I had discovered anorexia from one of my soccer coaches when I was ten. She had been friends with my best friend’s cousin. At our first practice, Feyi whispered in my ear, “That’s Melissa, she’s anorexic.” Anor-what? I had never heard the term before. Feyi explained, “Anorexia is when you don’t eat. So Melissa doesn’t eat.” Now with this photo in my hand, I figured that was the most logical solution: to just stop eating. My mistake was announcing to my parents that I had decided to become anorexic. I thought they would say, “Okay, Lisa, you can do that if you want to.” But of course my decision was met with much disapproval.
In middle school, food was my comfort and escape. I was never satisfied with myself, I felt ugly and fat, and the only way I knew how to comfort myself was with food. I couldn’t face who I was because in reality I had no idea. Food was like my own little support group and in it I could be popular, which was not the story at school. I felt like a complete outcast from all the skinny girls.
Every day I wanted so desperately to lose weight, but soon enough I turned back to food. Perhaps part of my chubby figure in middle school was due to lingering baby fat. I did eat quite a lot, but not enough to gain as much weight as I did. I think puberty caught up with me fast yet mingled with childhood chub that had a hard time saying good-bye.
My weight got noticed by people who knew me, and some who didn’t. On several occasions, as I was walking in our neighborhood, groups of juvenile boys would drive by, spot me, and shout out, “Fat!” At a birthday party in seventh grade, we were assigned to two cars and our driver asked who was the biggest girl, so she could sit in the front seat. One of the girls shouted out, mockingly, “Oh, it’s Lisa! Lisa is the biggest!” As if I wasn’t aware that my body was substantial by twelve-year-old standards. For the rest of the party, at a teddy bear factory, everyone but me was in a group, and when we got our pictures taken at the end, they posed together in happiness. I posed with my bear, my chubby cheeks smiling but inside I was breaking down.
I got my period when I was twelve. I was so ashamed, and prayed it would just go away. Mom reassured me that everything was okay and that this was a good thing, a sign of maturity. I didn’t want to be mature, certainly not this soon. My friends were still reacting to the idea of menstruation with a large eeewww, even though some of them had gotten their periods, too. Mom didn’t get hers until she was fifteen, so what did she know?
sheila: Lisa was dealing with bras and tampons at an age when I still had the body of a little boy. I wanted desperately to “develop,” whatever that meant, but it seemed like everybody else had caught the express train and I was stuck at the station. Lisa just wanted the train to stop.
Psychologists point out that girls can’t win in their middle school years. Eighth-grade boys hit on sixth-grade girls, ridicule them for having breasts or not having breasts, for being fat or flat. While a girl’s body is spinning out of control, she looks at her mother for a hint of the future, and likely is appalled at her bad genes or convinced she will never look as good as Mom. She is dying to look and feel like a teenager, meanwhile holding on to childhood comforts and prerogatives, like having Mom drive her everywhere and Dad cook dinner. It’s a push-pull time that repeats in later teen years, when the freedom of adulthood is very appealing, but not the responsibility.
And for Mom, there’s a full plate of rejection. Those smiling brown eyes I used to lock with and know would often flash at me with anger and disgust. I couldn’t get past the surface. Yeah, yeah, at this age Lisa needed to separate from us and expand beyond the family, and by now she should be secure in our love and values. She was no longer my adorable worshipper, the one who asked, “When you die, can I have your red shoes?” Now she scorned my closet, and most of me. I would have dined out on rejection every day, though, if it would have lessened Lisa’s load. Instead, I relived my own mostly unpleasant early adolescence in spite of feeling a dash of jealousy. She was young and I wasn’t.
