Such grim choices are—thankfully—far removed from our own dinner tables, where there is usually too much food to go around rather than not enough. When tables are laden—whether in India or the West—the family dynamic is no longer about who deserves to starve the most. Here, the unlucky child may be the one forced to play the role of the human dustbin, to make everyone else feel better about the leftovers they do not want to finish. We are certainly not counting out every grain of rice.
Yet the harsh parental choices described by Pande sound oddly familiar. My hunch is that this is because sibling competition for food is a central feature of the fairy stories we still read to get our children to sleep, or the Disney films we snuggle up to watch together on the sofa on rainy afternoons. We know that the Disney Snow White is a good, kind person because she shares out seven portions equally among the dwarves’ seven little bowls, with no holding back or favoritism.
Cinderella,
meanwhile, etches on our minds the thought of families where blood siblings are given more of everything than a neglected stepsister. In the original story,
Ashputtel
, the ball that she is prevented from attending is described
as a “feast.” By stopping her from going, the suggestion is that the dreadful stepsisters are preventing the heroine from eating as well as dancing.
The harrowing dilemma of how to feed multiple children in tough times is one of the main themes of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, first published in 1812 as
Children’s and Household Tales
. Much of the wickedness in the stories centers on stepmothers who are unwilling to give stepchildren as much food as they give themselves or their own children, if they have any. The story of Hansel and Gretel begins in a time of “great famine.” The stepmother is not truly bloodthirsty—like the witch in the gingerbread house—but she is still very selfish and afraid of dying. She wants to abandon the children in the forest because she fears that otherwise “all four of us will starve to death.”
In the conventional Freudian interpretation, wicked stepsisters and stepmothers are a fantasy. For the Freudians, a woman who outright starves her stepchildren could not possibly be real; she must be a nightmarish projection of the inner anxieties that children feel about being abandoned. Yet in a groundbreaking article published in 1981, the French historian Eugen Weber argued that fairy tales reflected the truth of life in eighteenth-century Europe: “hunger, poverty, death, danger, fear, chance.” To the peasants who first shared these folktales, the idea that you might be deprived of bread because you were valued less than a stepsibling was horribly real. “Given the mortality rates, especially of women in childbed,” wrote Weber, “wicked stepmothers were not a subject of fantasy any more than castout children.”
Viewed in this light, the experience of children in fairy tales is not unlike that of the two young siblings in the extraordinary Studio Ghibli anime film
Grave of the Fireflies
(1988), depicting the famine in Japan during World War II. When their mother dies, a brother and sister, Seita and Setsuko, are forced to try to survive on their own. An aunt takes them in, but she makes them feel unworthy of food at every mealtime, even though they have given her every scrap of food they had. The aunt resents them for not being old enough to work, like her own child. She blames them for not contributing to the household or to the national war effort. But we feel that the real root of her resentment over food is that these poor orphans are not quite closely related enough to her. The
scientist J. S. Haldane famously declared, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” In a famine, being vaguely related to the person who controls the food supply may not be enough.
Fairy tales are full of unlucky stepchildren being forced to live off moldy crusts. Sometimes—as in Hansel and Gretel’s case—the deprivation forces the siblings to become allies, to band together to find a better life. In Grimm’s “Brothers and Sisters,” a brother takes his sister by the hand and says that, since their stepmother beats them and feeds them “hard leftover crusts” that are worse than the morsels the dog gets, they must “go out into the world together.” When fairy-tale children seek their fortune, food is the main thing they are after.
Weber observed that when characters in fairy tales are granted three wishes, they tend to have modest ambitions: not world domination, mind control, or the ability to fly, but a life where they will never have to fight siblings or anyone else for food: “Above all they dream of food-pots that will cook endless porridge, tables or table-cloths that set themselves with meals.”
