The Burnt Toast Podcast

• "SNAP Is The Perfect Target for MAHA."

  You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Rachel Cahill, a longtime anti-hunger policy advocate based in Ohio. Rachel and her team support national and state-level organizations fighting every day to end hunger and poverty in the United States. Most of her work focuses on making SNAP (the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) the most effective, accessible and equitable program it can be in every community. JICYMI: When the federal government shut down this fall, it closed SNAP for the first time in the history of the program, pausing benefits for much of November. Benefits are up and running again in most places, but this has had major ripple effects on the state of hunger in our country right now. And it's led to a lot of long-term questions about what we do to prevent that ever happening again. Rachel knows more about the ins and outs of SNAP, and anti-hunger advocacy, than anyone I know, so I asked her to come on the podcast to explain what's happening, and what we can do to help fight hunger. We also talk quite a bit about how to give strategically because it is that time of year when a lot of us want to do charitable giving. Which is great! But there are good and less good ways to do that. Burnt Toast is a community of helpers, and I think this conversation will help us all be better at helping. If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work! Join Burnt Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 222 TranscriptRachelI am a SNAP advocate. That's how I think of myself. That's my identity. I live in Ohio, and I have been working on SNAP, and the food assistance programs that are connected to SNAP, for almost 20 years. I started working on it in Philly, and have now worked in a number of different states. My passion is to protect our food assistance programs that help families meet their basic needs. If we had something better than SNAP in this country, honestly, I would work on that. But because SNAP reaches 42 million Americans, and it's the best safety net we have, that's the program that I've committed to working on. I do policy, advocacy, administrative, legislative—wherever we can fight for the program, we are doing that.VirginiaIt's incredible. I should disclose that we have a personal connection. I first met you, I guess, 20 years ago? When you were in college, you were a student of my stepmother, Mary Summers, who has also been on the podcast.RachelActually, I was a fresh out of college working in the community at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. And Mary had students who she placed with us in a service learning program. Mary was one of my first and still mentors, who has supported me in lots of different ways through this career. And I think you did some interviews with Witnesses to Hunger? I worked on that program many years ago. So yeah, we've evolved a lot, Virginia, since those days.VirginiaYes! When I was researching my first book, The Eating Instinct, you helped connect me with folks for interviews. Rachel and I go way back in a shared advocacy spirit, sort of way so I just wanted to give people that backstory. And so I emailed you a few weeks ago to say, Rachel, help! Please come on the podcast. This was when the government was shut down and it had triggered the freeze on November SNAP benefits. At that point, everybody was scrambling, and I knew you were doing the most scrambling.  Of course, because of politics, the shutdown is now over. SNAP benefits are once again being distributed, for now anyway. But that is not to say that hunger has been solved in this country, or that the 42 million Americans who rely on that program are just totally okay now. You were like, "Do you still want to have this conversation?" And I was like, well, yes, because people are still going hungry! RachelYeah, thanks for the chance to talk about this! In the 20 years I've been working on food stamps, there has never been a moment I remember where SNAP dominated the headlines for two weeks straight. So on the one hand, I'm trying to see the silver lining in this massive drama to say it's a chance to educate everybody, including your listeners, about what the SNAP program is. It has been this quiet backbone program, running and feeding communities for almost 60, years. And during the shutdown, SNAP essentially got used as leverage for both parties to bludgeon each other with and blame each other for starving the citizens of the United States. It's unprecedented. I feel like that's an overused word these days, but this truly has never happened before. SNAP benefits stopped going out across the entire country. And the emergency food system—the food pantries, the soup kitchens, the food banks —was never meant, or equipped, to be able to overnight replace what SNAP is is doing in the community.Just in my home state of Ohio, we're talking about $263 million a month that goes out in SNAP benefits. No fundraiser for a food bank was ever going to come close to replacing that. It was a crisis. It was an absolute crisis that we were facing. So starting on November 1, people's benefits were frozen. They still had to complete renewal paperwork. They still had to comply with work requirements. But people weren't getting their benefits delivered. And then it turned into a Supreme Court battle. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court because the administration actually did have money available that they could have spent, and they were choosing not to spend it on the program that it was dedicated for. So finally, when the shutdown ended, the benefits slowly started flowing again. We're recording this on November 25 and in a few states, all the benefits still have not gone out. So there are still families who are supposed to get their benefits maybe the beginning of November, and are still waiting. The long-term harm of this is hard to overstate. The definition of food insecurity is not knowing where your next meal is going to come from. And we just traumatized 40 million people who did not know where their next meal was going to come from. 40 percent of SNAP recipients are children. Their bodies and brains are going to remember this trauma that they just went through, and it's going to be a long time before we can repair that harm. We need to make sure that this type of a crisis never happens again, and Congress is never in a position where they can hold SNAP benefits hostage, even in a future government shutdown. VirginiaI've been thinking about the juggling act that this triggered for so many families. If you relied on SNAP to cover groceries, that meant you could use other income to cover childcare or pay a utility bill. So we're also going to see folks having fallen behind