Part 1

NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS

O

BOOKS BY

FANNIE HURST

O

JUST AROUND THE CORNER EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG GASLIGHT SONATAS HUMORESQUE STAR DUST THE VERTICAL CITY LUMMOX APPASSIONATA MANNEQUIN SONG OF LIFE A PRESIDENT IS BORN PROCESSION FIVE AND TEN BACK STREET IMITATION OF LIFE ANITRA’S DANCE

NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS

_by_

Fannie Hurst

1935

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON

NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS

_Copyright, 1935, by Fannie Hurst_

_Printed in the United States of America_

_All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, motion- or talking-picture purposes without written authorization from the holder of these rights. Nor may the text or part thereof be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing. For information address: Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N. Y._

FIRST EDITION

A-K

NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS

O

Sometimes, regarding my slimmed human envelope, which at best seems designed more for service than beauty, I do ponder.

Not so much upon its frailty, which has been achieved at the cost of no food with my meals, but upon the frailty of the spiritual inhabitant of that envelope.

Regarding that spiritual inhabitant at the restless business of trying to learn to live in her house of clay, faint ironic laughter, the kind apt to be induced by a breakfast of lemon juice and hot water, rumbles along the inner me.

Some women are born frail. Some have frailty thrust upon them. Still others achieve it, and at what price glory!

_Trivia_, you say?

Not at all.

What is _trivia_, and what is not?

If, by virtue of its relativity to my concerns, the dahlia in my garden, the color of my tweeds, the nick in my dining-room table, or the market price of strawberries become important, then they _are_ important. Everything or nothing matters.

When even half of one hundred and twenty-three million human beings on a North American continent begins to care passionately about adhering in standards of beauty to formulae concocted somewhere between anywhere and Hollywood, then that state of mind becomes important. Sufficiently so to create neurosis, psychosis, and acidosis.

No state of mind or body flecked with evidence of phobia can remain trivial, no matter how trivial the minds and bodies themselves.

It was about four years ago that the slimming phobia of my sex and era first began to fleck me with its rabies-like foam.

Up to that period, although overweight by a not inconsiderable poundage, I had not given complete rein to the latent unease which sporadically smote me at my abundance.

In fact, overweight from my advent as an eleven-pound baby, there was a brief period around adolescence when my opulence seemed something of an asset.

“Guess how much she weighs,” I can hear my grandfather proudly challenging, as he stood me on the sitting-room table and named a good eight or ten pounds over and above the most conservative estimate.

Ladies called me apple-cheeked, and gentlemen pinched them. I strutted, but even back there, there was unease in that strut.

But generally speaking, up to the time of my acute surrender to my sex’s phobia for slimming, the matter of anatomical distinction or peculiarity was scarcely within the pale of discussion. You were fat or slim, narrow or wide, dark or blond, according to a divine appropriation over which you had little control. To be sure, there was usually a “Fatty” in the schoolroom or on the block, but generally speaking, one did not dwell upon the flesh, or lack of it.

* * * * *

Beauty, had it not been parceled out in your direction, was something that could be brewed within the spirit in a manner to offset the external lack. This you were taught at the parental knee. Although it was not very satisfactory, you let it go at that. Except, why were hearts of gold and curls of gold so rarely supposed to strike simultaneously. How odd of God....

Now take this matter of being a plump little girl. You were apple-cheeked and got pinched for their cuteness, but then, you had to go and be a fat little girl, too. Why couldn’t one be a slender little girl--and apple-cheeked!

If you were unduly slim, you were simultaneously apt not to be apple-cheeked. There God went again, being odd. Slim, your portion was usually the bitter one of cod-liver oil and shoulder braces, whereas in plump reverse, you were called the picture of health and encouraged in your natural predilection for the creamed potatoes and marshmallow fillings which were usually anathema to the slim cod-liver oilers.

There was to come an adult time however, in the life of this narrator, when as the hum of a swarm of locusts over the peace of her mind, the dietary chant of the dieting women began to separate itself into a specific and ominous roar all its own.

Gradually, and oh, so insidiously, the spectacle of you, going your somewhat robust routine of three normal, if perhaps unscientific meals a day, in a state of taken-for-granted health that made it no theme for discussion; gradually you became to yourself a not edifying spectacle.

There was too much of something with you. Yourself.

Awareness, faint as the footsteps of a fly along the back of a neck, began to creep upon you so lightly at first that it was scarcely more than a tickling across your consciousness.

It began from who knows what remote scratchings of unease, in a changing attitude toward such cardinal institutions as breakfast.

There had recently arrived a newcomer in our Middle West midst, a Mrs. de Lisle from New York, a slim, pretty little lady much criticized by the impeccable housewives on the pretty residential street of our pretty city, for lax housekeeping, and who was openly known to have her breakfast (roll and coffee) in bed.

