Exploring food obsessions and ‘a perfect plate’

Exploring food obsessions and ‘a perfect plate’

Realising that today’s teenage girls live in a world different from mine—that I’m a complete alien to them—makes me both uneasy and shiver. It aches, too, to think that their lives began from a random point in such recent years, detached from the schemes and backstories that shaped me. So, how can I speak to them without being misunderstood?

When I was 17, in 1997, my anorexia mostly took the form of dumping out the food my mom had packed in my lunchbox. I would try to numb the growling emptiness in my stomach by sipping the iced barley tea Mom had bottled for me throughout the day. (I belonged to the last generation before paid school meals were widely introduced, and well before the national free school meal program was launched.)

I had no access to the kitchen, and I couldn’t even imagine using any of the ingredients in the fridge as I pleased. We all knew that Mom cooked to feed the whole family on a handful of simple, yet insufficient, groceries. The only forms of cooking I was vaguely familiar with were boiling ramen or frying eggs—I was never a cook, nor was I interested in becoming one.

Girls today are different. They do things I never did.

When a disability rights activist I deeply admire asked for my advice about her brilliant and self-assertive daughter, who had begun showing anorexic tendencies months before and was now obsessively weighing every ingredient before deciding what to eat, I was taken aback.

On Instagram, the girl had been posting neatly plated wooden bowls with small scoops of Greek yogurt, a few berries, and slices of banana, each photo captioned with the hashtag #miraclemorning. This was a point of pride for her: waking as early as 5am to prepare the healthiest breakfast she could manage, then spending a peaceful period studying before leaving for school. She was about the same age I had been in 1997.

The ethics of food

At first, I thought the girl’s behaviour must be due to her idiosyncratic taste and obsession. She was as fierce as her mother when it came to social justice and animal rights, and it seemed inevitable that she would become an ethically uncompromising vegan.

She adamantly refused to eat the free school meals, which offered no vegan or vegetarian options, forcing her already overburdened mother to prepare a strict vegan lunchbox every morning—something her daughter would allow. I felt a little angry at that point, because her mother’s well-being matters as much as animal welfare!

The girl’s mom had to cook two entirely separate meals each time—one for her daughter and one for the rest of the family. The mother created as many variations of vegan dishes as possible, concerned about the health of her fragile child. She even made carrot laffe from scratch. Thankfully, the whole tragi-comical ordeal eventually ended with the daughter ceasing to be a vegan.

When the mother of another girl, maybe 14 years old, who was already suffering from severe physical complications involving her heart and kidneys, pulled out her smartphone and showed me photos from her gallery, I nearly leapt out of my seat in shock.

Immaculate plates lead to anorexia

We were sitting in a café, and what I saw were not just pictures, but immaculate plates that looked like a professional food artist had styled them—each one a minor masterpiece. The mother explained that these were her daughter’s creations and that they had marked the beginning of her anorexia. These plates went far beyond the simplicity of a Greek yogurt bowl; they featured a variety of health-conscious foods, delicately arranged and garnished with ivy-like herbs that seemed to cascade off the edges.

The mother, whose age was similar to mine, said quietly, “At first, she just started to eat healthy like this. She showed these pictures to others—and of course, she was praised.”

And now, having chosen to leave school, this girl has turned her room into a compact kitchen of her own. She even has a microwave in it, and according to her mother, its constant beep beep echoes through the house day and night like a haunting refrain.

Today’s girls are growing up in a world utterly different from mine, full of their metaphors and meanings. They have far more access and autonomy around food. While I would secretly dump my lunch yet leave the spoon and chopsticks dirty with sticky rice to fool my mom, I had virtually no options for what I could eat.

I never received any real allowance, so my sole focus was on how many cups of coffee I could afford from the school’s vending machine.

But girls today seem able to request what they want to eat from their mothers without much difficulty, and can even refuse what’s offered or planned by the adults around them. Their mothers appear far more receptive to their daughters’ opinions and desires than mine ever was.

Is my perception true? I’m unsure. Maybe it’s simply that today’s girls are more affluent than I was, than my family was. I don’t know. And this uncertainty scares me—perhaps I might be missing something critical in all of this. Maybe I am reducing these complex, lived experiences into mere anecdotes, stripping them of the depth they deserve.

The calories we choose

You might assume that today’s girls all have their own social media accounts, proudly showcasing their culinary achievements, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Even the girl who used Instagram had a quiet and inactive profile, with few followers. Her #miraclemorning posts were sparse—just a handful. Perhaps this restraint is because all three girls I encountered were, at least outwardly, regarded as successful contenders in the college entrance exam race, even while still in middle school.

Two of the girls had to drop out of school because they could no longer adjust—physically or emotionally—to the demands of school life. Their health deteriorated to the point where continuing became impossible, thus avoiding the frontlines of the entrance exam battle. Did their eating habits contribute to this outcome? I don’t know.

