Comic Thoughts: She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat (v1-3)
I picked up the first three volumes in the library because I was bored. My sister had borrowed at least one volume of it before and had mentioned to me in passing, but I wasn't that interested in it because I'm not a huge food manga person and the art just looked so-so to me from the cover. (The fact that the legs were wayyyyy too long on the volume 1 cover was bothering me to no end as a proportions freak.) I was expecting a kind of boring slice of life but Yuri, and man am I bored of boring Yuri. But most of the boring Yuri in the world is schoolgirl Class S stuff, so it was probably wrong of me to assume.
I started crying in volume 2 and 3 of this series.
Yeah, yeah, food manga, everyone loves cooking and everyone loves eating, or so it goes. Except this manga bothered to talk about people who don't eat that much, or who have trauma related to eating due to abusive families. It bothered to talk about messages we learn from eating with our families and whether we feel cared for or not. About all the expectations that come with food, with how you eat, how much you eat, whether you're expected to cook, and for whom along gendered lines, and from multiple directions.
Typically when people include complex feelings about food it's eating disorders that are related to wanting to be attractive. None of the cases in this manga follow that script, and it actively abhors the idea of having to exist for someone else's pleasure and focuses on personal choice. In fact, in volume 3, I thought the point might be to get this neighbor, who either has a lot of food sensitivities or an eating disorder, to eat more, but it underlined that the foremost thing is to be accepting of other people's needs. I think she probably will start eating a little bit more as the series goes on, but it'll be of her own choice and because she feels safe, rather than because someone cooked up the perfect dish that would finally Fix her nausea-at-eating reaction.
Volume 2 and 3 also went into sexual minorities, and Nomoto's initial issues of trying to search up "lesbian" and getting lesbian porn (augh! real). Asexuality and its spectrum was mentioned, and one of the characters explicitly calls herself a lesbian and asexual. wowz. And the whole thing about how unfair it is to have the things you do assumed to be for men and the expectation that you'll center men in your life -- if not now, eventually -- is so fucking real. I'm really excited to see Nomoto and Kasuga get together... will have to borrow more volumes from the library to show my support.
Meanwhile, Kasuga, who is heavier set1, is actually implied to be fatter now specifically because she can eat the way she wants to. So for her being heavier is directly correlated to her happiness and being her own person, rather than her thinner, younger self, who was starved by her parents at home due to misogynistic practices. That, and the copious panels of her eating are actually seen as specifically a good and cute thing (to Nomoto), and she's not even doing anything particularly cute when she's eating. She's downright wolfing that stuff down with mostly a poker face.2 This is the first time I've seen Getting Heavier = Happier for a woman in fiction, and it relies entirely on the reader to pick it up and put it together. Well played.
The tough family stuff made me cry, which was to be expected, but something that I didn't see coming was me crying over Nomoto actively appreciating and loving Kasuga's voracious appetite -- that this was something that was actively discouraged by Kasuga's family, but here was someone who really, really loved this about her. It was a reaction I didn't expect to have in myself because it wasn't even like Kasuga burst out crying or anything (poker face that she has), but because I realized that I also have hang ups on food that I've just been dealing with.
I hate cooking. I'm not good at cooking. My mom is not good at cooking either; my dad was far better. Growing up and living with one of them at a time, having to eat my mom's food sucked. It sucked when she left eggshells in the food because she was distracted, it sucked how the stuff she cooked had weird flavors. It sucked that basically all of her sisters fucking sucked at cooking too. I could not, and still cannot, relate to when people talk about how their moms cook the best dishes and how it's a vital part of their cultural belonging. But I didn't take any responsibility for this as a kid or teen; it's not like I started cooking to make up for it. Now that I am cooking for myself, I can only make passable meals by basically using the Instapot. I've always sucked with timing and the controlling of moisture and heat when it came to stovetop cooking. I cannot even make a non-soggy fried rice. Now the Instapot basically takes care of stew-like things for me and I rotate like 5 recipes, but there's three major things that are making things harder for me:
Because I don't like cooking, I don't want to cook more than I have to. The groceries have to all be used or else I'll forget to use them and they'll go bad. This means I have to cook double the portions and then I'm stuck with the same dish for basically a week, which gets tiring. We do not have like any freezer space.
I eat a lot, and I have a bigger appetite than anyone else who lives with me. So the double portions help with this, but this also means that, even with the double portions, I go through food faster than I would like, and that means I have to cook again or eat frozen food. (There isn't a lot of good frozen food selection at my nearest grocery store and I'm afraid of driving... And walking to get more of that stuff when I don't even have freezer space, it's... ugh. Frozen food portions are also usually too small. I want them to be like 1000+ calories but they're often something like 600.)
