The Rebel Anorexia

Abstract

This piece navigates the tangled web of food, guilt, and identity through the lens of my lifelong struggle with anorexia and disordered eating. Born into a patriarchal household in South Korea, I recount early experiences of forced eating, misophonia triggered by my father’s unselfconscious table noises, and the simmering anger of a childhood shaped by unrelenting parental and societal expectations. These personal vignettes intertwine with reflections on contemporary food cultures, where guilt and anxiety now seem inseparable from the act of eating. During the inaugural Eating Disorders Awareness Week in 2023, audience members confessed their daily battles with food—orthorexic extremes, communal “guilty eating,” and the relentless pursuit of dietary perfection. Their stories revealed to me, long removed from mainstream food culture, the insidious ways in which communal and individual eating practices are shaped by a cycle of shame and compensation. Months later, at a Seoul International Food Film Festival panel for The Table for Two, I encountered a filmmaker’s unsettling question: could anorexia be the “right” response to today’s unhealthy food culture? Dumbfounded, I could feel the bone-deep hatred for our own bodies lingering in the air. Through these fragments, I examine the ambiguous territory of recovery—whether it is audacity, indifference, or something else entirely. Is anorexia merely pathology, or could it be rebellion against a world that demands too much? These reflections refuse easy answers, instead asking what it means to live with, and maybe beyond, the weight of such questions.