Trigger Warning: This content may be upsetting to those that struggle with eating disorders or body image
I used to measure autumn in hayrides, apple-cider jugs and corn maze anxiety. But now that I live in New York, I know it’s autumn by the way pumpkin pie hits the shelves at Morton Williams, the way Central Park feels emptier and, oddly, my Instagram explore page.
I can scroll for hours and only come across photos of young women sitting in coffee shops with their breakfasts: a croissant sits on a doily awaiting a perfectly manicured finger to touch it; a turtlenecked fashionista bites into a raspberry danish, laughing. Somehow there is always scattered leaves and a Chanel bag tucked into the frame of these photos.
It all seems like harmless, “Insta-worthy” fun, but these images stirred up something inside of me. When I think of the words “breakfast” and “woman”, I’m not picturing eggs and bacon or bagels with lox. In fact, I’m picturing practically nothing. I see a thimble of coffee, untouched, and a muffin like a Tiffany’s accessory. I glance at the menus on the sidewalk chalkboards: pumpkin spice lattes and apple glazed doughnuts. I can see the girls posing by the windows inside.
There have been a few times in my life where I have gone out to eat for breakfast and felt uncomfortable about eating. I have always associated femininity with not eating, for some horrible reason, and the daunting task of eating a well balanced breakfast always hung over my head like a bad decision. A few weeks ago I was sitting in a diner and I was like, screw it, I’m getting what I want to eat. It was then that I realized that the menu was genderized: Hungry Man’s Breakfast, The Lumberjack Plate, Captain’s Corned Beef Hash. In that moment, ordering anything other than orange juice and a waffle seemed unattractive. But why?
Why are we abiding to this idea that meat is for men and sweets are for women? I thought I was crazy until I researched it. GrubHub, the leading American online and mobile food delivery service, reported that their breakfast deliveries varied vastly by gender. In 2014, oatmeal was twenty-six percent more popular with women than with men, while corned beef hash was thirty-two percent more popular with men than with women. More women ordered fresh fruit, waffles, and, you guessed it – coffees and croissants. More men ordered ham, sausage, breakfast sandwiches and omelettes.
The most ordered breakfast items included eggs, bacon, toast and bagels – all of which were more popular with men other than bagels, which were sixteen percent more popular with women. The most popular drinks, however, were entirely more popular with women. These included coffee (iced and hot), lattes, cappuccinos and mochas (Watson 1).
But what can be made of this? Are women naturally more inclined to reach for drinks and light foods in the morning, or have we been conditioned to eat lighter by an unspoken beauty standard? I want to clarify that I am not against anyone’s breakfast patterns. My mother is the type of person who can only do coffee in the morning, and I, myself, tend to reach for scones before I consider eggs. Yet in the spirit of National Eating Disorder Awareness week, it’s time I start exploring these behaviors. Especially my own.
My eating disorder has been a third party affair in every relationship I’ve ever had, nagging me and begging me to adore it like I once did. I used to listen more often – I used to skip breakfast and memorize the nutrition label of every food I touched. It’s shameful for me to say that even now, it’s hard for me to walk into Starbucks. I know there’s five hundred calories in the breakfast sandwich and two hundred and ten calories in the caramel macchiato. I don’t even like pumpkin drinks, but seeing the calories on the pumpkin scones and pumpkin muffins made me sick. I wish I could unmemorize it.
I am still searching for a word that falls somewhere in between recovery and relapse. That is how I feel, ultimately, when looking at these photos on Instagram. I have yet to see an influencer (on my explore page, at least) post a photo with a widely stocked meal. All that comes to mind is Trisha Paytas and her mukbangs, but even those are viewed as parody and reduced to “fat girl funny”, an entirely separate issue that deserves its own article.
But I’ll play Devil’s advocate. I see many photos of food from places like The Butcher’s Daughter in SOHO or Jack’s Wife Freda in the West Village. It’s true that these images usually show more than just a glass of OJ and buttered toast. I often see fresh fruit and waffles, leafy salads and poached eggs on the bright white plates. But these meals are deemed excusable because one, their aestheticism, and two, their marketing. Pull up the Butcher’s Daughter on a web browser and you’ll come across many articles about their plant-based menu and “vegetable slaughterhouse”. Because these restaurants are viewed as hyper-healthy options, these Instagram posts are not viewed as gluttonous or off brand.
Instagram has provided us a platform that allows us to be the mirage of our own desires. We have begun to capitalize on an image of a young city girl consuming little foods to get her through her day. And when we interact on a site that repeatedly normalizes this image, we begin to assess that this is how our days should be: fashionable and hungry and pretty.
I, too, am guilty of buying into and selling this image – it’s why my explore page looks the way it does. I’ve bought matcha puff pastry, iced cinnamon dolce, and even whole baguettes from coffee shops and bakeries in the city. I’ve posed next to them happily and uploaded them on my page.
But I can also say that I have felt immense guilt for the foods I consumed outside of the photographs. I am ashamed of the unphotographed sandwiches that I ate with my photographed coffees. For the butter or jam on my baguette that went unaccounted, or the picnic dates where I refused to be photographed because I was bloated.
Instagram selfies of croissants and tea are as real and vivid as the sheer numerical differences between men and women’s breakfast orders. Whether or not these ideas speak to a larger, underlying issue of self image, eating patterns and gender behaviors is difficult to say, but I will hypothesize yes, it’s something. Social media is not separate or part of reality, but rather it adds a new dimension. Even though I’m no longer starving in real life, I can appear to be starving digitally. Not through Photoshop, but by the law of subtraction and a few VSCO filters.
Food is a subject I have never covered on my own Instagram account. Since my breakfast epiphany struck me a few weeks ago, however, I have made a conscious effort to photograph what I eat in the morning. It’s not delicate or Parisian, but it is healthy. I’m learning to love these gray areas – all of them – and how they fit into my version of the Universe. My hope is that in the near future, I’ll get a pumpkin scone and not feel one way or the other about it. Not even an urge to turn on the flash camera.
For more information about eating disorders, visit NEDA or reach out to the ANAD Helpline 630-577-1330