butter and bad appetite

how a novel about food & murder sparked my own appetite questions

A content note: This week’s essay contains discussion and reference to disordered eating experiences.

It’s no secret that I lack an appetite.

It’s also not something I hold with much pride – it exists alongside me. In stirring emotion about food, I sometimes feel like a machine trying to remember how to be human. In many ways, this unappetite drives my curiosity: why does cuisine enjoyment come so naturally to some and with much legwork for others? On my podcast, I’ve interviewed dieticians, neurobiologists, eating disorder care specialists, and those with lived experience with disordered eating to make sense of what happens when you just don’t think about food.

In reading Asako Yuzuki’s Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder recently, I found a narrative around appetite that drew me in more personally than usual. Butter’s main character, Rika, is the furthest a woman can get from being a foodie. She’s a reporter for a weekly newspaper, with a tiny kitchen that rarely gets used. She doesn’t think about food much until she tries to connect with an imprisoned woman who allegedly killed five of her lovers after cooking for them. Throughout Butter, Rika explores the limits of body, appetite, and feminism in Japan, seeking new flavours and textures through food.

While Butter never explicitly mentions eating disorders, the book weaves together narratives of healing appetites under the surveillance of cultural gender performance with the more plot-focused story of landing the big interview with a murderer. Yuzuki tackles disordered eating in a way that profoundly connects a hunger for individual restraint with the larger sociocultural factors that continue to press down on this message. When appetites are bad, how do we make sense of ourselves?

demanding determination

While I tend to avoid the subject matter of disordered eating in novels, the few I’ve read (such as Women, Eating by Claire Kohda) are challenging, narrowing in on hunger and insatiability. For these reasons, they are challenging to read without cracking open a vast cave of dangerous habits for me. With Butter, it was the opposite. There was no urgency, no sensationalism, no stigmatization around it. Plain and simple, protagonist Rika does not connect to food much and sees it as time-consuming:

“It struck Rika acutely now how true luxury when it came to food demanded determination and energy, even more than it did for money. You had to keep abreast of which products were in season, search out a bevy of go-to shops, and be forever researching new products and trends. You had to be perpetually asking your body, calmly, what it was craving at that particular time… However much time and money Rika were to have, she would never be that way.”

These are the routines that intimidate me. The depictions of the energy, thought, and steadfast care put into acquiring and preparing foods are the very motivators I’m missing. I admire the people in my life who think in meals, who plan for ingredients. I imagine their minds playing chess with their fridge items, searching for the best strategies and patterns for acquiring, preparing, and eating.

There are obvious intricacies to the determination with which people show up to the market. Grocery shopping can take gendered forms, stocking pantries can be constituted into invisible domestic labour, and women can bear the brunt of this work in rigidly heteronormative relationships. I often wonder how much of my bad appetite has persisted with a steadfast refusal to be a woman in the kitchen. I saw generations of women in my family plod along the traditional party lines, planning holiday feasts, planning weeknight meals, planning lunches for the road trips to sports tournaments, planning, planning, planning. I wanted my work to come first, that was what I hungered for the most. It’s not that I rejected motherhood or femininity, but the strict expectations that come of conventional marriages, the ones that play out firmly across Butter, too.

But even that understanding is too simplistic in many ways, tied to gender without consideration of culture, biology, and community dynamics. I wrote about girl dinner having deeper roots in resistance; I also took solace in the concept of a lighter plate. But other more pressing elements are missing, like a warm connection to food, an aromatic thread to pull me back to my roots.

egg salad sandwiches

Geraldine DeRuiter begins If You Can’t Take the Heat: “When people find out I’m a food writer, they immediately want to know my first food memory. It’s like the pissing contest of the culinary world—whose first gastronomical imprint is the best.”

I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing chefs who love to tell these stories, too – even if I don’t ask (and I rarely do). Invariably, the flavours they bring to their work are often shaped by childhood memories. There is usually a matriarch in these early kitchens of men in food – labour appreciated but valued for nurture over economic gain. In a recent interview, I was afforded a broader question about the food culture I was raised in, which I think is much more interesting. My first food memory says it all, really:

An egg salad sandwich, heavy on the mayo, slopped heavily into two slices of bread while my mum talked to a friend in the other room. I barfed all over the floor after taking a bite, knowing full well this was not food for me.

I grew up on Shake N Bake chickens, meatloaf with ketchup, and plain baked potatoes. I can confidently tell which off-brand chips have the best sour cream and onion variety. I thought crudité was pronounced crud-iight, and I thought that bay leaves in stews were part of what you had to eat. Instead of a kitchen nonna, I had a Chatelaine-recipe-clipping grandma, who lovingly cut out vegetarian dishes I might want to cook, despite not understanding why I didn’t eat meat.

