Stuffed And Starved Quotes

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.

Faelan stuffed his mouth with the granola bar like a starving toddler and moved down the aisle with the loaded cart. Bree grabbed an empty one and squeaked back. She rounded the corner and stopped. Faelan wasn't chewing. That was a good sign. The package he was reading wasn't. He glanced up, mouth parted, eyes dark, and the hand holding the box of extra large condoms darted behind his back.

It is no surprise that so many women and girls have what are delicately called 'control issues' around their bodies, from cutting and injuring their flesh to starving or stuffing themselves with food, compulsive exercise, or pathological, unhappy obsession over how we look and dress. Adolescence, for a woman, is the slow realisation that you are not considered as fully human as you hoped. You are a body first, and your body is not yours alone: whether or not you are attracted to men, men and boys will believe they have a claim on your body, and the state gets to decide what you're allowed to do with it afterwards.

I might have starved to death. I would be mud-slick, stuffed to the guts with cold and hopelessness, and my body might know it was doomed and give up on its own. That would be better than idly winding wool on a snowy day, waiting for someone to kill me.

It’s not the people that are the problem. It is the way we consume through this food system, which allows a few to eat healthily, many to eat unhealthily, and many more not to eat at all.

When my mother was in the hospital,” I say, “her rabbi told her a story. In Heaven and Hell, people sit at banquet tables filled with amazing food, but no one can bend their elbows. In Hell, everyone starves because they can’t feed themselves. In Heaven, everyone’s stuffed, because they don’t have to bend their arms to feed each other.

Noodles?” “While you were thinking about stuffing the next nigga, yours was starving. So, yeah. Noodles.” I shrugged.

Increasingly, obesity and hunger are two points on a continuum of poverty. But the stuffed and the starved are also linked through the chains of production that bring food from fields to our plate. Guided by the profit motive, food corporations shape and constrain how we eat, and how we think about food.

My siblings and my mother wouldn’t communicate for most of the year, so by Christmas dinner my brother and sister would come stuffed with hurt and anger, starving for attention. Eventually, inevitably, they would all explode in a torrent of verbal abuse. I would sit there in the center of the chaos, crying and wishing: wishing they would stop screaming, wishing my mother could stop them from screaming and cursing. Wishing I could be somewhere safe and merry—somewhere that felt like Christmas

And consider flesh too, if it comes to that. Who could have dreamed up such stuff? It's flabby and it stinks as often as not or it bulges and develops knobs and is covered with horrible hair and blotches. The internal combustion engine is at least more efficient, or take the piston rods on a loco-motive, and it's quite easy to oil them too. While keeping flesh in decent condition is almost impossible even leaving aside the obscene process of ageing and the fact that half the world starves. What a planet. And take eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching they must be dying of laughter. And the shape of the human body. Who but a thoroughly imcompetent craftsman or else some sort of practical joker could have invented this sort of moon on two sticks? Legs are a bad joke. Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle.

You have got to be—” Her sentence is cut short when the elevator makes an abrupt stop, jostling both of us into the walls of the small carrier. “Huh, would you look at that?” I glance around the small room, wondering what’s wrong. “No, no, no,” Dottie says over and over again, as she rushes to the panel and presses the emergency button. When nothing happens, she presses all the other buttons. “That’s intelligent,” I say, arms crossed and observing her from behind. “Confuse the damn thing so it has no idea what to do.” She doesn’t answer, but instead pulls her phone out from her purse and starts holding it up in the air, searching for a signal. “It’s cute that you think raising the phone higher will grant you service. We’re in a metal box surrounded by concrete, sweetheart. I never get reception in here.” “Damn it,” she mutters, stuffing her phone back in her purse. “Looks like you’re stuck here with me until someone figures out the elevator broke, so it’s best you get comfortable.” I sit on the floor and then pat my lap. “You can sit right here.” “I’d rather lick the elevator floor.” “There’s a disgusting visual. Suit yourself.” I get comfortable and start rifling through my bag of food. Thank God I grabbed dinner before this, because I’m starving, and if I was stuck in this elevator with no food, I’d be a raging bastard, bashing his head against the metal door from pure hunger. Low blood sugar does crazy things to me. I bring the term hangry to a new level. There’s only— “Why are you smiling like that?” I look up at her. “Smiling like what? I’m just being normal.” “No, you’re smiling like you’re having a conversation inside your head and you think you’re funny.” How would she know that? “Well, I am funny.” I pop open my to-go box filled to the brim with a Philly cheesesteak sandwich and tons of fries. Staring at it, I say, “Oh yes, come to papa.