* * * * *

Now you take what has since become this more or less national institution of roll and coffee in the morning. It has its points æsthetically and doubtless gastronomically. But along about ten-thirty in the affairs of a busy morning those points, during the first period of the transition from more substantial matinal fare, begin to reside chiefly in the aching void at the pit of the stomach.

Breakfast tradition dies hard, particularly if that tradition happens to have been born and bred in the Middle West.

We lived not on a farm mind you, in these years of my late teens when too much of the corporeal me first began to seem too much with me, but in a large Middle West metropolis of urban habits of a most complicated nature. We ate our corn on cob from silver end-pieces, traveled east in a manner your Easterner seldom traveled west, and were among the first of the American communities to be stricken with such respective epidemics as burnt wood, honitan, ping-pong, Kinloch telephones, horseless carriages and hobble skirts.

At seven-thirty o’clock during the first eighteen years of my life spent there, a family of three, consisting of my father, the president of a fair sized shoe factory, but who nevertheless, punctiliously slid back his roll-top desk at eight o’clock; an alert and brainy housekeeper, my mother, and a slightly overweight youngster, myself, sat down to a breakfast worthy of the name. Literally we broke fast. Oatmeal in a covered dish was served out with plentiful additions of butter, sugar and yellowish cream. A platter of bacon and eggs, the eggs not necessarily portioned out along the conventional lines of two per person. My father was not adverse to a third, the frailer members of the family usually contenting themselves with two. Toast or hot biscuits or both arrived in a wicker basket, all tucked in under a red-and-white napkin with a fringed edge. There was usually hominy or grits or stacks of griddle cakes with apple jelly or molasses. Coffee and plenty of it in a beautiful old “Meissen” china pot with a gilt snout, and, more often than not, crumb coffee cake, still hot, and thickly sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

You ate, aided and abetted, it is true, by maternal duress of the most insistent nature, to have more of this, and another helping of that, on the respective suppositions that a business man was facing a long and exacting day, a growing child her school, and a housekeeper her arduous routine.

You ate! And thereby were to become susceptible for life to a tickling of the nostrils at the smell of frying bacon rushing up from the servant’s quarters as you, in your bedroom, sip black unsweetened coffee or gulp orange juice.

I was reared to like breakfast. I still like breakfast. Heaven my witness, I have not eaten a breakfast in twelve years.

Because it was about twelve years ago that the first whirrings of the dietary chant of the dieting women began to assail my ears. In fact, glancing back, it becomes apparent that about the time rolls-and-coffee became synonymous for the old noun breakfast, was launched the dietary era of my life.

It was all insidious, it was all as the humming of locusts, it was all as the fluty wings of the voice of my sex.

What had hitherto been only the vague unease at the poor, or rather the ample, showing put up by my externalities of figure; an unease which had been sweetly soothed by parents, now began to assert itself more positively.

* * * * *

Suddenly, or so it seemed to a languidly awakened awareness, the biology of my entire sisterhood seemed to have undergone an evolution. Female silhouettes began to take on the concavity of the letter C. Curves, only as they collapsed inward upon the anatomy, were apparently fit to be visible to the naked eye of the beholder. The bust measurements of the potential and actual mothers of the race dropped to the proportions of their young sons and brothers. The old, well-nourished ideal of the Venus de Milo became a lummox. Something actually rodential began to characterize the upper lips of the women of the slimming era as they gnawed at the raw carrot and the herbaceous green.

Out of the stuff of enameled rolling-pins for kneading too, too solid lady-flesh, rubber reducing girdles, bathroom scales to match any color scheme, reduction salts in the pastel shades, electric-light cabinets, rowing-machines, _et al._, new industries were born. Restaurateurs became Melba toast, spinach, and saccharine conscious. Spas began to find obesity, real and imagined, more profitable than liver complaint, gall stones, and gout rolled in one. Came the dawn of a dark hour when public opinion demanded that a grand-opera diva must be able to look down and see her own toes.

Such diet-derivative expressions as incompatibility, mental cruelty, fanaticism, irritability, cussedness, began more and more to creep into the phraseology of the divorce courts.

Overnight, as it were, that quick barometer, the show girl, achieved the biological phenomenon of shedding her hips, and measurements fluctuated more violently than a falling stock market. Figures began to slump and tip the scales at far below the Venus de Milo par. The way to compute your approach to the norm of the current ideal of beauty was to divide Lillian Russell’s adult weight by two, her measurements by three, and her vitality by four.

A favorite hypothesis has it that, in the main, women dress and adorn themselves primarily for the appraising eye of women. It is then also fair to assume that women reduce for women. Until his eye and arm became trained to the lesser lines of his womanhood, the male-in-the-streets’ reaction was scarcely nothing at all.

You’re all right as you are. What you want to reduce for? What’s the idea? You look good to me. Never did like skinny women. Cut out the dieting.

