More than edible–what is food to you?

More than edible–what is food to you?

I’m unexpectedly underweight again.

The 45-year-old me doesn’t want to expose my bare limbs to others’ eyes. This casual and comfy look I’ve long been attached to was something that emerged—and kept evolving—to protect myself from severe depression.

When I started working as a novice account executive at an advertising company, I was often paralysed in the middle of the street from the shame I felt about my body, a shame made worse by the clumsiness imposed by limiting and uncomfortable attire. Depression—and the sudden loss of functionality—is my deepest fear, and this freer version of myself in my forties is, in part, the result of my effort to simplify how I dress.

The problem is, my other utmost fear is constipation.

Since I was very young, I’ve never known what it feels like to trust my gut.

I was a fragile child who got sick easily, and a vivid childhood memory is of our family having to postpone our departure from my maternal grandparents’ house because of a sudden stomach upset and diarrhoea.

I sat, exhausted, on a baby toilet, while my grandfather stood nearby, smoking, leaning on the balcony’s edge. It was embarrassing and exhausting—this daily struggle of living in my body. So, living itself has always felt intimidating to me.

A gut feeling about anorexia

Excretion is a vital function that can deeply affect one’s life, yet it’s usually dismissed as a personal hygiene issue or a mundane discomfort, rather than a critical medical concern. During my teenage years, my irritable bowel symptoms shifted mostly to constipation. My mother, not wanting me to rely on over-the-counter laxatives, introduced me to various strange enema methods she had learned from neighbours or friends. Nothing worked. The long hours alone in the bathroom with heavily diluted coffee, a syringe, and so on, were futile.

When I left home for college, I turned to laxatives—and I’ve continued using them under the excuse of convenience. It’s been more than 25 years. The rest, you can probably imagine—if you have lived through this, too: the shopping tours through pharmacies, the regular experiences of severe side effects, the nausea, and so on. But those discomforts were things I could control, and they never scared me as much as the alternative: the uncontrollable constipation and the horrible, unbearable bloating.

The recent weight loss was unexpected in that sense—it resulted from weeks of nausea and loss of appetite, which coincided with all the heavy lifting I did for Eating Disorder Awareness Week (EDAW) 2025. I quit my job soon after and rested for about two months. (Thankfully, I have since started working at a new company.)

Throughout those two months, I kept returning to this thought: dissatisfaction with one’s body doesn’t come solely from how it looks but from the whole experience of embodiment. And if I may add a radical assumption, could it be possible that someone begins to be drawn into anorexia, at least initially, because it improves their sense of well-being, including, perhaps, the bacterial landscape of their gut?

The landscape without water

I came across an old video clip on my Instagram feed, described as having been filmed in 1967, possibly in Chuncheon, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. The videographer was likely an American soldier stationed at the nearby U.S. Army base. The buzzing, low-resolution clip showed a shockingly barren field, though the mountains and grasslands were green, the landscape felt empty. Only a couple of women were in hanbok, a child, and a handcart. A small house stood in the distance with a sign that read “Tailor Shop”—the only building in the entire frame.

I immediately felt suffocated. If I had been there alone, I would have had nothing to rely on but my own feet.

Even if exhausted and unbearably thirsty, I couldn’t have expected anyone to save me.

Chuncheon is the city where I grew up and where my parents still reside, but it belongs to Gangwon Province, not Gyeonggi Province. The soldier-videographer had probably gotten it wrong, so I sent the link to the clip to my mom and dad to confirm whether the scenery matched what they remembered from their teenage years. Surprisingly, both responded with a “yes” without hesitation.

So, what had happened? Where did the money come from initially, and how did all those blocks of a proper city start to take shape? Who was allowed to “develop” the land, and didn’t the properties already belong to someone?

I asked my dad, but he didn’t know how to respond. Instead, he said there had been many people.
“There wasn’t money, but there was population.”
He said, “People began to set up stalls and sell things near the American army base.”

He also explained how they got drinking water at the time.
“There were communal taps for each town. Everyone had to go there and carry the heavy water back home.”
“But what about those who were weak or ill and couldn’t carry it themselves?” I asked.
“Then a new kind of manual job appeared—delivering water to households,” he said.

Survival of the fittest

If I had lived back then, it’s possible I wouldn’t have been able to earn an income, and on top of that, I’d have had to pay someone to access drinking water—pure survival of the fittest.

My dad, the only son of a large and low-income family, had to carry water for his own home and his relatives.

Sometimes I feel nauseated imagining the scenes I’ve read in Korea’s early modern novels from the Japanese colonial era—the vivid descriptions of the protagonists’ perceptions: tunnel vision, dizziness, and exhaustion so severe that it prevented them from maintaining a proper, citizenly posture or gait. These were, clearly, symptoms of hunger and malnourishment.

I recall the peculiar sensation I experienced while reading those novels in junior high school. What kinds of lives had they lived? The life experiences described by these second-citizen novelists of the colony, who themselves often died young from tuberculosis, felt entirely alien to me.