Lisa’s room, where we had tried and failed at a series of organizational systems, got more chaotic through the middle school years. The usual advice to parents is: Just close the door. Except there was an increasingly consumptive aspect to her mess, like she couldn’t ever have enough stuff. Amid the mounds of clothes and shoes, hair things, scented candles, stuffed animals, handbags, and jewelry, she often lost her homework. Was that normal girlish sloppiness or a symptom of something deeper? She was furious when I gave away her dollhouse, which had been boxed in the garage for years. It wasn’t a handmade treasure, just a large plastic pieced-together dollhouse, sharing limited storage space with all the other outgrown toys, dolls, and artwork that had overflowed Lisa’s room.
She wasn’t in a party crowd, drinking, or doing drugs. She wasn’t cutting herself. She wasn’t measuring food or constantly weighing herself . . . yet.
Lisa played soccer, took singing lessons, prepared for her bat mitzvah and did all right in school. But in each arena, accomplishment came with a side dish of trauma. The coach never played her, the math teacher didn’t like her, religious school was a minefield of cliques. Minutes before the annual vocal recital, she came down with a sore throat and refused to sing. Maybe she did have a sore throat, and certainly the ramp-up to lavish bar and bat mitzvah parties was intense. Lisa’s complaints usually had at least a grain of truth. At an age when old friendships couldn’t be counted on and the requirements shifted constantly, she had a short supply of resilience.
Until now, the soccer field had been a haven for girls to run, kick, and yell. I was envious. They learned what in my age group only boys got to learn from sports. They even talked about it: “Somebody wins, somebody loses, nobody dies.” “There’ll always be someone better than you, and someone worse.” “On any given day, anybody can win.” All those corny sports lessons do prove useful in the real world, along with the jokey camaraderie. Boys’ teams would say, “It’s not who wins or loses, it’s how good are the treats.” The girls’ version was, “It’s not who wins or loses, it’s how good you look.” The difference seemed funny at the time. In middle school, boys sometimes came to watch the girls’ teams.
Suddenly there were bad teachers. Not mean, usually, just not able to control the class or convey the material, or both. From daycare through elementary school, except for the occasional substitute, Lisa never had a bad teacher. Now, if she fell behind, she was sure it was the teacher’s fault. Often she was right. Teaching middle school, where kids are said to go in like lambs and come out lions, requires a special talent. Few have it. But Lisa bad-mouthed some of the good teachers, too.
We signed her up for an after-school tutoring program, and then another. Neither helped, and she hated going.
All the complaining and blaming were getting in Lisa’s way. She was tightening up, less able to concentrate and get her schoolwork done. So much for the love of learning. The whole-child foundation of elementary school—giving equal value to emotional, social, physical, and intellectual growth—had slipped away. In middle school, the game was about grades and appearance. We watched Lisa gain weight and lose confidence, and we asked ourselves, “What do we do now?” There was a group at school to help kids organize their time and manage homework, which also taught that not everyone was born with CEO skills and movie-star looks, that others had problems, and that problems could be solved. Lisa agreed to go.
The group helped. Lisa relaxed and did better in school. But still, something was hurting that Lisa was stuffing down with food. She kept asking if she was fat. We kept saying no, and it didn’t matter anyway, because she was a wonderful person, compassionate and smart, and she would make a difference in the world. Ned and I weren’t popular in school or beautiful ever, yet we had a great life. What was so bad about being like us?
Before Lisa went into full puberty and stopped caring at all about our opinions, we thought about finding a therapist. We investigated and skirted the issue with her. She was horrified. If we insisted, would that make her feel there was something wrong
with her? But there was something wrong. If we didn’t insist, we could miss the opportunity. It could be like the mistake we made with toilet training. Lisa was ready at an early age, too early, according to the books. By the time the world was ready, she’d lost interest and put all her stubborn energy into staying in diapers. Now, though, instead of temper fits our worry was that Lisa could drop into a serious depression, the scourge of my family history.
