Our family kitchen table was a rectangle of bare wood, with a worn surface patterned with rings from the tree. At one end, there was a drawer full of random stuff: rubber bands, bicycle repair kits, extra-strong mints. As a hungry child, I loved this table. It was where I ate eggy bread and toad-in- the-hole, beef stew with fluffy suet dumplings, and raspberries and cream covered in sugar. It was where my sister E and I sat side by side, taking it in turns to thump the end of the ketchup bottle until it finally splurted out a red stain on our fish fingers, like the poster paint we used for potato prints at nursery.
Like most siblings, we had battles over food: who could mash the most butter into a potato, who stole the nicest Quality Street chocolates at Christmas, who could make an ice-cream last the longest, pushing the melting vanilla ever deeper into the cones with our tongues. Two years older and wilier, she usually won. Her best trick was to finish everything on her plate before the last person had been served. Ha! On hot summer afternoons, after school, we could hoover up a whole bag of cherries, pausing only to hang a few from our ears, like earrings.
But then we got too big to be sitting next to each other any more – or so our parents thought – and she moved to the opposite side of the table. She became vegetarian and, across that rectangle of wood, we started to live in different worlds. She read books; I watched TV and spent my pocket money on comics and sweets. My idea of art was still a brightly felt-tipped house with four square windows and roses around the door, while she was painting dark, intelligent landscapes in oils. I unthinkingly devoured sausages and stews, roast pork and crackling with apple sauce, while she was worrying about animal welfare and nibbling nut roasts and cold slabs of “tricoloured” vegetable terrine (one layer beige parsnip, one green spinach, one orange carrot, all equally tasteless).
I don’t remember the exact day when she started eating less, but she must have been about 14, so I was 12. At first, she just missed breakfast. It wasn’t a big deal. Lots of people are not hungry in the morning, though I’ve never been one of them. I’d sit and eat my porridge alone, pouring rivulets of golden syrup, comforted by the sweetness. But then she started skipping dinner, too. She’d say she wasn’t hungry and wanted to stay in her room.
No matter how feeble her excuses, our parents would carry on as if nothing were the matter, the three of us staring awkwardly at her empty place mat. I was happy to eat her portion, so long as it wasn’t vegetable terrine. I kept my place at the table, while she hid in her room eating little green apples. Under her bed was a graveyard of cores.
One day as we sat and ate New Year’s lunch – my sister had come down for the occasion – my father announced he was leaving. “My resolution is not to live with your mother any more.” We were eating a Marks & Spencer ready-made vegetable bake. It’s the only time I ever remember leaving a childhood meal unfinished. I had to get away from that table as fast as I could.
After he left, my sister and I – now 16 and 14 – ate in ever more diverging ways. No one called what E had anorexia, because ours was a family that didn’t talk about difficult emotions. She wasn’t actually hospitalised, but she lost an alarming amount of weight until her legs looked as precarious as snowdrop stems.
Often, she was tearful, or silent, or both. I missed the old squabbles, the innocent banter about who got another lick of the cake mixture from the wooden spoon. I missed her company at the table. Now there were whispered, fretful conversations about how to persuade her to eat. When she came into the kitchen, our mother froze. Would E – the suspense – actually take a yoghurt from the fridge, or just another apple? There was often a pot of ratatouille and another of brown rice on the hob (with my father gone, we hardly ever ate meat any more) and occasionally, she sat down and ate a little.
With the stress of divorce, my mother was buying a lot of ready meals and I started to take on ambitious cooking projects – as if trying to recreate the generous dynamic of a family supper all by myself. One day, I made a potato and tarragon pie, a Roux brothers recipe that I saw on a food programme. I layered up waxy potatoes and tarragon, baked them in buttery pastry and when it was out of the oven, poured in cream through a funnel. It’s the sort of hearty dish that should be shared among a table full of laughing siblings. I hoped to tempt E with it. But she anxiously picked at a tiny slice, leaving the rest for me.
Supposedly, I was the daughter who was fine, because I was the one who still had a “healthy” appetite. With one child refusing food, I was the only recipient left for treats, and after the divorce, the goodies came thicker and faster, especially at our father’s house. Our parents desperately needed someone to feed. I wasn’t complaining. I was still playing the old games of who could eat the most cakes, warm from the oven. With E starving, I was eating for two. I could sit at the kitchen table and eat a whole pint-sized tub of maple pecan ice-cream. I devoured peanut butter by the tablespoon and toast by the stack, each slice thickly buttered. In our family’s mythology – established when I was juvenile and skinny – I was the one who could eat “whatever I wanted”, without gaining weight. This may have been true when I only wanted to eat normal family meals. It didn’t play so well with my new bottomless hunger for pain au chocolat and McDonald’s.
