I grew up with an atheist Jewish mother (of 1930s Communist parents) and rather than try to stuff us at any point, she was weight (and beauty) obsessed, perhaps as a rebellion to the bubbe phenomenon. A former anorexic, she had rules about how much a woman should weigh for every inch over 5 feet (4 pounds!) and dreamed of having a waist like Audrey Hepburn. To a certain degree there is a balancing factor in offspring seeking moderation after being raised in a gluttonous family (who were reacting to having been raised in, but rising out of, extreme poverty) but this is also dangerously mixed with American perfectionist ideas of beauty. These days, with so much healthy food and information about nutrition and the mental repercussions of it (of too many refined carbohydrates, for ex) hopefully what we crave is more about how food makes us feel.
I grew up with an atheist Jewish mother (of 1930s Communist parents) and rather than try to stuff us at any point, she was weight (and beauty) obsessed, perhaps as a rebellion to the bubbe phenomenon. A former anorexic, she had rules about how much a woman should weigh for every inch over 5 feet (4 pounds!) and dreamed of having a waist like Audrey Hepburn. To a certain degree there is a balancing factor in offspring seeking moderation after being raised in a gluttonous family (who were reacting to having been raised in, but rising out of, extreme poverty) but this is also dangerously mixed with American perfectionist ideas of beauty. These days, with so much healthy food and information about nutrition and the mental repercussions of it (of too many refined carbohydrates, for ex) hopefully what we crave is more about how food makes us feel.