In contrast, I was of a generation that dared to swallow toxic substances if they had fewer calories than a so-called proper meal. More than two decades ago, in a short-lived inpatient clinic for eating disorders run by a private psychiatrist, a girl asked a nurse, bluntly, for a chocolate bar instead of the meal on her tray, because the calories would be precisely the same. “It’s lighter,” she said. “It won’t make my stomach feel heavy.” That, exactly, was how we used to think.

Unhealthy perceptions about food

Another insight emerged during an awkward remote interview with a young journalist from a well-known media outlet. She worked for a light-toned and bite-sized newsletter aimed at younger readers. Thankfully, we did talk about eating disorders, prevention, and potential support systems, but some of her questions unsettled me.

With what seemed like genuine curiosity and confusion, she seriously asked why I thought those little elementary schoolgirls who tried to lose weight often chose such “unhealthy” diets—like eating just a cup of instant noodles and some jellies a day—instead of sticking to “truly healthy” meals like salads.

What?! How could she ask that? Elementary school students typically don’t have discretionary money. What they can do, maybe, is survive the day on a few coins of allowance while refusing school meals entirely. How could they possibly buy or prepare salads three times a day? Or even favour eating vegetables in the first place? I was stunned that this question could seem like a genuine mystery to her.

Diet management is a trendy obsession

It appears that while I was away from mainstream food culture due to my unusual eating habits, diet management—overhauling one’s eating habits without much thought—has become a widespread trend, or rather, an obsession for large parts of the population.

Notably, it often begins with a sudden fear or realisation that one might have been living loosely or indulgently—in other words, in a way perceived as uncompetitive in today’s world. For instance, when I contributed an article about my advocacy to the student journal of my alma mater last year, the same issue featured a piece by a student reporter documenting a week-long effort to improve her diet for the sake of a healthier lifestyle.

Her effort was viewed as a serious and meaningful endeavour, requiring no justification for its inclusion in the journal—a reflection of how widely accepted and valued this pursuit has become.

In her article, the student reporter detailed how she began packing her lunch to avoid eating what was served in the school cafeteria. She attempted to grill a fish for dinner in her tiny, rented room instead of ordering delivery food.

Some of her honest descriptions—such as feeling embarrassed and uneasy while eating raw vegetable sticks from her lunchbox in a sparsely populated lecture hall because of the loud crunching—reminded me irresistibly of everyday scenes from anorexia memoirs. So perhaps the food focus is not just a medical symptom. It’s a profoundly human response, shaped by a particular cultural setting.

Treadmill of the curated self

Another memorable episode occurred several years ago when I was a guest speaker at the screening of Table for Two, a powerful independent documentary about anorexia and the mother-daughter relationship, directed by Borm Kim and shown at the Seoul International Food Film Festival.

The moderator was a seasoned film producer, and from the start, I was taken aback by her fervent enthusiasm for healthy eating, along with the self-control and willpower that she believed were inseparable from it. At one point, she asked, seriously and earnestly, whether anorexia might be healthier than today’s general food culture—because, to her, it seemed so.

Somewhere along the way, the question has shifted: from how not to eat to what to eat. Yet, we now find ourselves in the middle of a cultural frenzy over GLP-1 (a class of medications that can help manage Type 2 diabetes and obesity) and the ever-booming market for diet supplements. I wonder—are people fixated on what to eat, until that obsession inevitably reawakens their suppressed hunger, driving them once again to search for ways not to eat?

From ultra-processed food to macrobiotic diets

It is also possible that the fear of ultra-processed food now occupies a significant portion of people’s minds. Besides the girl who once stubbornly adhered to a vegan diet, another girl displayed an intense preoccupation with alternative food culture, such as artsy, independent farmers’ markets and macrobiotic diets. The girl loathed processed foods and refused to eat things like ham or fish cakes.

In contrast, when I’m hit by exhaustion or hypoglycaemia, I’m likely to grab items like mozzarella cheese sticks, fish sausage, candies, or bottled drinks—whatever I can quickly obtain from the nearest convenience store. I treat them as calorie boosters or emergency fillers for an empty stomach. But do today’s girls regard food as something that might invade and alter their bodies from the inside, something capable of disturbing their inner biochemistry?

Perhaps the obsession with eating “healthy” is just a socially acceptable excuse for not eating at all, rather than a genuine pursuit of wellness.

Some girls who develop the eating “healthy” obsession go on to abandon their carefully curated meal plans and starve themselves instead.

Many people in this era seem unable to escape the treadmill of trial and error: a carefully curated, health-conscious diet, suddenly interrupted by an impulsive halt, followed by feelings of shame and guilt, and another cycle of renewed effort. In that sense, today’s young girls with anorexia appear as natural features of a much larger canvas—details seamlessly carved into the broader landscape.

So, what is food? What is the self? Why the fear of contamination? The questions remain unanswered.