Because I'm aware that agricultural farming of meat is a substantial part of carbon emissions, I now cook meatless (even though I still eat meat with other people, partly because I don't feel like I have tasty food at home so I want to have something that is actually Tasty when I go out). This means I have to basically prep and eat a lot of tofu, which naturally has a lot of water content and makes the flavors worse if you don't bother to do stuff like pressing it or pouring boiling water over it... God that's so much work. I barely even could remember to marinate when I was cooking with meat. Nuts and beans are not good enough tasting to me for me to eat a lot of that. (Beans are also nowhere as filling for as long; I've tried.) I don't know where the heck you get stuff like seitan but I bet it's not cheap. I do eat eggs still but I limit that to only when I'm making ramen or instant noodle stuff because I need protein and opening up a whole package of tofu I have to prepare is just too much.
I don't like my appetite.
I don't like that I have to eat more than other people, and I don't like how all my friends who are my age now (almost to 30) have had their metabolisms slow down and don't eat as much as me. I don't like how it feels like I have to take up more space in this realm, I don't like how much work it takes, and I don't like the fact that I need so much to sustain myself when it's not like I even work out. Other people work out more than me and eat less calories, or at least that's how it feels. I've thought that it's possible that it just looks like I eat more because I can never wake up in time for breakfast, yet when I go out with my sister and her partner I'm always eating the most, even on days they don't have breakfast either. And they're actually going to the gym and stuff! What the fuck is going on with me??
My current theory is that I'm burning all the calories by being mentally unwell. Like it takes so much to put up with my anxiety and depression and self-hatred and whatever else. And I don't even get good sleep so it probably has to make up for that, too. People are supposed to hit a slowdown when they're nearing 30, or sometime after that. I do eat a liiiittle bit less now than I did a decade ago, but not enough less for it to make a substantial difference on how much I have to cook.
I hate that when we go out to eat, my sister has to ask me whether I had enough. I hate that one time, years ago, I asked if I could eat something and my sister's partner immediately said yes, but please don't eat everything because you can be a monster sometimes. He immediately apologized. I said it was okay. It was not okay. It was not okay because I know that they do believe this about me, even if it's just a little bit and it probably only came out because he was frustrated about something else. Even that little bit bothers me. It bothers me because I cannot stop thinking, while this isn't a big deal, if I could eat less I would be more convenient for other people. I also feel shame for not realizing that I should've been leaving more food for people before, also. This ultimately just loops back around to my issues about taking up space, but I really didn't think too much about it until reading this comic because I feel like I had just accepted that I'm a monster at eating and all of the calories are disappearing on things that other people wouldn't have to use them on. (Though, honestly, I have no idea if I'm that far to the side of the bell curve on this. Probably not, but it just feels that way.)
Even the 10-15 pounds I've gained since I was in high school don't make me feel good. They don't make me feel bad, per se, because I thought I was way too thin in high school to begin with, but as someone who is always aware of how people might be perceiving me, I always have conflicting feelings on my appearance, too. Like, I don't want to look attractive so I mostly don't bother, but then I'm aware that other people are judging me because I don't put in the effort when I'm read as a woman, and that makes me paranoid. Similarly, I'm fine with my weight and existing in the body that I am and prefer this to my high school days, but at the same time I'm aware that this would be perceived worse by other people so I can't feel completely safe with my decision. I hate how looks-oriented our global culture is, especially as it's outright discriminatory and ableist and all of that, but at the same time, when I'm aware of how I'm not "optimal", I feel less safe because I'm anticipating the rejection. And it feels like I don't have enough other "points" to make up for it, such as imagined points I would get for if I was actually a proper working person who didn't have all these emotional problems.
So seeing Nomoto accept Kasuga and actively love her for her appetite makes me cry. I didn't realize it before, but I want to feel accepted for how I eat, too. I wish someone appreciated how much I eat. I want to feel accepted for being as I am, imperfect as I am. I wish I could take up space. I wish I was resilient and true to myself. I wish I had the material means to chart my own path and eat what I want and not have to do the hard parts of cooking and live where and how I want and sleep how I want and exist outside of the realm of normal.
I wish I was happy.
Anyway, it's a good Yuri. 10/10. Though I've currently rated the volumes 4.75/5 on Storygraph, I expect to be rating this 5/5 for future volumes.
Though probably still in the "small fat" category, which made me a bit cynical because I was just thinking, "This is the fattest animanga will accept in a woman," but it's really nice that Yuzaki actually bothers to draw the double chin from the side view. Though they could stand to draw it from the front, too.↩
In fact, in volume 1 I started wondering whether the mangaka had a teeth fetish or something, because there were so many panels of the tops of the gums being visible as Kasuga bit down that it was making me uncomfortable, especially from angles where that shouldn't have been visible since the lips would cover it. It's just kind of weird to me to even see teeth be detailed like that when they have anime faces that don't also detail stuff like noses strongly. This problem mostly went away in the next two volumes so I think it's more of not knowing how to diversify the eating panels as much in the beginning.
There's also one sequence of Kasuga biting down that has two panels of virtually the same thing that bothered me on a nitpicky way because I didn't process it as two separate bites without one of the panels having an open mouth before the bite down...↩