The very new crop of adult young men, a generation born and reared in the slimming era, probably cerebrates about it not at all, except that by now our new male adults are trained to like their fair sex, should they stop to think at all, slab-like, flat-chested, hipless, and with skin tones of emacia carefully smeared over with sunburn, real or artificial.

Next, starting from proportions which at first had seemed no more ominous than that cloud no larger than a man’s hand, the home-wrecking, nerve-wracking noun of the age burst explosively upon the scene. _Calories!_ And the counting of the women within the shadow of a guillotine became as naught, compared with the counting of the dieting women.

Five medium slices pickled beet 25 calories One cup black unsweetened coffee 0 calories One medium-sweet pickle 25 calories Two tablespoons lemon juice 10 calories Average helping lettuce, no oil 0 calories One plum 30 calories One-half one small peach 30 calories Five strawberries 25 calories One stalk celery 3 calories One slice cucumber 1 calorie Four ounces consommé, no fat 15 calories

It was along about then, free, white, and over twenty-one, that the rabies-like foam of the slimming phobia of my era began to fleck me.

In fact, it is possible to lay finger upon the very occasion of my surrender to the caloric age.

Suddenly, and at one fell swoop, as they would have put it back in the days when Venus de Milo was not considered a stylish stout, all the inchoate unease of my overweight lifetime burst forth.

* * * * *

A slim and lovely woman invited me to lunch with her at one of the town’s smart hostelries. As we walked through crowded dining-rooms, heads turned to the rhythm of her svelte grace. With the prerogative of the guest, I ordered first, off a menu the size of a tabloid newspaper. About my usual. A creamed celery soup (specialty of this particular hotel). A grilled chop rolled around a kidney. Green salad with an oil dressing. A sweet and coffee. Mine hostess, whose neck, so slim, was like a swan’s, ordered plain spinach (en branch please--not even buttered) and a demi-tasse.

“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m dieting. Came back from White Sulphur last week one hundred and nine pounds, which is just exactly nine more pounds than this five-feet-nine is going to drag around. I’m foul with overweight.”

Reader, as they would say back in the days when Lillian Russell attached her corset strings to the bed post and took three deep breaths, I died that day. Of shame. Suddenly it seemed to me, sitting there in the abundant coverage of thrice nine pounds overweight, that of grossness I must perish before the very eyes of the waiter so solicitously placing my four hundred calories of cream of celery before me. The hand with which I toyed at the tablespoon designed to convey them to my stiffened lips became as a pale and flaccid ham. The dead hammish hand of a lady who had suddenly died of the shame of her overweight. From every corner of that opulent dining-room, there appeared the delusion of the slim hands of slim ladies mocking at one of their sex who permitted indenture space for dimples on the backs of her hands, whose neck seemed shorter than it need have, who was fair, fat, and alas! size forty.

And all the while, the waiter never even suspected that the lady toying with her cream-of-celery soup was dead. Of shame. And neither did her rodential hostess, nibbling at her spinach with her quivering little upper lip.

So out of this moment of this dream of slenderness honing herself still further on a diet of a concoction that looked like a small portion of boiled green tissue paper, was born resolution.

Mine no longer to reason why, mine but to do and diet.

To be sure, over a period of years dating back to days when a college senior who detested basket ball had played it vociferously, and had swapped her cream pie at dormitory for abominated jello, there had been varied and expensive attempts at reduction.

Subsequently, one unsuccessful experiment followed another. I had eighteen-dayed, counted calories, lamb-chopped-and-pineappled, sat in an elegant electric cabinet, and been treated exactly like a fowl in a Dutch oven; taken punishment from a famed Hollywood masseuse, that put me in the red, the black and blue; immersed my too, too solid self in baths of paraffine and mud; walked around reservoirs in sweat shirts; and without making appreciable inroads, had indulged in every out-and-indoor sport dear to funny-paper compilers.

But this day of the spectacle of the dream of slenderness honing herself down on boiled green tissue-paper, something toward which the not inconsiderable bulk of me had doubtless sub- or unconsciously been traveling since the basket-ball-jello days, was suddenly bang up in front of me.

* * * * *

Life, except on the basis of a lesser me, was no longer endurable. The fulsome sensation of being me, of having the vendeuse in the shop smear me, as I approached, with her appraising eye: “Blouse? Er--yes--er--size forty?” had reached its limit.

Invalid, suddenly intolerable, were the years of the benignity of friends: “But you are really not too stout, my dear. You’re just plump. Nonsense! You wouldn’t be you, thin. Don’t you go dieting and ruin your health. Why, my sister-in-law got herself down to a bag of bones and died of getting herself there, that’s what happened to my sister-in-law. Yes, of course _I_ diet, but I wouldn’t if my weight was as becoming to me as yours is.”