As E got smaller, I got larger. The table and its offerings no longer gave me the same solace. When our mother was out and E was upstairs, I often sat there alone, staring at the rings on the brown wood, feeling disgusting and ashamed by how much I had consumed, wondering why no one ever mentioned the depleted fridge. (What happened to “don’t spoil your appetite”?) I tried to make myself sick a few times, ramming my fingers down my throat until the acid rose, but I hated the feeling too much to make a habit of it. Instead, I started a diet – the first of many. These punishing regimes would last half a week before I caved in and returned to my unhappy, shameful binges. E was still avoiding meals and I could tell she was miserable, too, but somehow, we couldn’t reach one another.
The siblings of those with anorexia or other eating disorders are often overlooked. The UK’s leading eating disorder charity, Beat, has described siblings as the “forgotten victims”. In one report on the charity’s website, eight teenagers with anorexic sisters were interviewed about their experiences. All were negatively affected, even though they also sympathised with their sisters and knew that the illness was not their fault. Many of the siblings felt the eating disorder affected every aspect of family life. Each developed personal coping mechanisms. Some tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Others found themselves talking about it obsessively. Some distanced themselves from their sister, but others became closer, often assuming an almost parental role.
Sophie’s younger sister, Grace, was diagnosed with anorexia five years ago, when Grace was 14 and Sophie was 16. One of the first things Sophie noticed, she tells me, was that her needs now came second in the family. As soon as Grace became ill, she felt she was “in the back seat”. She was doing AS-levels at the time, but felt she needed to ignore her own stresses to look after both Grace and her parents, who started going through a “rocky patch in their marriage”. Each of her parents and Grace used her as a sounding board for their own pain. She felt she was looking after all three. In the end, the pressure of trying to be strong gave Sophie depression. Her own eating is still relatively normal, although she spends much longer than she used to weighing up whether to eat something like chocolate cake (“It’s put a twist on my eating”). She is now at university, studying pharmacology. Back at home, Grace’s eating is slowly improving, with a new programme of treatment and meal plans.
But the pressure of the disorder is still there for Sophie, even when she is away from the family table. She is wary of mentioning Grace’s anorexia to new friends, partly because she feels it is not her story to tell, and partly because of the perceived stigma. “One boy that I told said, ‘Send her to my family in Italy and they will fatten her up.’ So there’s not much understanding.”
She and Grace remain close, and she has never blamed her younger sister; but she hates the anorexia itself, calling it a “selfish disease”.
This is something that Hannah can understand. One of four sisters, she tells me that anorexia “ruined my teenage years”. In the grip of the disorder, she had several hospital admissions and lengthy outpatient treatment; it took her many years to recover.
Now in her mid-30s, she feels, to her immense relief, that food and weight do not “control” her any more. But during the bad years, she was so immersed in the disorder – “like you are possessed by a demon” – that she never thought any of her sisters might be at risk, too. She was heartbroken to discover that her youngest sister – around 10 years younger – had been secretly bulimic while she was still recovering. “I couldn’t believe it was happening to my little sister and I didn’t notice.”
The same sister then developed anorexia, which Hannah says she found soul-destroying: “I would have had all the eating disorder back myself to take it away from her.” She thinks her sister would probably have developed the disease regardless of her own anorexia, but wishes there was more sibling support. Eating disorders confirm how deeply social our appetites are.
When one person at the table radically changes the way they eat, the whole ecosystem of a family has to adjust. A meal is not the same thing when it is not shared. I wish I had understood better as a teenager how entangled eating behaviour between siblings was. My sister wasn’t to blame for my problems with eating; but it was only when she became ill that it was obvious how much my apparently robust appetite took its cue from her. Numerous studies confirm that peers have a very powerful effect on how a child eats. Under the influence of those who share our childhood meals, we may eat faster or slower; take a bigger or smaller portion; eat breakfast or not. The effect is stronger if that person is closely related to us; stronger still if we love them.
Among female meerkats, new research shows, sisters use food as a form of competition. The socially dominant sister actively works to grab more calories and gain weight faster than her peers, to reinforce her position. In human sibling relationships, the competition over food is more warped and oblique, but no less real. I once met a cookbook publisher who said that she spent her childhood pretending to be a fussy eater, to emulate a much-respected older sister. It was only when she left home that she realised that many of the foods she had been shunning were actually delicious.
There’s a solidarity to how girls eat together – either we all have chips, or no one will! - which might be admirable if only it weren’t so self-defeating. In 2002, 415 pairs of Dutch siblings aged 13 to 16 were followed for a year and asked about how they ate in relation to each other. The most startling finding was that it was generally the older sisters who copied the way the younger ones ate, rather than the other way round, particularly when the younger girls ate in a disordered way. The researchers decided it must be because the older girls envied their pre-pubescent lack of curves.
