a more cynical outlook on food. Jessica learned about how much the food industry lies on packages to sell their product, and now whenever she walks through a grocery store and sees phrases such as “cage-free” and “non-GMO wheat” she knows that these labels have little to no meaning. This is because there is no such thing as non-GMO wheat and also the fact that cage free does not mean the animals lived any better lives. Additionally, Jessica now constantly gives out unsolicited information about food to her current boyfriend and family. Almost anytime one of her loved ones tries to take a moment to enjoy some processed food or meat in her presence, Jessica will bombard them with her shocking and appalling food facts while hypocritically partaking in the consumption of the same foods. Overall, Jessica’s food habits haven’t changed since her completion of her class. She just now feels guiltier almost any time she eats. The gist of her class taught her meat is bad for her and gets horribly tortured, vegetables are okay for you but not really because they are covered in pesticides plus they could have possibly been picked by children or struggling immigrants, and that processed foods are terrible for her and the environment. She feels helpless in opposing what she now believes to be evil food corporations since it produces 99% of available food, she is a poor student, she is living off a meal plan that partakes in the industry and she has no access to a car to get food from anywhere else. While her food habits may have to remain the same for now, her newly found knowledge makes her want to veer off the industrial food/agriculture business path by seeking out locally grown food as well as growing her own food in the future. Her dream is to one day have a small ranch with some chicken for eggs, bees for honey, and a small garden where she can grow some of her own fruits and vegetables. For now, however, she will just to have to keep grumpily being a part of the massive food system.