When she was finished with the mailbox, Lisey trudged back down the driveway with her buckets in the long evening light. Breakfast had been coffee and oatmeal, lunch little more than a scoop of tuna and mayo on a scrap of lettuce, and dead cat or no dead cat, she was starved. She decided to put off her call to Woodbody until she had some food in her belly. The thought of calling the Sheriff's Office—anyone in a blue uniform, for that matter—hadn't yet returned to her. She washed her hands for three minutes, using very hot water and making sure any speck of blood was gone from under her nails. Then she found the Tupperware dish containing the leftover Cheeseburger Pie, scraped it onto a plate, and blasted it in the microwave. While she waited for the chime, she hunted a Pepsi out of the fridge. She remembered thinking she'd never finish the Hamburger Helper stuff once her initial lust for it had been slaked. You could add that to the bottom of the long, long list of Things in Life Lisey Has Been Wrong About, but so what? Big diddly, as Cantata had been fond of saying in her teenage years. "I never claimed to be the brains of the outfit," Lisey told the empty kitchen, and the microwave bleeped as if to second that. The reheated gloop was almost too hot to eat but Lisey gobbled it anyway, cooling her mouth with fizzy mouthfuls of cold Pepsi. As she was finishing the last bite, she remembered the low whispering sound the cat's fur had made against the tin sleeve of the mailbox, and the weird pulling sensation she'd felt as the body began, reluctantly, to come forward. He must have really crammed it in there, she thought, and Dick Powell once more came to mind, black-and-white Dick Powell, this time saying And have some stuffing! She was up and rushing for the sink so fast she knocked her chair over, sure she was going to vomit everything she'd just eaten, she was going to blow her groceries, toss her cookies, throw her heels, donate her lunch. She hung over the sink, eyes closed, mouth open, midsection locked and straining. After a pregnant five-second pause, she produced one monstrous cola-burp that buzzed like a cicada. She leaned there a moment longer, wanting to make absolutely sure that was all. When she was, she rinsed her mouth, spat, and pulled "Zack McCool"'s letter from her jeans pocket. It was time to call Joseph Woodbody.

Starving equals stuffed!

She once left me alone for so long, I ate old banana peels and eggshells from the garbage. I even tried eating a few bites of stuffing from inside the couch cushion, but it was too hard to swallow. I spent most of my childhood scared to death that I was slowly being eaten from the inside by that starving cat.

God Answered Fire with Fire The Master sent a message against Jacob. It landed right on Israel’s doorstep. All the people soon heard the message, Ephraim and the citizens of Samaria. But they were a proud and arrogant bunch. They dismissed the message, saying, “Things aren’t that bad. We can handle anything that comes. If our buildings are knocked down, we’ll rebuild them bigger and finer. If our forests are cut down, we’ll replant them with finer trees.” So GOD incited their adversaries against them, stirred up their enemies to attack: From the east, Arameans; from the west, Philistines. They made hash of Israel. But even after that, he was still angry, his fist still raised, ready to hit them again. But the people paid no mind to him who hit them, didn’t seek GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies. So GOD hacked off Israel’s head and tail, palm branch and reed, both on the same day. The big-head elders were the head, the lying prophets were the tail. Those who were supposed to lead this people led them down blind alleys, And those who followed the leaders ended up lost and confused. That’s why the Master lost interest in the young men, had no feeling for their orphans and widows. All of them were godless and evil, talking filth and folly. And even after that, he was still angry, his fist still raised, ready to hit them again. Their wicked lives raged like an out-of-control fire, the kind that burns everything in its path— Trees and bushes, weeds and grasses— filling the skies with smoke. GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies answered fire with fire, set the whole country on fire, Turned the people into consuming fires, consuming one another in their lusts— Appetites insatiable, stuffing and gorging themselves left and right with people and things. But still they starved. Not even their children were safe from their rapacious hunger. Manasseh ate Ephraim, and Ephraim Manasseh, and then the two ganged up against Judah. And after that, he was still angry, his fist still raised, ready to hit them again.

