On my father’s birthday, my mother always makes fried bananas. I love them too: the sticky caramelized edges, the sweet warm center. My father makes ketimun snacks—crackers with peanut butter, cucumber slices, and spicy sambal. We eat kroepoek, the crunchy prawn crackers we kids love. We eat satay with peanut-coconut sauce and nasi and bami goreng, rice and noodles. As a child, I don’t know that these things aren’t Dutch, and that I am getting Indonesian culture mixed in with my already muddled identity growing up in the United States with Dutch parents. Some days we eat pannekoeken, thick Dutch crepes rolled up with bacon and Gouda cheese or stroop, a thick, dark sugarcane syrup. My mother is an expert pannekoeken chef. She fries them in butter until they are perfectly browned and bubbled on one side, then flips them over to brown the other side before sliding them out of the pan onto the stack that she keeps warm under a tea towel. For me, pannekoeken are the ultimate comfort food, greasy and crisp at the edges, breathing the familiar breath of Holland into my face. Food is part of my cultural identity and inheritance. The power of food in my life is learned, as much as my tortured interaction with it is learned. More than perhaps anything else, the influence of my parents’ war trauma on my family’s behavior around food seems clear. In the camps and during the Hunger Winter, food was a constant focus and source of anxiety for both my parents. War robbed them of this most basic necessity for life at one time; now food would become imbued with all sorts of power in our home.
My relationship with food is and has always been fraught. This is predictable, I think, given both my gender and the cards my family was dealt. With the exception of my brother, I think every member of my family has a dysfunctional relationship with food. As a three-year-old, my little sister goes into a full-scale meltdown when any food on the table is nearly finished. “Niet opmaken!” she yells in her tiny voice, panicking whenever someone reaches for a half-empty jar of jam or the last piece of bread. “Don’t finish it!” If the food item is indeed finished, she dissolves into an inconsolable, sobbing mess. It’s amazing to me now how early we learn nonverbal cues, absorb invisible anxieties, inherit the traumas of our parents, even when none of us realize that it is happening. How does a three-year-old learn such extreme anxiety over the prospect of running out of food in a house where there are two refrigerators stuffed full of it, one in the kitchen and one in the garage? Perhaps it’s from seeing the urgency with which those refrigerators are stuffed. When I am seven, I tell my mother that I love ketchup, and she tells me about the time she got a little tube of mayonnaise all for herself, and how she loved to go into a corner and squeeze a small dollop onto her finger, rationing the mayonnaise out over weeks. She buys me a bottle of ketchup for my birthday and I do the same as my mother, sitting in a corner of the kitchen with a tiny egg cup filled with ketchup, feeling special and bonded with her. As when she remembers the soft-boiled egg she ate on weekends away from the orphanage, or when she emphasizes how special getting real butter is, she fetishizes the lack of food. “The best treat in the world is getting the leftover rice after dinner and putting butter and brown sugar on it,” she says. “We never had dessert in my family, and butter was so rare. I loved that so much.” Later, when I am eight years old, she tapes a diet to my bedroom wall because I have grown a bit chubby. “If you get hungry, drink a glass of water,” she says. We aren’t allowed any fancy snacks. For years, I fantasize about getting a fruit roll-up or a cookie in my lunch like my friends, but I get only half a sandwich and a piece of fruit.
My father always wolfs down his food at the table, then hiccups for several minutes. I imagine this is the way he learned to eat in the camp—the kind of eating that starved animals do. After dinner, he puts the leftovers into Tupperware, and I see him scoop hasty spoonfuls of macaroni or mashed potatoes into his mouth when he thinks we aren’t looking, hunched over the counter protectively. I know this stance, because I’ve learned it too. Eating like we’re shoplifting. When food has spoiled, my mother has to flush it down the toilet to stop my father from pulling it back out of the garbage to inspect it. His standards are significantly lower than ours. I watch him cutting blue fuzz off of crusty bits of cheese that he fishes out of the garbage while chastising us. “You guys are so wasteful. If you cut this little bit of mold off, it’s totally edible. Look at this. This is still perfectly good!” Perfectly good. He eats the hard pieces of post-surgery cheese just to show us how perfectly good it is, even though he just ate a meal and doesn’t particularly like the cheese. This is how I learned to live with food, day in and day out.
Pacific Palisades, California, 1983
We have rabbits growing up in Pacific Palisades. First we have two rabbits. Then my little sister lets them out of their cages at the same time, and soon we have eight rabbits, then twelve. We can’t give the rabbits away fast enough. My sister likes to watch the male rabbit run around the yard after the females, and she keeps opening our painted “Bunny Hilton” hutch before my mother can stop her. So we have a lot of rabbits. At some point, my mother discovers that the supermarket in the center of our small community throws away boxes full of produce every day. So after doing our grocery shopping inside the store, she starts pulling our green Volvo station wagon around the back to their giant Dumpsters. I always slump down low, beneath the window, when she walks brazenly up the ramp to grab crates of wilted lettuce or carrots off the top of the Dumpster, certain one of my school friends will pass by in their movie-star parents’ Mercedes-Benz and spot us, and that will be the end of my social life. But it gets more embarrassing than that. One day, my mother spots a box of canned peaches in the Dumpster. The labels are torn, but the cans are intact, so she takes those home too. Then a box of twelve ketchup bottles with only one broken bottle makes its way home with us. And that’s how it becomes routine for my mom to climb into the Dumpsters behind the grocery store in one of the most upper-crust neighborhoods in America to root around for several minutes while I hide, knowing it is futile to try to be inconspicuous in our very distinctive mint-green car.