There is an old French folktale about a wonderful substance called “fairy bread.” This was a food so abundant it could never be eaten up, with the proviso that it must never be shared with strangers. As Weber put it, “generosity stopped at the family threshold.” The fairy-tale dream—the happily ever after—is to reach a state of abundance great enough that no parent is tempted to make cruel selections among the many mouths at the dinner table. In a house where the bread never runs out, stepsisters might be nothing to be feared. They might become your friends. Then your only worries would be about the truly evil monsters—the witches or ogres, the ones who want to eat
you
up.
There is one category of people, though, who have never had
to worry about siblings stealing the choicest morsels. The only child—or “singleton”—is freed from all those dinner-table squabbles. Those of us who were always in the shadow or shelter of another person often wonder if it would have been liberating to be the only small mouth at the table. How different life would be if you could blow out the candles on
your birthday cake in peace and quiet, without someone else breathing down your neck. Imagine never having to share your sweets. Chinese propaganda for the One-Child Policy, when it was first introduced in the 1970s, emphasized that only children would have a larger share of resources: the nation’s booty as well as that of the family. Freed from the “meaningless uproar” of many siblings, these children would be healthier, better educated, and better fed. That was the theory, anyway.
The contrasting negative stereotype about only children is that they are spoiled and self-centered. The wealthy businessman George Hearst (1820–1891) noted a certain selfishness in the eating habits of his son William Randolph, an only child who would go on to be one of the greatest newspapermen in the United States and the inspiration for the main character in
Citizen Kane
. “There’s one thing sure about my boy Bill. I’ve been watching him, and I notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake; and he wants it now. And I notice that after a while he gets his cake.”
This behavior probably had more to do with Hearst’s personality than the fact that he was an only child. Several large-scale studies of singletons have disputed the common assumption that a lack of siblings makes people socially maladjusted. Research suggests that “onlies” are very similar in their behavior and outlook to other children. As for the idea that they are bad at sharing food, Lauren Sandler, the author of
One and Only
, a celebration of being an only child, makes the point that only children may actually learn to share food more nicely than others: they are copying the behavior of adults, who have learned a bit of give and take, rather than modeling their behavior on an immature sibling.
Yet there are disadvantages to eating as an only child. In an affluent setting, having no siblings places you at a greater risk of childhood obesity. In one study, twice as many eleven-year-old only children were overweight as compared with children the same age with one or more siblings. Why? The obvious explanation is that they are given all the goodies. One adult who loved being an only child recalled the joy of waking up on Easter day and having twelve chocolate eggs and “only me and mother and father to eat them.” There are also signs that only children tend to get less exercise, without siblings to knock a ball around with.
But these are only tendencies, not rules. Depending on the family dynamic, almost all of the health negatives of being an “only” could become positives. Maybe you exercise more, not less, because your parents have more time to take you to sports clubs or to the park with a Frisbee. It is possible that you develop
better
eating habits, because your parents invest time each morning making you a healthy breakfast. Ultimately, each of us will never know whether we would have eaten differently with or without siblings.
Another question we will never know the answer to is how
different our mealtimes might have been if we had been born a different sex. Before I was born, my parents thought I would be a boy, called Gabriel. Would he have given rise to a different repertoire of family dinners? Would he have agonized less over what he ate? When my sister and I were at the height of our disordered eating, I sometimes wished we had a younger brother, someone for whom food could be a more straightforward affair, instead of an endless psychodrama. He would eat hearty meals of bacon and eggs and never worry about how the food was affecting his looks. I didn’t realize then that boys get eating disorders, too. Nor did I ever consider the possibility that a boy’s presence at the table might have created more psychodrama over food for the sisters rather than less.
It isn’t only among impoverished families in rural India that brothers are encouraged to eat more while sisters are made to feel they should have less. It happens in richer societies, too, the difference being that it is not classified as neglect but something that is good for the girls. Many girls pick up the message at home that their appetite is a problem, something that must be curtailed. We speak of “growing boys,” praising them for their manliness, but almost never of “growing girls.” Maybe it is because we are fearful and embarrassed by the way
girls’ bodies grow—outward as well as upward. Is it any wonder that some teenage girls try to eat like their prepubescent sisters?