customers. But this girl was weaving in and out of the picnic tables, handing out chicken-sandwich samples to those of us who were already stuffing our faces with these same chicken sandwiches.   Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown. H. ROSS PEROT   “Ed,” Lisa said, “that's hilarious. I mean, all she has to do is walk about fifteen paces and offer those samples to the people who haven't eaten yet.” Hundreds of starving shopaholics were nearby,

I’m bored to tears and nearly dead with cold,” she said, dropping her cloak. He remained atop the stairs, watching her. “And it’s your fault,” she went on, stuffing her hands into her pockets. “You made me come out here, and someone left the balcony door open so I could hear all that lovely music. So you should really reconsider who’s to blame. It was like putting a starving man in front of a feast and telling him not to eat. Which, by the way, you actually did when you made me go to that state dinner.” She was babbling, and her face was dark enough for him to know she was beyond mortified that he’d caught her. He bit his lip to keep from smiling and walked down the four steps to the gravel path of the garden. “You’re the greatest assassin in Erilea, and yet you can’t stand watch for a few hours?” “What’s there to watch?” she hissed. “Couples sneaking out to fondle each other between the hedges? Or His Royal Highness, dancing with every eligible maiden?” “You’re jealous?” She barked a laugh. “No! Gods, no. But I can’t say it’s particularly fun to watch him. Or watch any of them enjoying themselves. I think I’m more jealous of that giant buffet no one is even touching.

In Brazil, the targeting of peasant leaders has been an ongoing government and private-sector project. Over the past two decades, and according only to official sources, at least 1,425 rural workers, leaders and activists have been assassinated there. And yet only 79 cases have ever been brought to trial.

Further away from the border, and further away from wealth, small farms, which make up 85 percent of farmers in Mexico,6 have been faring badly.7 Indeed, for the majority of poor farmers, NAFTA hit hard. And that’s because the crop they grew was treated with a mixture of contempt, ignorance and incompetence during the negotiations. Responsible for 60 per cent of the land cultivated in Mexico at the time the treaty was concluded, a source of livelihood for three million producers, and 8 per cent of the population, that crop was corn.

It was announced, to awe and insult, that the subsidy for every head of EU cattle was more, per day, than the income of three Mexican farmers.

In Mexico, there have also been changes in the foods people eat as a result of NAFTA, particularly in the increased availability and consumption of high-calorie food.62 This has led to a spike in levels of obesity with, as noted in the introduction, the observation that the closer a family lives to the border with United States, the more likely it is that its children are overweight.

Today, Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than milk.65 The consequences are more than cosmetic. With over one in seven Mexicans living with diabetes66, the cost to the country is US$15 billion (GB£7.8 billion) a year.

California has a higher number of people in poverty than any other US state.96 Within agriculture, farm workers die on the job at rates five times higher than other comparable work.

Today, the UFW still fights for the rights of farm workers – winning concessions like basic access to toilets and running water – in an economy in which farm workers remain exploited, if a little less than before.

