Day 16 in which I pull a thread that ends up being connected to my Grandmother.

So, I’m a food hoarder.

Since I was a child, I’ve had this compulsion to make sure that I always knew where a secret stash of food was hidden—one that only I knew about. I would sneak food out of the refrigerator at night, take it to bed, and hide it in the sliding headboard. I’d buy 5 candy bars with my allowance, and stash 4 of them outside my bedroom window on the porch roof.

If you’d asked 7 year-old me what I was doing, I would have said that it was “In case I get hungry at night”—as if a little midnight hunger was a tragedy that couldn’t be dealt with other than by eating at 2 a.m.

But what I couldn’t have explained then that I can now is that I get anxious if I don’t know that there will be food within easy reach when I get hungry.

This isn’t some huge revelation to me; I’ve been aware of it for years, but only in the last few weeks became curious about whether it’s a “thing”, or just me. Turns out it IS a known eating disorder, and the symptoms are:

• Stealing or hiding food (Which I did as a child)
• Eating rapidly over a short period of time (CHECK. I’m always the first one finished at the dinner table)
• Consuming large quantities of food, even to the point of vomiting (Well, not to the point of vomiting, but to the point of being painfully full, yes)
• Storing or stashing food (Yep, I have at least 100 cans of various kinds of food in my pantry. In addition, I have an unreasonable love of leftovers from restaurants. I usually order more than I know I can eat SO I can take some home. I’ll also stop eating before I’m full so that I can take food home and have it there)
• Becoming upset or emotional if food is limited, taken away or if forced to share with others (Oh HELL yes. I go CRAZY when this happens, I literally have to fight for control of myself. Do NOT touch my leftovers. And do NOT tell me we can eat at such and such a place and then have it turn out that that place is closed. Do NOT accidentally drop the meal I’ve just made into a sink full of dishwater, rendering it inedible. And for God’s sake, do NOT accidentally throw away food that I think is still available to me. The Smartboy only has 9 fingers. Ask him why sometime.)

What was surprising, when I began to read up on the disorder, was that most of the literature around it addresses parents of adopted and foster children. Apparently, those children are the overwhelming sufferers of this problem, and it’s believed to be because they’ve experienced actual food deprivation. Article after article asserts that the reason these kids are the way they are is because they didn’t get enough to eat, or were punished by withholding food, and are subconsciously insecure about where their next meal is coming from.

The thing is, I couldn’t remember ever having been denied food as a child, except in the very normal “You can’t have that cookie, it will ruin your dinner” sense. I DO remember feeling very out of control of food, as if it could be the case that I was really, really starving (yeah, I know, but when you’re a kid, those hunger pangs do seem intolerable, and you’re unaware that they’ll go away whether you eat or not), and despite my distress, I could be refused food anyway.

I also remember thinking that I should consume all the food I thought I would want now AND later when it first appeared, because if I didn’t get it now, it wouldn’t be around later. And although that thought might have come from food hoarding anxieties, it was also reality, since my family of origin included 4 dudes (dad and 3 brothers) who basically descended on any available food like a hoard of locusts. There were few leftovers in the Jones house, and no matter how carefully one instructed one’s brothers et al. that a particular pork chop belonged to one, chances were that said pork chop would be M.I.A. when one wanted to eat it, and there would be denials all around as to knowledge of its fate.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t as if we ACTUALLY went hungry when I was a kid.

For years, I’ve told people that I probably picked up the vibe that food was scarce and hard to get from my mother. Even though I can’t remember her ever saying that it was, or even acting as if it were, I do remember my father telling me a story about how when they were first married, he found a box of canned food under their bed, and when he asked her why it was there, she said something to the effect that it was “just in case”.

And I was aware that her family was poor and that she was born toward the end of the Great Depression, so I thought that maybe I’d just picked it up through that special ether that transmits messages between mothers and very young children.

But as this came back up for me during the #100DaystoHealth project, I thought, “Hell, my mother’s still alive, why don’t I just do something we don’t really do in my family and ask a question?” So I sent her this email (hey, baby steps):

Mom—

I have a pretty obvious case of food hoarding, have since I was a child.

It’s apparently most common in foster children and adopted children who are literally denied food. I don’t remember ever being denied food except in the “don’t eat that, it will ruin your dinner” sense.

Dad told me at one time that YOU hoarded food. To my memory, I was never aware of such a thing, but I have to think that I got the vibe from you that food was potentially scarce.

So where did YOU get it? Did your family go hungry, did they withhold food from you as punishment, or does it go back yet another generation to YOUR mother?

Research for my blog. Thanks

Vena

And later, I got this response:

Did not know about your food hoarding, and was certainly unaware that you did it as a child.  I never went hungry when I was pregnant with you, and I never denied you food as a child.  In fact, I was careful to feed you any time you felt hungry, and never insisted that you had to wait until meal time.

As to MY history. . .yes, I was often aware that food was scarce in my childhood.  I recall ONE TIME before you were born looking to clean under the bed and finding a good size cardboard box of canned food that I had stored there and forgotten.  I pulled it out with the thought, "you are not going to starve while you are married to this man, so you don't need to do this anymore."  And I never did.

As to further back in my mother's history, there was a story during my childhood that she went around one day with a baseball bat and broke every mirror in the house.  When I asked if the story was true, and why, she said, "I didn't want to watch myself starve to death."

Not sure what use this will be to you in your blog, but there is the story as it is as it pertains to food scarcity as far back as your grandmother.  There is research that says that people whose grandparents suffered from hunger show evidence of that in their DNA.  Look it up.

So of course I did, and sure enough, there are a BUNCH of articles out there citing a study that was done on the grandchildren of victims of a Dutch famine, claiming that the DNA of their progeny unto (at least the) 2^nd generation showed signs of increased susceptibility to a bunch of metabolic diseases. Apparently, hunger is the gift that just keeps on giving.

In my own family, the women have, for at least 3 generations, had a fear that food wouldn’t always be available to them. It makes sense that this anxiety would contribute to the pleasure I get from OVEReating (see day 12’s post), because if I can OVEReat, my anxiety would be (at least temporarily) put to bed, disproven, whatever. It may also go some of the way toward explaining my extreme tendency to over-achieve; I’ve never had that “As long as I’m married to this man, I’ll never starve” thing. I’ve had the “As long as I can take care of MYSELF, I’ll never starve” thing.

This information is interesting to me—my Grandmother died when I was young, and I barely remember anything about her other than that she seemed very nervous. And now I understand why; she was, like my mother and like me, when I don’t control it, anxious.

I’m not going to make it MORE than that, though. Our parent’s and parent’s parent’s histories and anxieties can certainly affect us in ways we don’t understand, but it’s easy to let them become an excuse for why WE can’t be better. The medicalized excuses for why I can’t lose weight (My body evolved to store fat! It’s the chemicals in the environment! It’s my Grandmother’s epigenetics!) don’t explain why there were so many fewer fat people in 1980 than there are today.

I’m a food hoarder. So was my mom. My grandmother thought she was going to starve to death. I’m sorry that we all had to go through that, but food is NOT scarce in my life, it’s overabundant. I live in a country and a time when there’s ample food available to even the poorest person, if they simply reach out for it. I don’t have to gobble down what’s in front of me like it’s the last food I’ll ever see. Even when I don’t know where my next meal is coming from, I can trust that it will come.

Going forward, I’m going to intentionally be thankful for the fact that there’s more food than I can even use, and let the anxious little girl who needed to eat ALL of it know that we’re fine now.