Sigh… Yes, I'm Prediabetic

But I Still Fuckin' Champion Appetite and Desire

One day when I was six, my mother offered to make me a snack because we were going to eat out for supper, later than my regular dinner. She was slicing little pieces of Hebrew National salami for me, to have on a piece of Temptee bread. "How many pieces do you want?"

"About six," I said. That would cover the bread nicely.

"Is that all? You sure you don't want more?" I didn't realize my mother was making fun of me.

"OK, how 'bout 12?"

Since that day, my family has referred to me as the Bottomless Pit. But I have never been ashamed of the pleasure that I get from food.

Like all women in America, I have dieted from time to time. But I have never been ashamed of myself for liking, for wanting hot buttered biscuits, rainbow cookies, taramosalata (the sexy Greek spread made from carp roe), lobster salad, hot crab with butter, oysters, champagne, Camembert, cakes, fruit pies, simple Italian sesame cookies, global fruits unknown to me that look like jewels and taste like mango vagina pudding.

So I can't help feeling resentful that now, in my 50s, I can no longer eat many of the foods on that list (including the champagne). And many, many more (artisanal and regular pizza, exquisite or humdrum pasta, hot bagels with cream cheese, rice, more than a tiny amount of potatoes, all manner of cookies, scones and chips, and normal sandwiches that have two pieces of bread). And even of the foods I can safely eat, I can no longer eat the amounts that seem right to me, the amounts that just seem like a normal day's nourishing.

Let alone the amounts that used to make special occasions so special as, on my birthday, for example, I used to snack on artisanal cheeses, foie gras, bittersweet fudgy chocolate cake, rugelach, smoked fish, and fancy French ham for breakfast and lunch, and then eat a proper dinner.

For Thanksgiving now? I can eat the turkey, but then just two spoonfuls of cranberry sauce, no stuffing, only minuscule amounts of mashed potatoes or half a sweet potato, and not a single slice of pie, unless I cheat (cheating with a third of a piece of pie on Thanksgiving is very tempting, but it does make it more likely I will get diabetes).

But this essay is not a morality play, or a cautionary tale. So this ISN'T the point at which I will say, "Give up white flour! Stop eating bagels!" or even "Desserts should be few and far between," like Michael Pollan says. (Michael Pollan, incidentally, can go fuck right off. When he said "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," I wanted to respond, "Who made you the king of the world?" To say nothing of his nostalgia for the traditional white hetero cisgender family meal, for which he fondly recalls the woman cooking from scratch every night.)

In fact, "our appetites and weights are matters of metabolic chance that we interpret as matters of personal responsibility and discipline," the writer Jia Tolentino said recently on The Brian Lehrer Show. "We have moralized thinness as a state of moral salvation that [is] achieved by work, and fatness as a… state of damnation or punishment that should only be crawled out of by penance." Now, as a point of fact, I am not fat — for me and many other people, blood sugar levels are not absolutely correlated with weight. But I am quoting Tolentino's excellent analysis because I want to interrupt a narrative that might possibly be in your head about how I got this way, how I got to the point where it isn't healthy for me to eat all sorts of normal food. I was diagnosed as prediabetic four years ago (which means my blood sugar is elevated, and I have had to take steps to bring it down as much as possible so that I do not wind up diabetic). But I've never been a person who eats a lot of junk food, binges Twinkies, or hates eating vegetables. For most of my life, my diet has always been pretty healthy in comparison with most Americans. I have eaten four or five fruits and vegetables a day! I didn't have ice cream, chips or French fries very often! I exercised! I ate fiber!

I am interested to find that I feel the need to protest here, to tell you that I truly am worthy, despite the metabolic "punishment" I appear to be enduring. But that whole idea of illness as punishment is a crock of shit. Eating a lot or eating a little, being fat, skinny, or medium, or having healthy or unhealthy blood sugar have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. (Even though they do sometimes have to do with our diets, albeit in complex ways that are not the same for every person.) Illness, food-related or not, happens to us for reasons that have nothing to do with ethics. And good health, for the periods in our lives that we have it, is not a reward for good actions.

Prediabetes happened to me because, most notably, I got older. Okay, like most people, I may have given myself a bit more leeway to eat dessert after I got married. And becoming a restaurant critic for a few years in the 2010s — while a lifelong dream — was not terrific for my blood sugar. But mainly, middle-age people's bodies are far more likely to develop prediabetes (and other health conditions) because… that's the way the cookie crumbles. For the same reason — sorry to say this — that we are also much more likely to die. Bodies break down over time.