on other bills. Maybe they're unable to make a car payment, which then impacts their ability to get to work, to get kids to school, so many different things.RachelThere's a saying that poverty charges interest. You might only have gotten $200 from that SNAP benefit, which supplements your work income. But if you're now having to put a bill on a short term loan or credit card and you're paying 20 or 30 percent interest on that because you waited three weeks...How long is it going to take families to dig out of that hole? We hear all the time about utility shut-offs, all the time about evictions that get connected to a small change in household income, including the loss of SNAP benefits. Now I will say, because we have made SNAP such a difficult system to navigate and renew benefits, even if the government never shuts down again, this uncertainty where your benefits disappear, you go to the grocery line to checkout and you find out that your benefits aren't there because of some paperwork mishap—that actually does happen a lot in families' lives. There's a lot we have to do longterm to make this a more stable program for everybody who's experiencing the instability of food insecurity. But this was certainly a crisis moment where it was hitting everybody at the same time.VirginiaSay a little more about that. Because for those of us who are mostly just seeing headlines, it's like, Okay, the government reopened. Okay, the SNAP benefits are back. But this is a system that was already not meeting the need. So what are some other ways SNAP struggles to support families?RachelFirst, let me just remind folks who don't know, if you've never been connected to the program: SNAP is a very modest food benefit. It is on an EBT card, like a little debit card, that is loaded every month with money for groceries. But it's the equivalent of, like, $6 a day on average. It is about as much as most people spend on a cup of coffee. It is not a generous benefit. There's a lot of misconceptions about what SNAP is. It's a very modest benefit you can only use for grocery items. The program—for as great as it is, and it's the best thing we have—has a history of exclusionary policy making. Certain groups have gotten excluded and carved out over time. And HR1, the big bill that passed July 4, really took a sledgehammer to SNAP, too. It cut almost $200 billion out of the program and did some additional exclusionary policy making, the impacts of which we're just starting to feel. So I put the barriers to SNAP in two buckets. There are eligibility barriers, meaning the people that policy makers intentionally exclude from the program. This includes groups like legally present immigrants. It includes people who are forced to prove that they are working over and over again, and if they can't provide the paperwork proving it, then they get kicked out of the program. So there is exclusionary policy making that has to be tackled at a legislative law making level. Then there's all this other stuff, which is most of what I've worked on for 20 years, and what I worked on with Mary twenty years ago. These are the kind of the administrative barriers that people face in tackling the program. Application forms that are 40 pages long, that ask extremely intrusive questions, asking for tons of verification. You have to do a full interview with a case worker, you have to renew your benefits at least every six months. All of these hoops are built up in the program to make people jump through, and that often keeps the folks most in need of benefits from accessing them. Not because they're not eligible, not because they don't need them, but because they just give up when the program is too hard to access. So we do a lot of work at the county and state level, state by state, red, blue, purple states to try to tackle some of those administrative barriers.VirginiaIt is wild that we think people need to work to have the right to buy food. And that we think people need to fill out 40 pages of paperwork just so you can buy groceries this week. RachelIn a number of states that have asset tests, you're asked for bank statements. You're asked for a copy of your rent receipt, your child care bills, how much do you spend on utilities every month? Applying for SNAP is harder than getting a house loan. It's harder than getting a business loan. It's harder than almost anything else, but that is the way the program was built. And there continues to be this persistent stigma or this narrative about unworthiness that has persisted in the program is so disconnected from reality. I'm hoping having this spotlight on SNAP, where we dominated the headlines for two weeks, does give a moment for people to take a second look at the program, really learn about what it is and start to fight for it. If you survey the American people, 90 percent of people, regardless of their political affiliation, will tell you that they think we should be doing more to help people meet their basic needs and pay for groceries, not less. But that doesn't match with what's happening legislatively in Congress. So we need people to know more about this program so that they feel like they have a stake in it. And I guess I just can't stop myself from saying one more thing: SNAP is so critical to our actual economy. One of the things that happened in the beginning of the shutdown is it wasn't just the folks losing that groceries on their table, it was the grocery stores they shop at, which, all of a sudden were saying, We have no customers, because 30 percent of our receipts come from SNAP and no one's shopping right now. I had a local store here in a rural part of Ohio which started laying people off immediately. Because they didn't know when those receipts were going to come in, and they don't have enough of a margin to be able to maintain their store without the program. So if we want our grocery stores to continue to exist and be in all parts of the country, we need SNAP. As that lifeline too.VirginiaWe agree we should be doing more to feed kids. We agree we should be doing more so that people don't go hungry. And yet, the program is built with so many barriers. And that's because there's this way we feel really good about fighting hunger—and it isn't the way that actually fights hunger.RachelI'll say two things to this. Because of the history of exclusionary policy making in SNAP, there is always going to be the need for charitable giving. And there's always going to be, I think, the need for a wraparound system that provides food in real time, today, for anybody who needs it. That's what the best food pantries and soup kitchens provide: No questions asked, walk in the door, get food today. But that doesn't solve the long-term problem. So while we are always going to need that, I think the reason there's