Of course, most of those writers were men, and likely couldn’t grasp the lives of women, who must have existed on an even lower, more undignified level in the second-citizen hierarchy. (Those male artists, unable to express their rage toward colonisers, could instead take it out on their wives.)

Lately, I often think about my mom’s cooking and other forms of labour, and how they’ve sustained our household entirely. It’s shameful to admit that the monthly expenses for my parents’ household of three are smaller than what I spend alone each month.

Mom fed our family on a tight budget

I don’t cook—I hate it—and more importantly, the rented room I live in doesn’t have private cooking facilities; only a shared public kitchen is available. So I spend a considerable amount on food delivery. (Of course, some people don’t mind cooking in the public kitchen, but I dread occupying the space for too long, filling it with strong smells, and exposing myself to others’ eyes when cooking and eating.)

However, my mom has always run her household in a way that feels almost ideal, completely different from my own.

She’s a master of small miracles, like the loaves and fishes.

For years, she had to feed a family of five, including my grandparents at certain times, all within the limits of my dad’s modest salary as an elementary school teacher.

When I was young, I could never have understood the challenges my mom faced alone. But recently, Mom described how anxious she would feel, like when her mother-in-law, who was then suffering from dementia, ate all the marinated potatoes, the only banchan she had managed to prepare on a tight budget. She worried there would be nothing left for me to eat when I came home late from high school, needing dinner.

She had to accept the traditional role of a housewife early on—buying fresh, cheap ingredients and making them edible. The labour she provided sustained our family.

Cooking for a family isn’t just about labour. I hate cooking and have no interest in it—unlike many people with lived or living experience of eating disorders—and one of the biggest reasons is the dread I feel at having to constantly think about what to prepare for three meals a day. I don’t want thoughts of food and cooking to take over my everyday life. I don’t want to feel hurt when a family member dislikes what I’ve made. I don’t want to project my hunger and cravings onto the people closest to me.

More than that, more critically, my life can’t afford such an economically and physically intensive way of living around food. I must work for a living.

Buzz of a farmers’ market

On a recent Sunday, I visited the Marché farmers’ market, held in a park in southwestern Seoul, to meet a girl and her mother who had flown in from Ulsan, a city near the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. A visit to the market had been on the girl’s wish list.

I had come to know this mother and daughter because the mother had contacted me via Instagram direct message to consult about her preteen daughter, who has anorexia. That day’s meeting was our first in-person encounter. When I arrived, I wandered around the stalls and waited an hour, not wanting to disturb their precious time, something they had gone to great lengths to make possible.

The weather was cloudy, windy, cold, and even briefly hailing, especially after a stretch of prematurely hot summer days. But the sellers and visitors didn’t seem bothered.

Marché is the largest and most successful farmers’ market group in Korea. They regularly host outdoor events in various parts of Seoul, and their beautifully curated, design-forward photos and posts on platforms like Instagram—featuring their events and their select group of mostly small, independent farmers—have drawn a large following. I was one of them. I even spoke with them about a possible collaboration on eating disorders when planning the first EDAW.

But I’ve rarely found anything I could buy because I don’t cook.

So, that one hour of waiting left me completely exhausted.

The marketplace was more crowded than I expected. That day’s venue was set in the middle of a wealthy neighbourhood, right next to a large department store, and I saw neatly dressed young families enjoying the event—shopping, tasting food, and strolling on the lawn.

I overheard their conversations. They could, and did, cook meals from the ingredients they bought there. They had adequate logistics: They parked in the department store’s underground lot and could easily load everything into their car trunks.

Consuming ethically grown, fresh ingredients from small farmers—and cooking them into three healthy meals daily—is not easy or feasible for everyone. What’s more, I find it incredibly complex to bridge the world of artful food-based projects—like cooking, sharing meals, or “communion” in its original sense—with eating disorder advocacy. I’m unsure whether these projects are helpful for people with lived experience, especially when the underlying moral framework is veganism.

The girl I met at Marché might identify as a vegan and pro-animal welfare advocate. In her case, though, I felt relieved, not worried. She knew exactly what she liked and didn’t like. She had a passion and energy for it—she could name all the sellers she had planned to visit. Most importantly, her mother was there for her. She had decided to support her daughter and do what she wanted.

New attitudes to cooking and eating

Again, one more anecdote. Interestingly, several co-cooking and co-eating projects have emerged around Seoul in recent years, primarily initiated by young female artists. I contacted a few and met with one team in person—we discussed a range of issues related to eating and eating disorders.

There’s a team that focuses on recipes shared by immigrant women. Of course, some projects aim to promote healthier, more ethical meals, treating shared, simple, fresh vegan dinners as a form of communion and a way of caring for oneself.

The team I met with said the original idea came from a moment during a political protest when one of them received vegan cookies from a stranger. She is vegan, and that small gesture made her realise that careful, attentive sharing is possible.