We told ourselves to relax. Lisa was doing well enough in school; she had friends and interests. This was a developmental stage she’d get through, a “period of disequilibrium” like the ones that hit her at just about every half-year when she was younger. By her birthday, she normally matured and mellowed out. But this time, was Lisa having treatable problems? What should we change about our own behavior? Were we becoming one of those families we used to tsk-tsk about? As if saying, “Of course Jeffrey M. is in a drug treatment program. You could tell in kindergarten. He was always getting sent to the principal’s office.” Now, in my imagination there had been similar conversations along the soccer field sidelines: “I know, I know. How could the Himmels not see Lisa’s eating disorders a mile away? She used to be such a fun kid, but now, you know, she seems kind of depressed. Plus, with all that food in the house, and all they do is cook or go out to eat.” lisa: As if being overweight through my early puberty stages wasn’t torture enough, I did not belong to any clique in particular nor did I really have many friends. In middle school, people were judged on appearance and rumors, although I doubt any negative rumors circulated about me, because I wasn’t that important. I was mainly gentle and friendly to all, just a bit bigger.
Not that I was a loner. I had close best friends, other friends, and acquaintances, but I think my body structure and all-over proportions caused my peers to steer away. I mean, who wanted to be seen with the fat girl?
Boys became an interest for me, like many young teens, blossoming and discovering their own thoughts on sexuality. Yet, no boy ever advanced my way, nor had I ever been asked to dance. I still went to the school dances, trying to dress cute and hoping I might get lucky one night. I buried my despair with bravery as I often asked boys to dance. I never got turned down, but I’m sure none of those volunteers felt happy about a slow dance with a chubby girl.
I struggled academically, with severe test anxiety and self-loathing, and by seventh grade most of my motivation was gone. Even when teachers offered their support I could never bring myself to seek assistance. I did fine in English and history (social studies then) as well as art and P.E. But math and science were torture. No matter how hard I pushed myself to study I could never grasp the concepts laid out before me. I always excelled in projects, however, giving me some leeway and a boost in my grade. Even with the talents I did possess, such as musical theater, singing in general, and art, I never felt these trades would lead to any success or social acceptance. No matter what, I was a failure. I don’t know if anyone really saw me in this negative light, and in a way it didn’t matter. I knew myself better than anyone. I knew I belonged on the bottom of the social ladder, and no matter how hard my parents tried to remind me of my positive attributes, nothing could raise my morale. I sucked at life and I especially sucked at middle school.
sheila: When Ned and I look back on Lisa’s middle school years, we realize this was a key time and we beat ourselves with an endless lash of sentences starting, “If only.” If only Lisa had found a passion to counterbalance her low self-regard. Middle school was when I discovered journalism, which provides armor for many shy people. As in acting, in the news business you get to become somebody else. You are the protector of the public’s right to know. You get to call important people, accost strangers, ask all kinds of questions, and keep asking until the story makes sense.
Lisa didn’t find anything like that. She was good at sports and singing, but not driven enough to really get better. She played the piano. She got her schoolwork done and got a Student of the Month bumper sticker, but long after all her friends, when to her it wasn’t all that important anymore.
I was the one who was thriving. Unlike sports writing, food writing truly can be as good as it seems. Reviewing restaurants turned out to be a natural for me; going places I’d never been, undercover, and criticizing other people’s work. What joy! I doubt this had anything to do with the fun of discovering restaurants, but later I tested positive for the supertaster gene. Supertasters have the most fungiform papillae, those dots on your tongue where taste buds live. The French physiologist Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, father of “You are what you eat,” said people with more papillae live in different worlds of taste. And in my world, Northern California, your papillae also get to taste lots of wine.
Often during that first year of reviewing restaurants Ned and I would look up from the table and start giggling. Most of my career had been served as an editor in a penny-pinching newsroom. Lunch? If there was time, maybe somebody ran out for burritos. Usually editors and reporters in the newsroom grabbed a plate of something congealing in the cafeteria steam table. Cafeteria workers regularly swept the newsroom for trays people had forgotten to return, after eating at their desks. The food was bad or terrible. One view was that this was to remind us, in the heady years of newspapers, that we were blue-collar workers.