From the fifteenth century, rural England was undergoing Enclosure, the process by which the community rights of the poor to the land of the rich were transformed into what we understand today by ‘private property’. The rural poor found themselves without access to common land, and had only their labour left to sell. It was an economic revolution, with profound social repercussions. For the landless, options were few.

free’ landless poor made their way to the cities to seek work. Those who remained on the land worked for a wage and only after-hours worked to feed themselves. On the other hand, for those who owned land, the shift from feudal to capitalist economics generated vast efficiencies, profits and hence the means to fund a growing national appetite to buy foreign food.

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist … McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,’ observes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy, daughter of the late leader, and now an international emissary in her own right, explains her father’s vision: ‘All we want is a fair price. We’re not asking for anything more. My father called it a “scientific” price – a price that includes the cost of growing, the cost of labour, the cost of land. Nothing more.

The certainty of a domestically earned monthly wage is one that NAFTA took away. And migration is a global response to the rural insecurity that economic liberalization in agriculture has fostered.

In the Great 2008 Price Spike, one of the agricultural commodities with the highest price rise was fertilizer, which more than doubled in price from August 2007 to 2008.

Some have suggested that half of all adults in the US may be obese by 2030 (with similar increases on the horizon for every other high and middle income country).

Some folks are so busy stuffing their face that they don’t see their neighbor starving.

In 2002, for instance, US corn cost US$1.74 per bushel to buy but US$2.66 for US farmers to produce.8 This, because the United States had long supported its farmers and had made a range of subsidies available to them for machinery, fertilizer, credit and transport

Without an effective minimum price system in place, you’ve absolutely no guarantees at all. In other words, globalizing the market has effectively transferred control of farming away from the farmer, and into the hands of those who can shape that market.

Particularly in the Global South, poor people are under threat of direct physical harm, never more so than when they try to exercise their rights. In taking a stand against the illegal appropriation of their land, or even in merely raising their voices against the injustices they face, peasant groups across the world are targeted, often with impunity, by local and national forces, both public and private.

In Mexico, when the price of corn fell, the message many farmers received was that they were on their own, that the government was shuffling off its commitment to them, and that farmers had better think of some other way of feeding themselves and their families. The method farmers chose to face the falling price of corn was to grow more of it, to generate an income to meet the rising prices of all the things they couldn’t provide for themselves.

Hugh just dropped off the cheese selection for the week. I thought you'd like to sample?" I perked up immediately. Sampling cheese sounded fun. I was starving. The Hobnobs hadn't been particularly filling. The light, airy dining room was a beehive of activity. Four servers buzzed around, readying tables, wrapping silverware. Outside someone was watering the ornamental cabbages. I sat at a table with Chandice and tasted a half dozen local cheeses. A sharp English cheddar with a bite that lingered just at the hint of your jaw, a creamy goat cheese lavished with a sweet onion chutney. Stuffing the last of a very toothsome local blue cheese into my mouth, I looked around at the happy bustle with satisfaction. This is what I had always dreamed of, this bright hive of positive energy.

In his path-breaking research, economist Amartya Sen observed that modern famines weren’t related so much to the absence of food as the inability to buy it.

Right there, at his feet and mercy, I gawked up at him like a sex-starved, desperate housewife while he gyrated sensually. His eyes spotted the green bucks, and he knew the drill. He descended, thrusted his crotch towards my face, missing my tiny Asian nose by half an inch. Cross-eyed, I frantically and nervously stuffed the wad of dollar bills into his tiny shorts. Once satiated by the paltry deposit, he backed off and launched into a sexy repertoire for my eyes only.