One spontaneous topic during our conversation was their cancelled session on “feeding others.” I immediately wanted to scream, but my interest piqued so sharply that I asked them to tell me more.

It seems like a simple protocol: participants form two-member teams and carefully feed their partner, then are fed in return. However, for some, especially those with lived or living experience, this can be one of the most dreadful and triggering activities imaginable. I asked how they planned to address the issue of trust.

They had an adviser, and she encouraged them to devote as much time as possible for participants to talk with their partners beforehand, so each person could understand the other’s preferences, aversions, and boundaries, and negotiate what they would eat.

A window into my ancestry

I’ve only been able to be close to my parents—truly close—for about five years now. It started when the childish projections I’d long cast onto them began to fall away. I could finally see them, disillusioned and properly, as fellow individuals: absolutely good enough, and the people I love most.

I visit them every other Saturday, and during the short time my dad spends driving me to and from my psychiatrist’s office, we talk. It’s often about age-old things, obscure things—mostly experiences he lived through and remembers vividly, but which I never knew.

One day, for example, he told me about Santonin, an anthelmintic that was distributed to all the students at his school when he was young. He talked about public libraries—the only place students could prepare for entrance exams to higher schools. He had to leave home and walk to the library early in the morning to get a seat.

My dad, a curious and wide-eyed boy, once wanted to become a politician. But his family couldn’t afford to send him to university in Seoul. Instead, he enrolled in a two-year, tuition-free course at the local teacher’s college, which suggests the government had prioritised training teachers at the time. He went on to work as an elementary school teacher for decades.

According to my mom, his father—my late paternal grandfather—was a person with alcoholism who often beat his only son with a whip. It was to the extent that, when my dad severely broke his leg as a child, he instinctively hid from his father’s sight, afraid of being scolded or hit. So, that was that.

My dad was born during the Korean War in 1950, and my grandfather belonged to the generation that had to live through the war. I remember relatives who had lost their hands in explosions. As a child, I was afraid of their stumpy arms. I feel a deep shame remembering that I cried in fear right in front of them.

A yearly ration, and radish soup

My mom showed me a video clip on her smartphone during a recent visit, which she had recorded on my maternal grandmother’s birthday. She’s the only one of my grandparents still alive and well. Her daughters—including my mom, the eldest—have been caring for her since she began showing signs of dementia.

The clip captured a loose, meandering conversation among maternal family members, centred around my grandmother’s ramblings, mainly about the Japanese colonisers. Mom said her mother spoke to her children in a hybrid language, heavily infused with Japanese, and they never had difficulty understanding her.

I watched a YouTube video made by a North Korean defector-creator. In it, he and his elder brother—probably in their fifties or sixties—talk about what they had eaten in the past, what they eat now and how their food consumption changed dramatically after settling in South Korea.

The creator’s elder brother said their family had been relatively well off in North Korea until 1968, the year of the Pueblo Incident.

He referred to it casually, as if “Pueblo Incident” were a mundane noun.

I looked it up online. After that year, he said, they struggled to eat properly. It was around the time he entered elementary school. He mentioned how much he regretted not liking pork before, because from that point on, they could rarely eat—no, even see—meat.

The two brothers recalled that their father used to say to himself how good croakers had tasted. But they hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant, because they had never seen or eaten such a fish.

The elder brother also shared this story. One of their neighbours was notorious for the haphazard way they managed their food provisions. Before 1968, when food rations were still relatively generous, that household received a large quantity of food due to the number of family members. However, they tended to consume it impulsively early on, leaving themselves to endure hunger for months until the following yearly rations arrived.

They would make a large pot of radish soup, share it as their dinner, and try to fall asleep before the hunger returned.

The shape of hunger

So, what does “edible” really mean?

I once saw an older woman on TV, a resident of a small island town, pull a whole, clean radish from a mound of soil to cook. Burying radishes in the ground is a traditional method of food preservation. She still creates edible dishes from such humble ingredients and sustains herself.

Meanwhile, it has never been easy for me to eat food cooked by someone other than my mom. This sounds ridiculous, especially considering I have no problem eating at restaurants. But things in a friend’s lunchbox, probably made by her mother, never felt “edible enough” to me. Once, I even had a hard time eating som tam—my favourite Thai dish—when my best friend, obviously not a master chef, made it just for me during the pandemic.

To me, those foods contain the entire cooking process. They’re not just “complete” or ready-to-eat—they carry the intimacy of being made specifically for me. The entirety of the human experience can feel overwhelming when considering the entire process.

When I watch popular cooking shows or mukbangs on TV, I notice that they don’t give up when something tastes off. They work to fix it, using every possible trick or remedy, until it becomes edible. But isn’t this too much to swallow?

This also prevents me from enjoying the food I cook for myself.

Whatever I make never really looks edible, regardless of whether it tastes good or not. It’s something more than edible, something monstrous.

Perhaps it all comes down to trust—and learning to embrace uncertainty.
Embodying uncertainty without fear.
Being contaminated without fear.