Miriam is able to experience genuine pleasure in food-pleasure that satisfies in the moment, and, necessarily, passes-while Rachel can’t let herself enjoy even some soft-serve frozen yogurt without turning it into a full-on binge, followed by a starvation ritual.
When Broder describes her own passage into sobriety, which she eventually found her way to in her twenties, she does so in terms of joy-and appetite: “I wanted to sample what the world had to offer, and this included food.” This is the central conflict at work in Milk-Fed, the tension between skinny, miserable Rachel and her unabashedly fat lust object Miriam. Milk-Fed’s preoccupation with what Rachel is and isn’t eating can be, at times, exhausting-in the way that actually suffering from an eating disorder can be exhausting-but Broder sees eating disorders as a kind of “monotheistic religion,” and her refusal to allude circuitously to Rachel’s problems in forgiving ellipses is strangely invigorating. “I am an eater who feels safest at a place of very thin,” she wrote in So Sad Today in that book, she detailed her experiences with anorexia, binge eating, laxatives, and a host of other hallmarks of disordered eating. The notion of a higher power is central to both a religious and eating-disorder-prone mentality, and Broder has written frequently about turning the latter into the former. Photo: Getty / Photo-illustration by Parker Hubbard
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