ADDICTED AMEN I’m drunk, stoned, and stuffed. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. And it never will be. There will never be enough to satisfy me. Because the problem is, I’m not hungry. My soul is thirsty. I’ve had the realization That my spirit suffers from dehydration. Thirsty for love. Thirsty for peace. My flesh won’t set me free. I need You, Lord. I’m starving. There’s only regret after the party. The hole in my heart just gets bigger. Even when he says I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so careless with my body. I didn’t realize I was worthy. I cry myself to sleep. The absence of her presence cuts so deep. What can I take to escape the grief? It’s not enough. Take it. Take this from me. I’m so sorry. I know You love me. I believe it’s not just a story. I’ll give You the glory. Restore me. Make me new. Let me see myself from Your point of view. Fill me with Your Word. The way, the life, the truth. I’m addicted to You, Lord. Take my chains. Give me fruit. I’m sober. I’m satisfied. I’m full. I’m running to You, Lord. I can’t believe I’m running. It used to be a nur. But now I’m chasing after something. Something I can see. Something I can feel. You brought my pain up to the surface. I had to deal so I could heal. Now it has a purpose. Life is good. Despite the struggles. I can smile in the face of trouble. I got my laughter back. She laughs. I’m without fear when I’m attacked. I keep on moving. Forward motion. You have my full devotion. It doesn’t matter where I’ve been. Value isn’t found in the opinions of men. My worth left marks within your skin. You won’t let me stay hidden. It’s Your love, Lord. I’m addicted, amen.

A factor that plays an important role in both self-mutilation and eating disorders is a distorted body image. Although many women suffer from poor body image brought about by oppressive public attitudes and media images, societal pressure alone does not cause the kind of deep-seated mental and physiological disturbance that leads to serious and chronic self-mutilation or eating disorders. Cutting and burning, starving and stuffing, bingeing and purging all reflect both an extreme preoccupation with the body and an equally strong sense of alienation from it. The body is viewed as the enemy—an adversary that must be punished and controlled at all costs. At the same time, the body seems dead, unreal, separate from the soul. It's reality must constantly be proven. The root causes of this are much more closer to home. Like the skin ego, body image begins to form with the earliest skin contact between parent and infant. Whether a positive or negative body image ultimately develops as the child grows into adulthood depends on, among other things, the sense of power, control, and autonomy the child feels over her physical self. Inviolate body boundaries are essential to a healthy body image. Intrusive and neglectful caregiving results in poor body image and the compulsive need to artificially create and enforce body boundaries though behaviors like cutting and eating disorders.

Development was, in other words, part of a policy mindset that linked international trade, military power and a programme of redistribution. What was to be redistributed was, it turned out, food. The Marshall Plan – the US aid programme to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – had instigated, among other initiatives, the transfer of food to the hungry and possibly querulous European population in response to the post-war food shortages.

Any US-aligned government that found itself battling worker-led organizing or, indeed, any plausibly left-wing political opposition could gain access to the US strategic grain reserve.

Between 1956 and 1960 more than one-third of the world trade in wheat was accounted for by American aid. The world price of wheat was kept artificially low through food aid, hurting growers, but hooking countries of the Global South on US largesse.

There’s no tombstone for it, but the post-war food order died in 1973.

The price of oil quadrupled from October 1973 to 1974.

The oil shock also forced a recalculation of the economics and politics of the Cold War. With drivers lining up for gasoline in the United States, securing the domestic supply of fuel became a strategic priority.

The new political economy of food rested not on control through the United States’ food surplus, but through the Global South’s fiscal debt.

banks in which oil exporters had invested were lending money to anyone who’d take it. It was a system ready to collapse at the slightest breath of change. When that change came, with the high interest rates and global recession at the end of the 1970s, the accumulated debt set large parts of Latin America, Africa and eventually Asia on the route to bankruptcy.

times. To do this, countries needed to borrow and, precisely because it was a time of recession, with high rates of inflation (and therefore high interest rates), money was much harder to come by. With the shrinking of other lending sources, a new series of actors were able to shape the destinies of the Global South: international financial institutions. This cluster of organizations is funded by taxpayer dollars

Under these conditions governments ceded large parts of their economic and social spending sovereignty to their donors. From this point on, choices over national development would be shaped not by national governments, but by their creditors.64

And the Global North managed to replace the old colonial instruments of command and control with newer, and cheaper, mechanisms of ‘self-imposed’ market discipline.