These are not elements of my upbringing I anguish over, having connected the dots further as an adult. I had no tether back to Irish foods. I was a child of the diaspora and a grandchild of two immigrants who had to navigate complications of Irish identity while working for or around the British Empire. My dad reminds me that his parents didn’t take much of Ireland with them when they left, and perhaps that is why the NoName brand ham, the frozen peas, and the McCain frozen chocolate cake are my culinary heritage.

a mystery to be solved

For a review of Butter in The Guardian, Josh Weeks says that the book’s brilliance lies in framing “individual eating habits as a mystery to be solved.” While many characters dig into these mysteries, they wind up back in their childhood kitchens to figure out the solutions. They cook for their partners, ruminating on rigid gendered expectations for Japanese women while stirring:

“Japanese women are required to be self-denying, hard-working, and ascetic, and in the same breath to be feminine, soft, and caring towards men.”

It makes me think too of the expectations of Mormon women to maintain thin bodies and restraint, to build their bodies and lives for spreading the word of God.

Canadian culture is miles away from Japanese culture, and yet appetites as an individual problem persists across national borders. What makes us keep digging? What makes these mysteries problems to solve? The more I question my appetite, the more I appreciate the fractures that led to such a disconnect as being bound by whiteness, along with its connections to immigration, farming, and transitions to industrialized foodways. My grandparents made the decisions that felt the best for them and their kids, the same way my choices are inspired by wanting the best for my children and future generations. If you grew up on a rural farm, regardless of it being in Ireland or Canada, you were neighbours with poverty. And if you had an itch to see something more of the world, would you not do what was in your power to ensure your family got to do that very thing? 

Conversely, I look to Yuzuki’s description of what a good appetite can really be about, too:

“All of your knowledge is within anybody’s reach if they read the right books and pay the right money. The reason you appear so special is because people these days don’t spend all that time and money. Because they all count calories and have abandoned the arts of home-cooking and fine-dining, which they didn’t receive a proper education in. That’s all.”

Luxury in Butter is expensive, and specialty items, like salted butter when there’s a nationwide shortage, “coasted across [the] tongue like a placid midwinter wave.” There are negotiations around identity as Rika’s appetite increases, and she gains weight. She spends a significant portion of the book trying to figure out what a good amount of food is for her, when she’s spent her adult life restricting, calorie counting, and eating foods perceived as healthier.

That's why I strongly advocate using what you have, looking to frozen foods, canned and jarred vegetables, and substituting ingredients where possible. Food isn’t always a luxury for families, particularly those I grew up with. It can be exhausting, stressful, and tedious. It can be a ritual, something that brings everyone together, or it can just be a shitty burnt hot dog eaten to fill a stomach quickly.

energetic appetites

Where appetite gets interesting to me is the idea of the energy felt when eating, so much as the energy felt preparing it. I laughed when a friend recently posted a story of a beautiful-looking dinner they made for their family, noting it wasn’t made with love so much as a bad headache and endless frustration, but they were glad all the same. In Like Water for Chocolate, the main character famously infuses her emotions into the dishes she prepares, with great consequences for the recipients of her meals. In Butter, Shinoi (a divorced middle-aged man) makes a point about taste:  

“There are times in life when this sort of instant food tastes better. The kind of eating where absorbing the feelings of the person who’s made the food can use up energy. Everyone needs some distance sometimes —from tasty things as well as anything else.”

This felt like such a unique way to look at the richness and decadence of some cooking. I don’t necessarily mean expensive ingredients so much as the small moments that compose a kitchen: the knife skills, the ability to transform stale bread into panko, the privilege of experimentation (the potential food waste of a failed experiment means precious time and food wasted). I’ve had exes with culinary knowledge and experience shame me for how I chop, how I eat, and how little I know. The implicit message was that what I ate and where I came from weren’t necessarily good enough.

This fuels my need to unpack the stigma around ultra-processed foods: I don’t think the quality we reckon with in grocery stores is fair or reasonable. I also don’t believe high volumes of industrialized meat are acceptable when meatpacking labourers are exploited, and much of our land is used just to feed livestock (when so much gets wasted). But I think it’s incredibly important to meet people where they are with food, no matter where that might be.

Butter has shown me that when you grow up with food being a vessel for societal expectations, you risk becoming entirely self-contained. You bottle up to outwardly project how you want to be perceived, and an actual appetite becomes a mystery to be solved, pieced together, only to realize later in life how interconnected it is with the rest of the world around you.

Throughout the book, Rika realizes what a good amount of food is for her, having explored the many flavours and complexities of dishes that the murderer used. Ultimately, Butter finds solutions in blending the past and present: balancing the tastes of instant foods with the possibilities of new flavours. For anyone who’s struggled with appetite, shame, and reckoning with family histories of food, it’s worth exploring the potentials that come with a confident relationship to the kitchen—regardless of what form that might look like.

We talk about knowledge being power; sometimes I forget how much I’ve accumulated. In reading Butter, I felt a new and more layered appreciation for learning through food studies – not through cooking, but by reading.

After all, I don’t think we can solve the challenges of food systems by individual choices (even if they do compound with time). But unearthing the connections between these individual appetites and broader social values around food helps centre communal experiences— in all their forms, variations, and contradictions— and piece together how our appetites became gendered, ascetic, gluttonous, or nonexistent for some of us.

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