I'm an urban gal through and through despite the fact I grew up on Vancouver Island. Growing up on a island is not that similar to growing up in a big sprawling suburb. Island folk can have a bit of an eccentric edge that suburban folks might look at as just plain weird. So I might have evolved into a city gal but I still came from a unique edge of the world ripe with twisted experiences.
I recently ventured outside my normal geographical range to try something new and it was clear very quickly that many urban suburban stereotypes can often hold true. I'm not saying always but often. Of course, there are some city folk who act like burb folk and vice versa. I'm treading on delicate territory in this post. I don't want to come across as geographically prejudice. I'm just saying there is something valid about emotional geography, an emerging discipline in the field of geography.
What is emotional geography?
The study of the location of emotions in both bodies and places; the emotional relations between people and environments; and the task of representing emotional geographies.. Emotional geography has ‘a common concern with the spatiality and temporality of emotions, with the way they coalesce around and within certain places. One of its central themes is the examination of how feelings mediate both our conscious and unconscious behaviours in the places where we live out, or ‘enact’, our lives
Now let me intro the Hungry Girl.
LISA LILLIEN, the Internet weight-loss goddess also known as Hungry Girl, is into French manicures and Brazilian hair straightening. But her palate is American to the core, right down to its weakness for a signature dish served at Planet Hollywood restaurants.
Almost a million people subscribe to Ms. Lillien’s free daily e-mail newsletter, putting her among the most influential figures in what digital marketers call “the diet space.” The e-mail message, liberally sprinkled with exclamation points, OMG’s and BTW’s, is a mashup of advice and opinion on how to consume as few calories as possible while filling up on approximations of pizza, Buffalo wings, fettuccine Alfredo, Slim Jims, Fritos and vanilla pudding.
Ms. Lillien, 44, describes herself as a noncook, but her last two cookbooks, “Hungry Girl 1-2-3” (2010) and “Hungry Girl 200 Under 200” (2009), both published by St. Martin’s Press, nonetheless debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list for advice and how-to books. Fit but not skinny, short and dark-haired, she looks like thousands of other women in the tristate area, only with better biceps (she has a trainer in Los Angeles, where she lives) and more than 200,000 Facebook fans.
Ms. Lillien has been criticized for advocating a path to weight loss that is slippery with Cool Whip Lite, onion soup mix and other foods of debatable nutritional value. She says that the recipes reflect the reality of what American women eat, sometimes despite their best intentions. “I live in the middle of the supermarket,” she said: the aisles that are stocked with packaged processed foods, many of which are loathed by locavores and nutritionists alike.
Taken from New York Times Well Blog
So clearly her diet and weight loss advice resonates with many people. Any urbanites know anyone who use onion soup mix for anything? I mean, my mom used to use it for chip dip when we were kids. But I thought as a culture we had moved passed any kind of soup mix as a staple. Planet Hollywood is like armagedon to me, not a place I can't wait to go and indulge.
Perhaps Hungry Girl's followers are folks I don't understand that well AKA suburbanites or middle Americans that probably think my tattoos are tacky and my favourite films 'too out there'. Maybe emotional geography can help us understand the huge cultural divide in how we choose to eat, how we choose to lose weight and quite frankly what foods are worth a little extra hard work out to earn.
The cheese cave and wine list at Enoteca Sociale makes me want to sweat a little harder. I can go without the Fritos.
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