We Are What We Eat

Exiting Winter's cocoon, our next Goddess enters the world.
And the world has suggestions.

Be attractive.
Be desirable.
Be disciplined.

And above all, be thin.
Very thin.

I know.  I'm admitting my age here, but for women of my generation, thinness wasn't merely one version of beauty. It was the prerequisite. There could be no pretty without thin.

Inspired by Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian Bombshell from the mid 1950’s who introduced fruit basket haberdashery decades before Edible Arrangements arrived on the runway, ‘We are What We Eat’ balances an entire food pyramid on her head: healthy fruits and vegetables near the bottom, followed by increasingly questionable choices as we climb toward the heavens. Bread. Pie. Candy. Chocolate.
And, presiding over the whole nutritional enterprise? A martini.
​Balance is everything.

But look at her.
She doesn't seem entirely convinced.

​Is she leaning because she's struggling to keep everything in balance?
Or is that slight tilt something else entirely?

Maybe she's beginning to suspect the whole arrangement is ridiculous.

After all, We Are What We Eat may have less to do with what's on our plates than with what we're fed.
Ideas about beauty.
Ideas about our bodies.
Ideas about what we must deny ourselves in order to belong.
We consume those too.
And some of them take a very long time to digest.
Perhaps becoming begins when we start questioning the menu.
​