With the blows dealt to worker organizing in the 1980s, and through the breaking of union power around the world,65 fears of worker insurrection were set, temporarily, at bay. The new food order offered a way of maintaining cheap food supplies globally, but with an increased role not just for the US government, but for the private sector, in providing agricultural technologies and in international trade itself. And one institution above all was to frame this new agricultural order – the World Trade Organization.

The power of this model comes from assuming that the market looks like a pyramid, with a few on top scalping the many at the bottom. The trouble is that agriculture doesn’t look like this. In agriculture, there are many at the top, and they are often substantially poorer than their customers.

Particularly in the Global South, trade liberalization has rarely been accompanied by working mechanisms to redistribute its gains to the poor, or to provide meaningful work or retraining for those left unemployed by the consequences of market shifts.20 This is because liberalization is part of a bigger political philosophy – one in which government intervention (even to provide a basic protection for rights) is considered meddlesome and inefficient. This is why, with few exceptions, the era of trade agreements has also been the era of increasing inequality.

Companies and governments from India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States have all thrown their money at poorer parts of the world, where an acre of land and, most important, the groundwater beneath it can be had for a few dollars.

This new scramble not only for African land, but for the resources of the poor, sets us up for a century of resource conflicts the likes of which we have never before seen.

while the drug-related homicide rate fell in urban areas in the 1990s, it tripled in rural areas.31 In 2009 almost one in six people living in rural areas in the US fell below the poverty line.

Women carry its brunt. In one district in Southern India, for instance, a study found that the suicide rate for young men was 58 per 100,000. For young women it was 148 per 100,000.28 As a yardstick, the rate in the UK is less than 5 per 100,000.

Part of the telling of the fairy tale of ‘Shining India’ demands that the poor disappear. In India, this has been achieved through the waving of a magical, statistical wand.

in the decade after 1993, rural income fell by about 20 per cent while urban income increased by 40 per cent.

India has skipped past industrial development, to become a software giant, a knowledge economy in which one third of the population is illiterate.

To grow tea and sugar required industrial agriculture’s single most bloody innovation – the plantation. The agricultural technology of advanced and permanent monoculture came bundled with its own social technology, of soil tilled, cane hacked and leaves plucked by an endless supply of almost disposable people from the Global South.

In 1645 (at the beginning of the two-centuries-long era of slavery), records show the purchase of 1,000 slaves for Barbadian cane sugar production. A commentator noted that more slaves would soon be on their way, for so lucrative was the sugar industry, and so low the value of human life, that within eighteen months, slaves had recouped their strike-price for their masters.

In the consumption of tea as a source of calories, exploited urban workers in London mirrored nothing so much as the slaves at the other end of the food system in the Caribbean, who chewed sugar cane for energy enough to get through the working day.

In order for the companies to supply tea and sugar, imperial power was necessary, in India and China principally for tea, and in the Caribbean for sugar. Britain had dominion over both regions. Religion also played a part, with the Temperance movement and the Protestant work ethic driving beer and gin out of the workplace.19 And, for the working poor, tea held an important advantage over a cold glass of beer: ‘Two ounces of tea a week … made many a cold supper seem like a hot meal.

The demise of beer’s place in everyday life does, however, show how traders in tea and sugar were able to ride, and further cause, changes in centuries-old tastes, reduce levels of nutrition and get a more caffeinated workforce for the ‘workshop of the world’ as a result.

The mechanics of setting up a global food system involved the twin processes of colonization and the forced creation of markets.

Settler colonies were made possible because agricultural commercialization in Europe was driving smallholders off the land. Displaced settlers were sent from Europe en masse to populate newly conquered territories.

Peasants could no longer expect to receive free grain from the village lord if the harvests failed. Under modern British rule they were to work for food. The result was extreme rural hunger and poverty.

Through directly extracting food resources from its tropical empire and a new commercial frontier of export agriculture in settler colonies, and with only a twinge of guilt at the human cost wrought, Britain was able to feed its working class.