Now I was working nights and weekends again, but I controlled my schedule, and it was fun. The worst that could happen was a bad meal, paid for by my employer. In ten years of reviewing for the Mercury News, I never got food poisoning, and the one time I did get sick, it was not the restaurant’s fault. I ate too much rich food in a high-toned San Francisco hotspot, and a young woman was spraying her hair in the poorly ventilated restroom, where I stopped before leaving. I just made it to the car in time to puke in the gutter.
My editors sent me to Carmel, the Napa Valley, Mendocino, and Lake Tahoe, the prime weekend getaway destinations for Silicon Valley. Ned and I were forced to spend two or three days in swanky hotels like the Highlands Inn and eat every meal in a different restaurant.
The need to remain anonymous keeps reviewers from getting chummy with chefs and other restaurant people, but it means reporting stories by phone that normally would be done in person. Perfect for a shy yet curious person. On the phone, I developed a banter that would’ve been hard to sustain in person.
One day I got a voicemail message from a former employee of a prominent downtown San Jose restaurant. The restaurant business is tough in every way, and a lot of people leave mad. Calls from disgruntled ex-employees were almost as common as, “Where should I take my girlfriend for her birthday?” and “Why is restaurant service so terrible these days?” but I called everybody back. This guy had been a waiter at a renowned restaurant, where, he claimed, the executive chef was “cutting corners” in ways that customers should know about.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like using fake Madeira. And the veal dishes are made with pork.” He mentioned something else, something minor like the Madeira, but putting pork in the veal scallopine? Now we’re talking fraud with religious implications!
My editor and I went to lunch at the spacious two-story restaurant in a beautifully restored historic downtown San Jose building, crowded as usual with familiar business and government faces. We had veal scallopine and the parmigiana. The meat on both plates was mild and covered in sauce; it almost could have been a very tender chicken breast. I called John Draeger, who oversaw the meat, poultry, and fish department for Draeger’s Markets, a third-generation family business with a full-service restaurant and nationally known cooking school. “Pork has a very distinctive flavor, which comes from fat,” said Draeger, who had apprenticed as a butcher. “But if the exterior fat is removed, the distinctive flavor wouldn’t come through.” Also, he said, the texture could be pounded out and disguised by breading and sauces.
I called food-science writer Harold McGee, a Palo Alto resident. He was revising his classic On Food and Cooking, which would come out three y
ears later. “Pork has gotten much leaner,” McGee said. “It resembles veal more, and would be easier to disguise.” He echoed Draeger about cooking diminishing the meats’ different flavors: “Browning generates a more generic flavor.”
Even the local kosher butcher said he wouldn’t bet the store on distinguishing cooked pork from veal.
If nobody could be sure by tasting, maybe science would help. Had the meat been raw, I could have sent it to the USDA or the veterinary genetics lab at University of California, Davis, department for DNA testing. I called Michigan State’s department of animal science and Iowa State, too. A private drug company could do it, but they wouldn’t. Many of their clients were restaurants.
Marian Burros at the New York Times had recently run tests on the freshness and cleanliness of food at salad bars. She generously took my call and gave me the name of a lab in New York City that she’d been using for ten or twelve years. Associated Analytical Laboratories Inc. also did work for the federal government, Burros told me, and, “They don’t take just any newspaper case.”
They took mine. Finally, I was getting somewhere, although my editor’s editor balked at the $200 per sample cost. We would have to send at least three samples to verify the results. We would also send a sample of another restaurant’s veal scallopine, to make sure everything wasn’t coming up pork.
This restaurant seats four hundred diners, but someone might notice if I showed up repeatedly and ordered the same thing. So I called for takeout, wrapped the meat samples in plastic and foil, and FedExed the boxes to New York. The next day, the boxes came back to my desk. They had started to smell. FedEx workers also had noticed they weren’t labeled properly and could have been hazardous. Now the meat was rotten. Back to the restaurant, three more times, eating in and ordering out. I found packing ice and labels, and the Mercury News had to spring for next-day delivery to New York. All of this restaurant’s veal samples tested positive for pork.
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