My big fat Italian grandmother

Diets are dreadful. Speaking from experience, dieting is damn near impossible for an Italian person. EVERY night my grandmother has a three course meal laid out on the kitchen table. Hot, fresh and irresistible.  Gluttony seems to be a virtue in my home. 

Not having an appetite during dinner time is NOT an option in an Italian household. Refuse food, and you better expect the entire family to glare at you. Refuse food once too often and you’ve got an intervention coming. 

At some point, during my senior year of high school, I decided to eat…. less. I didn't exactly care to loose weight, but everyone seemed to think anorexia was really cool or something, so I tried it. 

Not so cool. 

 After shedding a few pounds, my family took action. They cornered me like I was a criminal.

“You are taking diet pills aren’t you,” my crazy aunt shouted accusingly. This went on for a while. Eating was the only way to make it stop.  

No worries, I still got one of the skinniest guys in school. 

As a child I was quite the animal (and insect) lover, (I go through many phases).

When meal times rolled around, my family would laugh. “You’re not a vegetarian today,” my grandmother would say while throwing a meat dish at me. How horrifying for a young, innocent child.

I held them in such disdain for being so cruel.

As for my bizarre compassion for insects. Saving snails from the boiling sauce pan was a hobby of mine. I should have known better because in Sicily this was a crime... In Sicily everything is a crime.

 My family found my behavior absurd. How could I ever jeopardize their “lumache” dinner? "Stupid Americans," they would say. 

“The snails are so tasty,” my 12-year-old cousin Marilena would say while sucking the snail out of its shell, “Buonissimo.”

Where I come from, I am sure they do not know how to say vegetarian. 

Italian and vegetarian is like oil and water or Israel and Palestine.

One summer, my good friend Paula confided in me. Her father was selling my grandmother a rabbit! I cried, kicked, screamed and ran away to my 6th cousins house for the morning. They didn’t care; they ate the rabbit and told me about how good it was later.

I am no longer a vegetarian, but when I realized where that rabbit came from--my friend’s father’s farm--and that my friend’s father slaughtered the innocent animal, I became…traumatized and depressed.

Food is way too big of a deal for these people. I don’t even know how we are related.

Being a dancer you better expect most of your friends to have an eating disorder. The day I told my friend Annie I thought I had an eating disorder she laughed. I however, was very concerned about my supposed problem and on the verge of tears. I truly believed I was anorexic. 

“Your version of being anorexic is eating like a normal person,” she said. 

To my grandmother, I was sinning. And I’m still not sure who is right.