The Industrial Revolution (from roughly the 1780s to the 1840s)35 had transformed the country.36 Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the new working class were battered by the harsh living and working conditions in the new cities.37 It is from this time that the word ‘slum’ derives, a new word to describe a new urban geography.

The solution to worker dissatisfaction in Europe involved blunting the edge of discontent. It involved adhering to an unwritten social contract, keeping levels of hunger and deprivation within manageable limits by making sure enough quantities of cheap food were available. The cheap food demanded slaves and low-paid agricultural workers.

This is why slave uprisings were so fearsome to the architects of the new international food system. Without slaves, no sugar, and therefore no food to quiet the industrial worker.

Ma held out the tray of muffins, smiling at me as though I’d just brought home a report card of all As. “For you, Reggie, darling,” she said. “It’s over, sweetheart. You win. I see now that I was wrong.” “Really, Ma?” I dared to hope. “Yes, honey. Take one, you must be starving,” she said. I took a muffin. I had a bite. It was the most delicious muffin I’d ever tasted. The chocolate was creamy, the muffin perfectly moist. And I was sooooo hungry! I stuffed the rest of the muffin into my mouth and chewed fast. Then Ma did a strange thing. She threw back her head and started to laugh. Not just her regular laugh but more like a witch’s cackle. She cackled and cackled. It was the most hideous sound I’d ever heard. I stopped chewing and watched her. She put down the tray of muffins. She started dancing around the room, her eyes crazy. “Ahahahahah!” she cried. “I win! I win! Reggie’s eating cabbage! Reggie’s eating cabbage!” She began running all her words together. “Ahahahahaha! I stayed up all night cooking at first I made brownies but the cabbage taste was still there so I started again I chopped it up finer I put it into a cheesecake you know you love cheesecake Reggie but the cheesecake came out still tasting like cabbage so I started again at 4am I blitzed the cabbage until it was individual molecules and I baked the molecules of cabbage into my double choc chip muffins…and ahahahahahahah…you can’t taste the cabbage Reggie you’re eating cabbage!! I win! I win! I haven’t had any sleep but I WIN!! Ahahahahahahah!!

If you buy your organic, all-natural, GMO-free tortilla chips at Whole Foods, you're still stuffing your liver and starving your gut--you're just paying more for the privilege.

At the same time that she was grateful her secret was safe, she couldn’t understand why nobody confronted her. There were so many people in her orbit and yet only two of them ever said anything. One was her friend Ingrid, and the other was Ingrid’s mother. On a sunny spring afternoon when the girls were sixteen, Ingrid and Ingrid’s mother and Sloane were all in the living room at Ingrid’s house and Ingrid’s mother said, Sloane, what is going on? You are emaciated. And Sloane made the usual excuses. She said she was eating so much and she didn’t know what was going on, that perhaps it was a high metabolism. She pretended to always be eating. She had several reliable tricks. Coming into someone else’s home, she would say she was stuffed, that she’d just eaten a burger and fries. That way no one would ask if she wanted something to eat. Faced with a plate she couldn’t avoid, she would move food around, smearing caloric sauces around the plate, mopping them up with bread that she left on the rim. She would cut food into many pieces and hold her fork in the air, so she seemed to be actively consuming. Meanwhile she would drink constantly. Bottles of water, Diet Coke, tea, coffee. She always had a drink in her hand. Her friend Ingrid would ask, Why are you drinking so many drinks? Why do you drink so much coffee, and juice, and water all the time? Why are you drinking so many freaking beverages, Sloane? The answer, the one that Sloane could not tell her best friend, was that she was starving.

(No wonder Arthur fell all over himself to baby Mordred, who wasn’t even particularly good, let alone great. Because he was starved for love Arthur thought Mordred should be glutted with it, stuffed like a goose, but there’s such a thing as overcorrection. Trap for young players.)