I could have done some things differently, but then again, most of my friends eat less healthy diets than I ever did, and are not prediabetic.

And now that I have it, I do not feel chastened or regretful (well, I do sometimes, but who among us doesn't ever?! :-) ) But instead, the main thing I feel is angry, and hungry. I have a fierce, ravening hunger in me for bowls of ramen with rich broth, pork, seaweed, noodles, and a jammy egg. For Filipino sisig pork jowl and ears with white rice, for blackberry pie, gnocchi with sage and butter sauce, meatball heroes. For agave in my oatmeal, agave in my coffee and tea (I gave up both recently because my A1c wasn't going down enough). For pancakes that do not have to be made, by me, with special flour and a complicated process. Creamy chicken pot pie, pasta in restaurants (I can now only eat pasta made from things like lentils), breaded things, potatoes. More than half a banana, more than half a pear. Dates and figs.

These are all things I cannot eat. And it makes me hungry, it makes me angry, so that I feel like the Devil, now for the first time with a raving lust for something that I literally cannot fulfill except at risk of my life. I am not a person who has ever thought desire was the enemy, and I've always been a person for whom food was as directly libidinous, and at least as satisfying as sex. It is very strange to have to monitor my pleasures, to have to resist my physical desires, so radically every day. (Although I know others, and probably many reading this piece, have had to do this throughout their lives for different reasons. Hello, AIDS epidemic! Hello, opioids and other lovely addictive substances!)

I love my appetite. Despite my current debacle, I feel like all my life, my appetite has been on my side. It — I'm speaking now of all my appetites — has been there guiding me, helping me taste my feelings and finally feel what they are. Actually hear what they're telling me. So my appetite leads me to what I need. It will be obvious that I don't mean literally that when I want a croissant, a croissant is truly what will do my body good. But on a deeper level: appetite, desire, has always led me to what I need emotionally, to what I need in my spirit. If I can't eat the physical croissant right now, I can lead myself to the things that the croissant means to me: nurturing, being valued utterly. Warmth. I can take steps to get that thing and cram it in my mouth.

Years ago, I had an appetite for a certain woman who was bad news on many levels. She was in an open relationship, but had no room for me in her life except as a sex object. That was simultaneously just what I wanted right then, and something painful to me, something I could not endure past a few months' time. But taking that journey —the intense sex, the emotional turmoil, and the ultimate sense of deep deprivation with this woman — gave me something I needed and probably could not have gotten any other way. I needed to feel how sexy I was. And I needed to learn that what I actually needed — for the long term — was to be with a person who valued me, who cared about me in a way I had not been cared about by a partner yet, who was joyfully committed to me.

I learned that it was okay to require a partner who was like that, that in fact I deserved it.

My awakening sexual appetite also saved me when I was in high school. Puberty gave me a power to resist my mother that I'd never had before, and suddenly, with my new teenage muscles and my hair flowing out around me like a sweet thick flag, I no longer worried about pissing her off. I stayed out as late as I wanted with whomever I wanted.

My other appetites, too: for books, which I almost want to eat, which I need constantly to chomp with the mouth of my brain. For art and singing and dancing and stamping around with children's toys, for mountains, which hug the town I live in like a group of very encouraging, loving monsters. FOR FIGHTING BACK. For love where you just lie there holding the other person and taking them in. Staring at them in wonderment.

For recognition, tenderness, touch, close friendship and the ones where you're not yet that close but just like joking, shooting the shit.

I once heard the late cultural theorist Lauren Berlant talk about a group of queer activists she saw marching down the street, chanting "WE ARE EVERYWHERE! WE WANT EVERYTHING!" She wanted to champion them for, if I understood her correctly, their deliberately overweening celebration of wanting — even global wanting, a desire for everything in the world. At the time, I couldn't agree. I thought the chant, and her love of it, spoke to a queer nationalist sensibility I found troubling because it seemed to deliberately override other people's interests, other people's needs.

Now I understand it. I don't think she literally meant that we should ignore or override the claims of other communities, their undeniable interests and needs. Instead, I think she meant to say that we should identify ourselves with the force of queerness within every community, with the force of wanting. Wanting more — specifically including wanting more politically, daring to say that we deserve more than this, this dullsville unimaginative capitalism that feeds nobody and murders many. Dreaming of other ways of being, other ways of being together, other ways of being satisfied.