I am half embarrassed but, oddly, also proud sharing this anecdote now. I want to see this aspect of my parents’ war trauma as not all bad. On the one hand, I am certain that this hoarding relationship to food contributed to some complex issues and the inherited “Don’t finish it!” anxiety my sister and I both have. On the other hand, as a grown woman removed from the privileged community in which I was raised, I am grateful for the lessons in humility that I might have otherwise missed. After all, my irrational fear of there “not being enough” comes from a real fear my parents once felt, a fear based in experiences. And while this fear is the source of some of my dysfunction, I don’t want to forget my gratitude that there is enough, and that it isn’t something to take for granted.
Some studies have shown that there is a prevalence of eating disorders in the offspring of concentration camp survivors, and I am intrigued by these studies. In one 2004 study in the European Eating Disorders Review, out of eleven adult offspring of concentration camp survivors who were interviewed in the admittedly narrow study, ten had eating disorders, and they reported eating disorders in twelve of their seventeen siblings. While that’s admittedly a very small study group, I am both alarmed and soothed by that astounding ratio if it can be extrapolated to the broader population. I wonder why more studies have not been conducted on this subject, and whether any behavior can be attributed to nature or nurture. Is disordered eating in my siblings and me a result of my parents’ behavior around food, is it a result of societal pressures, or could it have to do with epigenetics, a fairly new, controversial, and inconclusive area of study? I find that I want some sort of scientific explanation for why I struggle against my damaging relationship with food.
Per epigenetic researchers, it is theoretically possible that my father’s starvation literally stays in his body and is imprinted on my genes, according to their studies of offspring of concentration camp victims and survivors of the Dutch Hunger Winter. If that turns out to be the case, it would mean I am set up to be susceptible to these issues by a toxic mix of history, physiology, and psychology, but to my mind, it also means there is a physical explanation for some of my problems. My sister and I both struggled with eating disorders in our teenage years and into young adulthood, and have a conflicted relationship with food to this day. As a teen, my sister restricts her food, counting fat grams in everything that passes her lips. I binge and purge, food soothing my anxiety momentarily, then filling me with guilt, causing me to vomit it up for absolution. When I am in my twenties, I can’t bear for people to see me eat. I don’t feel I deserve to eat and believe people will judge me if they see me eating. I buy a yogurt on the way to class because I haven’t eaten lunch and I am running late. As I open it, I see people I know approaching, and I panic, dumping the uneaten container, completely full, in the garbage. The yogurt sits there, taunting me from afar as my stomach growls during class.
Now I can eat in front of people, but it is still with a sense of shame. I imagine that people think I don’t deserve to eat anything. Only when I am alone do I feel relaxed when I eat. I no longer purge, but I cannot have large quantities of food in my house when I am alone. An open bag of chips, for example, causes intense anxiety. I spend hours with therapists trying to figure out the source of this anxiety. There is a voice inside of me that tells me that a bag of chips—or any opened package of food in my cupboard or fridge—needs to be eaten immediately because it might be gone later. In an irrational paradox, it’s a mirror emotion to my three-year-old sister’s “Don’t finish it,” something along the lines of “Finish it now” so I don’t have to live with the building anxiety about finishing it. Is there any proof that my food issues exist solely because of our parents’ war trauma? No. There are millions of girls with eating disorders whose parents do not have war trauma, especially in the wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles, where I made extra cash swimming as a background extra on episodes of Baywatch as a teen and watched famous supermodels and actresses walk around the grocery store. But I know the charge around food in our household has something to do with my relationship to eating and self-worth, and I know that charge is strongly influenced by my parents’ experiences during the war.
In the end, I am left with more questions than answers as I go down the rabbit hole of epigenetics, psychological studies, and the evergreen debate about nature vs. nurture, but I do seize upon a few lines in an article about a 2015 Biological Psychology study on Holocaust survivors’ children that demonstrates “an association of preconception parental trauma with epigenetic alterations that is evident in both exposed parent and offspring, providing potential insight into how severe psychophysiological trauma can have intergenerational effects.” The journal’s editor, John Krystal, states, “Holocaust survivors had 10 percent higher methylation than the control parents, while the Holocaust offspring had 7.7 percent lower methylation than the control offspring. The observation that the changes in parent and child are in opposing directions suggests that children of traumatized parents are not simply born with a PTSD-like biology. They may inherit traits that promote resilience as well as vulnerability.” I hold on to this last possibility, as I do to another epigenetic study I hear about on the radio, in which grandchildren of starvation victims actually have more resilient genes in some areas. Maybe trauma is like a vaccine, and the bodies of the future generations can learn to protect themselves.