Apple sauce! I found myself hissing to myself in the days when that elegant compound noun was eloquent. Apple sauce! (without sugar in it).

Suddenly the too, too solid flesh and I were in the death grapple.

Latently, beneath my poor numbed powers of logic where this faddistic subject of diet was concerned, there stirred insurrection.

Beneath the superficial layers of puerile and sometimes pernicious panaceas, eighteen-day ones, rolling-machine ones, sweat-shirt and hair-shirt ones, must somewhere lurk a fundamental truth.

Casting aside, except as subsidiaries, the dumbbells, the static bicycle in its sweat-cabinet, the vibratory machine, the rowing-machine, the electric horse, I set up a fundamental truth for myself.

Food makes fat.

Exercise may aid and abet its con- or destruction, baths, massage, health waters and what not, be its handmaidens, but fundamentally, chemically, irrefutably, it is certain foods which make fat! And so it came about that the lesser me that corresponds to the one you see in reduction advertisements etched in dotted lines beside the before-taking silhouette, rose to the supreme heights of decision. Casting away the cluttering paraphernalia of the blue-enameled rolling-pins, the indoor bicycle, the five-foot Diet-book shelf, I decided to set out afresh upon the single supposition that in the normally functioning human being, _food makes fat_.

I sought out the most all-around wise man of my acquaintance. He, in turn, directed me to a man especially wise in the highly specialized field of dietetics.

There was little in this physician’s laboratory-like office to suggest what I had come to regard as part of the sumptuous adjuncts of slimming.

The address was not good.

I arrived there finally, to be received by a tall, rangy man with no manner at all, who promptly proceeded to take from me what had never been taken before, my metabolism.

Metabolism is something that you surrender with a clothespin on your nose and what seems to be the cork end-piece of a bicycle handle bar inserted into your mouth.

This walling up of the two major points of egress of what is known to the laity as your breathing, results in an inner panic which is recorded by an automatic pen attached to the apparatus which records the goings-on of your trapped breath.

You do not give your metabolism standing up. You lie prone, first thinking you are going to die, then hoping it.

The results of this sudden internal commotion, as recorded by the metabolism-machine, established my metabolistic processes as normal. This fact, in turn, established the further fact that there were no glandular alibis or pathological peculiarities to exonerate this case of overweight.

To put it bluntly, food in wrong selection, proportion, and combination was the root of the evil.

* * * * *

Now if the motif of my words seems to have chiefly to do with food and editorial we, please bear in mind that these words have chiefly to do with food and editorial we. The sum, substance and portent which give whatever justification I may be able to eke out of the penning of these pages of adjectives and split infinitives, being food and editorial we.

This, however, is neither the time nor the place to go into the details of this new post-metabolism regime, except to emphasize that after years of dangerous and rudderless experimentation, I had at last found a man who seemed to understand the science of food as it applied to my human envelope.

The lesser me (who now purchases her blouses in the misses’ department) has not got it left in her to display the behaviorism of your true hero. “It was nothing at all. I saw my duty and I did it.” It _was_ something, let me tell you that. It was lean and rocky going, full of thorn. Rocky going and slow and uphill and torturous and to a dreadful sing-song rhythm that more and more frequently got into my way: What-of-it-what-of-it----

Neither is the transformation from my hitherto normal attitude toward food as a pleasant means of subsistence, pretty telling.

There were hours, there were days, during the long lean siege of the post-metabolism era, when part of a newly developed form of self-torture was to rise from the pickings of my table and retire to a solitude I sought chiefly in order to visualize, while the tortured saliva ran, the meal it might have been. Instead of the soulless and fatless broth, consisting of the water off boiled greens, creamed soup to cling warmingly to cold ribs; instead of the cube of boiled beef (three ounces, cooked), a filet of sole, lying tenderly beneath a velvety sauce and sprinkled through with capers, like the black tips of little ermines; hot rolls slit on the side and then pressed down again on a cube of sweet butter to fit into the aching void of no bread. A sweet, preferably souffléd, or even a lowly, a sugared and cinnamoned baked apple under cream, to take the place of eight gulps of water.

There was to come a time, fallen so low had I, when to stand with my nose plastered against the plate-glass windows of lunch-room emporiums, where flapjacks, later to be smothered under melting butter and golden syrup were being juggled, became one of my favorite outdoor sports.

Time has healed those aching voids. Alas! one of the cruel anachronisms of this whole cruelly anachronistic business is that deep within the lesser me nests regret that my palate, doubtless also leaner, has lost much of its fine gusty capacity to yearn.

Today a dish of flapjacks beneath a golden blanket of maple syrup; a Roquefort dressing flowing off the smooth red flank of a stuffed tomato, a soufflé, a marron glacé, a crêpe suzette, a marzipan, leave me cold and without zest. Before them now I stand bowed with a regret that I have lost my capacity to regret them.