According to a recent Deloitte study, over 70 million people today have an eating disorder. There are almost certainly millions more who are restricting their food intake in some way. So embedded is the idea of ‘thinness’ as beauty in our culture that from early childhood women are conditioned to think of the human body’s natural appetite—not just for food but for space, power, and desire in general—as gross and inappropriate.  Jewish traditions are often built around meals that reference persecution – such as the seder where foods are eaten to call to mind hardships. A Dangerous Daughter is fiction but it’s based on Dina Davis’ own experiences with anorexia that include many of the damaging mis-treatments that the protagonist of the book, Ivy, experiences.  Like many people, Ivy is encouraged to think of the abundance of food in her life as a privilege against the starvation that others continue […]

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