Among teenage girls, dysfunctional eating can be a way to forge instant intimacy, quicker and more inclusive than talking about boyfriends or clothes. When E left for university, I begged to go to boarding school for sixth form. I couldn’t bear to sit at that table alone any more and I fantasised that if I left home, I might lose weight. But my new school friendships brought fresh complexities over food. In our boarding house kitchen, eating was a joint obsession, an unquenchable topic of conversation. I still compulsively gobbled toast in between homework and TV. But now others sat there, too, passing the peanut butter and jam.
We went on crazy diets together, trying to subsist on raw carrots and Müller Light yoghurts while subjecting ourselves to cruelly demanding exercise regimes. We would make absurd declarations of how much weight we planned to lose (2 stone! 3 stone! all the stone!). One of my friends calculated how many chocolate bars you could eat as part of a 1,000-calorie diet if you ate nothing else.
We skipped our main courses – waste of calories – and ate heaping bowls of custard instead. One girl told me that she took laxatives, so I tried those, too, my stomach contracting in agonising cramps. I felt weak and stupid. To cheer myself up, I went out and bought a restoring slab of chocolate fudge cake and another of brownie and a triangle of cheesecake and ate them all, one after the other.
At school, I had a new best friend, who ended up at the same university as me. Like my sister, she suffered from anorexia. Once more, I was the chubby one in the relationship; the normal one; the one who supposedly didn’t have a problem. Unlike my sister, my friend didn’t mind talking to me about her deep unhappiness with food – and other things – as she sat, pale and thin on the floor of her college room. This time, I felt I could help, although listening to her was also, selfishly, a way for me to play out my own obsession with food. I hung off her every word as she told me how upset she was when a boyfriend gave her a cup of tea and she could taste the greasy fat in it from a splash of whole milk. We went to the cinema, and whipped ourselves into shared paranoia that the person behind the counter had given us regular sugary Coke instead of Diet. In private, I still binged, and despised myself for it, but when I was with her, I tried to emulate her ways of eating. Unlike me, she was so beautiful and so thin.
We had evenings where we put on too much makeup and drank cocktails and smoked Marlboro Lights and ate nothing. On the occasions that she did eat, anything she chose took on a deep cachet. It was as if her food preferences held the secret of slimness, even though she was only making these choices from a state of deep mental distress. By today’s standards, what she permitted herself to eat as she recovered was carb-heavy and dull. Side by side, we ate baguette with no butter and baked potato with low-fat cottage cheese and pasta with tomato sauce (never cream) and forests of salad with not a scrap of dressing. And, always, Diet Coke, which seemed to wash away all our sins.
Looking back from a happier place, I can’t quite fathom the sheer brainpower we once squandered on food and weight: the tedious minutiae of poached salmon versus skinless chicken breast. I wish I could go back and show us how wonderful eating can be when you feel free to think more about flavour than nutrients. Our teenage selves should have seen the dinner we ate together last winter, as 40-year-old women. We would not have believed we could sit together, freely enjoying glossy olives and flatbreads and hummus and spicy chicken and chunks of aubergine and thick garlicky yoghurt and glasses of red wine and sticky almondy cake without keeping count of who had what.
The old warped way of eating seems – thankfully – distant to me now. I fell in love and over a period of months, if not years, I learned how to eat in a different, more balanced way. I discovered that you might sometimes eat salad for pleasure, rather than as a cure for your upper thighs or to copy the thinnest person at the table. I now can’t imagine wanting to go on a diet and it horrifies me when my daughter, aged 13, comes home and talks about girls at school who have nothing but a cake and a sugar-free fizzy drink for lunch (“Please, don’t get too close to these girls,” I think but do not say).
I never dreamed I would reach the point where I would be free of the nagging voice in my head telling me that I was disgusting because I had eaten pudding. Still less did I think I could choose what to eat based on my own desires, rather than what another female at the table was eating. At last, my appetite was my own.
Both E and my friend slowly recovered from anorexia. E’s 20s were hard but her 30s were better and she emailed me this week to say she doesn’t remotely feel “defined” by her eating any more. She moved to America and found a new life. When I visit her and her kids now – not as often as I’d like – I’m amazed by how easy it is to sit down and share food together. There’s a Vietnamese place near her house and we sometimes get vegetarian takeout and sit laughing and drinking white wine as her three girls squabble over who gets the last rice paper roll. I don’t even notice if she eats more or I do, but the main thing is we are together at her table, which is nothing like the one we grew up with. It’s round.
• Bee Wilson is the author of First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, published by Fourth Estate at £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99, visit the Guardian Bookshop.
- Comments will be pre-moderated because of the personal and sensitive nature of this piece.
