drawing connections to "the raw and the rawer"

dec. 12 2023: the author of "the raw and the rawer", alexandra kleeman, is also the person who wrote my favourite book, you too can have a body like mine. the way that she generally writes about food as a source of anxiety is so so so cool to me, and this article is her taking that ability and applying it to a real-life diet that is honestly probably just an eating disorder if people did eating disorders because they thought they could cure cancer? i think i'm stealing this sentiment from someone's review of her novel but: her work is very good at making you feel gross about food and the way that we (and our bodies) use it.

when i was younger, my parents spent a lot of time sat in front of the tv, listening to preachers tout these miracle remedies that you could get mailed to you. when i was a kid our pantry always had a loaf of this special bread from isreal (evangelicals tend to heavily fetishize isreal) and/or some sort of ?bible cereal?, and for a couple years my dad would stop me in the doorway before i could leave for school to anoint me by dabbing olive oil onto my forehead. any time i see people using food for their faith healing, i get a wary feeling. i've never found something unrelated to spirituality that's given me that same unsettled reaction until i read this article.

the idea that a shitton of apples can cure diseases or heal blind/deaf/mute people if you just pay someone enough money for the proper use protocol for the apples (i.e.: eat them all!) is so evidently troubling on its face, especially when the people selling the use protocol would prefer for their buyers to forego much safer options, like a balanced diet or medicine. it's hard for me to find it funny, but kleeman's article does a great job of using descriptive language and storytelling to make the funny-ness in it apparent. i'm trying to find a quote to pick out and display to prove it to you but. honestly i think you should really just read the whole article.

maybe it's less funny because i've experienced being on the recieving end of the use protocol: whenever i got sick as a child, my parent's first instinct was to pray over me, and to audibly talk about my illness like it had been cured, even if it hadn't been. at the time, it felt like they were talking to some unseen third-party who was hiding in the walls—trying to keep that concealed person calm, so they didn't curse me to be even more sick. in the present day, my parents still hate to talk about sickness like it's a real thing that could affect them. it doesn't exist, and if it does it only exists for the unsaved, and the only panacea is prayer.

in fruitarianism, the panacea is fruit. in the article, kleeman talks about feeling surrounded by health in the festival's ecosystem, and feeling strange/foreign as a not-paragon of health. i feel like some evangelicals often talk about how everything in their own lives has gotten fixed, and it's so much better now. there's no place for debility in a space that promises that everything will eventually be fixed if you believe that everything will eventually be fixed. it's a weird feeling when you're on the outside of it, but writing like kleeman's helps me to remember that i am not the only person in the world who can get sick.

if you want to read about a slightly more fun ?cult? and you enjoyed her article i would recommend you too can have a body like mine!! available wherever you get your books (........zlibrary...)