What’s Up With Cake?

What’s Up With Cake?

The screams of fellow six year olds flood your also six year old ears. The parents call. Cake time. You sit down and surround that perfectly frosted cake. As the slices get passed out you only pray to get the largest one. You pick up your fork and take that sweet sweet bite of the pillowy airy cakey sponge smothered in that velvety frosting. After you finish, you and your fellow six year old friends are energized and satisfied to run and scream again. 

10 years later the gossip of teen life infiltrates your ears. No parents call cake time, but eventually, you are faced with that rich moist sponge once again. The slice in front of you raises your heartbeat. You look around frantically praying you didn’t get the largest slice. Taking that one bite feels like a crime. You leave half on your plate claiming you are full. In reality, for the rest of the party your brain can’t stop thinking about the damn cake, hungry for more. 

Whatever happened to you and that piece of cake?

This thought, while always lingering in the back of my mind, fully occurred to me as I was watching a comedic yet depressing movie, documentary, short film type thing called: Eating, A Very Serious Comedy About Women and Food, which I thoroughly enjoyed and rated a well deserved five starts on my letterboxd (@catalinabilandzija). Anywho, getting to the point, there was one particular scene in this film in which they were finally cutting into the birthday cake of a 40 year old woman. As the slices got cut, slapped onto paper plates, and passed around to each woman, the dance of the cake slices began to form in a merry ground pattern in the women’s circle. No one. Ate. The goddamn. Piece. Of. Cake. 

While a slight giggle erupted from my belly as I watched this merry go round of cake go by, the light laughter stemmed from the deep uncomfort of knowing this feeling. Soon, the smile seemed to wash from my face and the deeper pain, anxiety and all too familiar feeling sunk to the pit of my stomach. 

The piece of cake seemed to become the one person at the party everyone avoided like the plague. It was no longer a thing, it was that one ex that showed up to a party in which you immensely try to avoid in order to prevent any awkward tension- it was a relationship. 

Cake-or let's just say food-is now a full time relationship. 

A relationship that is supposed to be ‘healthy’

That has now, for so many, has become ‘toxic’.

And the big question that haunts so many of us: why?

Has food always been a relationship?

Or has it evolved into one?

At some point, in many of our brains, some chemical switch or reaction fires in our neurons that turns cake from the best part of the birthday party, to the part we all dread and run away from (or desperately try to run off the day after if we so indulged in that piece of cake). Perhaps it's due to diet culture, social media, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Goop diet. In all honesty, I don’t know the answer-and I’m not even sure if there is a singular answer for that matter. Because the truth is, like any human relationship, food is extremely individual and extremely personal. 

But the paradox that haunts me with food is this:

When does something so healthy, beneficial, and necessary physically, emotionally, and mentally for our lives, become so toxic?

I’m not one of those people who believes that we should live like our primitive ancestors on the paleo diet or whatever. Humans evolve, we change, our needs change to keep us functioning. 

But how much has our relationship with food evolved? And how much of this evolution is beneficial to us? How has something that used to be so innate and natural like breathing or needing to use the restroom, become a task in which so many of us restrict ourselves to the point of destruction,  or binge to the point of being unable to be aware of our own fullness?

When did we start needing therapy to heal our relationships with cake? 

What did cake ever do to us?

I don’t have these answers now.

I’m not sure if I ever will. 

But I hope with these blog posts, I, and you who are reading them can begin to explore the relationship of food and humans-together, and of course, eventually say ‘I love you’ to cake once again.