In most ways, parents learn to stop interfering in their children’s eating habits as they get older. Once children have their own money, we can no longer view ourselves as the controller-general of snacks. We become
reacquainted with the pleasure of planning our own meals, without worrying that one child won’t eat it if it has pepper in it while another will complain if it doesn’t. In short, as our children grow up, we relax. The big exception is when parents think it is still their job to get a child, especially a girl, to lose weight, in which case the dietary pressure may continue and even intensify into adulthood.
I have sat at a table with grown-up children and their parents where a boy—in fact, a thirty-year-old man and not worryingly skinny—was told by his mother that he simply must have a second helping, because he needed it, while his sister was tutted for accepting a single potato. In 1970s working-class France, as described by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, such double standards were part of the culture. The rule was abundance for males and restriction for females; meat eaten in great gulps for men, salad and tiny nibbles for women. A boy’s path to manhood was marked by the privilege of being able to have your plate filled twice. A girl’s journey to womanhood instead was marked by self-denial. She must learn, like the other women, to share one portion between two, and stay on her feet serving the men, as they lolled in their chairs.
The original rationale for boys being encouraged to eat more than girls was the fact that men worked outside the home more than women, and needed plenty of food to perform their manual labor. This was not the case everywhere: among the leisured upper classes of Europe, it was sometimes seen as legitimate for girls rather than boys to overeat, because extra food would enhance their looks: think of the rounded white skin of the women in Paolo Veronese’s art in the sixteenth century, or the plump, pink arms of girls painted by Franç ois Boucher two hundred years later. Now, plumpness is associated with poverty, given that energy-dense, carb-heavy foods are generally much cheaper to buy than fresh, healthy produce. In former centuries, however, for a woman to look “well fed” was a sign of wealth, and, as the twisted logic went, of beauty. The French gastronome and philosopher of food Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of
The Physiology of Taste
(1825), felt sorry for women who were too thin, with the “pallor of illness,” and urged them to fatten themselves up on a rich diet with “plenty of bread,” hot chocolate, fresh eggs scrambled in butter, lots of meat, fish, and soup, “dishes made with
rice or macaroni,” and desserts of Savoy biscuits, babas and the like, and well-sweetened fruits and grapes. And beer.
Among the masses, beer belonged—and to a large extent, still belongs—to men, along with salty cheeses, salami, and second helpings. To be male was to eat with freedom and a sense of largesse. “It is part of men’s status to eat and to eat well,” noted Bourdieu, though this does not explain why women were not thought to need sustenance for all the work they did, serving, clearing, washing, and cooking. Women were supposed to be content with less, to have such “dainty” tastes that they did not even aspire to drink strong liquor and eat strong meat, but derived their satisfaction from seeing their brothers and fathers well fed. A man with a small appetite, meanwhile, or one repulsed by meat, was viewed as “suspect.”
From the 1980s onward, as more equal patterns of work emerged, this rationale for sisters eating less than brothers dropped away, to be replaced by a new ideology of slimness, which again dictated that they eat less. “If boys get fat they say it’s muscle,” an eleven-year-old girl told researchers conducting a survey of children’s eating habits in Europe, somewhat bitterly, in 1994. Girls are still supposed to be content with less than their brothers, and to take up less space around the table. The difference is that parents who pressure girls to slim down think they are doing them a favor, because they fear we live in a world where the consequences of being overweight are worse for girls than for boys. In this, they are not entirely wrong. A recent study in New York found a direct negative correlation between the extent to which women were overweight and their expected income, their ability to acquire a job, and even to have a fulfilling family life. None of these correlations held true for overweight men. Life was significantly worse for the overweight women than for their male counterparts. Interestingly, the researchers could not decide if this was because society really does discriminate against overweight women, or because they have lower self-esteem, which in turn leads to diffidence over applying for a job or a pay rise.