this mismatch is this misconception about who benefits from SNAP. So, if you asked those same 90 percent of people who they think the most common person on SNAP is, they would say, "It's a 30 year old in their basement playing video games." It's the same stereotype and tropes about health care, about who benefits from the safety net. There's this misconception that there are people who aren't pulling their weight in society, and that's who's benefiting from these programs. But if you actually look at the programs, most people getting SNAP are elderly, retired, they're people with disabilities, they are children, and they're working parents. They are parents working sometimes two or three jobs, but in low wage work that requires the supplement of a SNAP program. This group of "non-working but capable people" that people imagine are benefiting from the program is a fantasy. And it's intentionally used by politicians who want to attack the program. That goes back to Reagan and before, right? It's a long political strategy that we have in this country. I've been really grateful in my career to see even the food banks and the rest of the charitable sector has come a long way in talking about SNAP as an integral part of feeding the community. Feeding America is a big association of food banks. And they will say: SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal that a food bank can provide. So I think the solution is not to say, "Is it charitable giving or SNAP that solves this problem?" It's actually the blend of the two that's going to make our community's food secure.VirginiaThere's a bit of moralizing, I think, that goes into this. People feel good about giving to a canned food drive, but not necessarily good about voting for policies that would protect SNAP. And with RFK and MAHA taking over the rhetoric around all of this, is that leading to even more policing about what people can spend SNAP benefits on, and what kinds of food we want people to have access to?RachelI'm going to first tackle the voting question. I think that very few people ever vote based on their beliefs or policy preferences around SNAP. I've yet to see a major political campaign where SNAP was a top issue that got talked about. That might change after the shutdown. We did see a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle come out in defense of SNAP when the shutdown started, and that was, I hope, a jumping off point for people to actually vote. But I think there's this disconnect. I think there's a lot of bipartisan agreement here that we don't see. When you think about folks who are anti-SNAP, if you look at the comment section of an article in the newspaper that's about SNAP, you'll always see online comments that are disparaging SNAP. But if you look one layer under the maybe racism and misogyny that are layered on top--VirginiaHard to look past it, but sure, I'm with you. Comment sections are not my favorite.RachelAgreed. But if you do look past, most people's story is actually about they themselves not getting benefits from the program. So it's often a story of, "I don't like SNAP because when I needed it, I couldn't get it, or because I wasn't able to comply with the work requirement and that wasn't fair," or because I was disabled, or my family member was and couldn't get the help that they needed.So I think that, like so many social compacts in our society, if we actually built the program to help everyone who needed the help from the program, you would see more political support for it. That's why universal programs like Social Security generally benefit from really high public support, because we don't do the kicking people out there. There's not this sense of "if this group gets it, then my group doesn't get it."Some of the realest conversations I've had about SNAP are with families and parents who are just over the income limit and are really upset that they lost access to that benefit once they got a raise or once they got a slightly better job. And that just fundamentally isn't fair. So if we brought in the program and make it more accessible, we would have higher political support for it, I think.All right, on your MAHA question, which I know fits very well with your audience in terms of like you guys track the MAHA stuff.VirginiaWe do. Unfortunately, that has become a core part of our beat.RachelThe great irony of 2025 is that SNAP is one of the single best things we can do to make America healthy again. SNAP has every research study behind it that shows kids who get SNAP as children have higher economic output. They're healthier as adults, they work more. Older adults are less likely to go to the hospital, less likely to go to the nursing home, if they have access to SNAP. The research is abundant, right? VirginiaIt's wild we needed research to prove that feeding people made them healthier, but okay.RachelYes, but we have it. It's rock solid. I spent too many years trying to help those research studies to get published in peer-reviewed journals. We know that to be true. You also have a parallel movement that's been happening for several years, where food banks have been working with insurance companies and other healthcare providers to make sure that they're doing tailored meals, meal boxes for people who are going through cancer treatment, people who have diabetes diagnosis. So these sort of tailored meals continue to be a trend. SNAP is a payer. Medicaid is a payer for those programs, all of those things improve health. MAHA, of course, is not about improving health. You guys know that.It has become is about policing food, right? That is what MAHA is about. And so SNAP was an unfortunately perfect target for MAHA. As soon as we got into legislative sessions. This is at the state level. In January of 2025, we saw a flurry of MAHA-supported bills that would restrict what people could buy with SNAP benefits. In some states, it was soda. In some states, it was candy baked goods. In a state like Iowa, it's literally everything. If it didn't grow on a farm in Iowa. If it's not a vegetable or a legume, it's not in the program. So you've got  these extreme proposals that came out of it was the same two or three lobbyists who came through. They were Casey Means, they were RFK-alliance folks who came through in the state houses. And the only opponents in those hearings were the SNAP advocates. It was the Morris Institute for Justice in Arizona and a couple of brave food banks in some of the red states who saw these bills, and they were there to explain to lawmakers calmly how they have been working, how SNAP supports health, how there are other alternatives. I will say there were some victories. During session in Kentucky, the advocates very effectively educated lawmakers that it would be better to incentivize healthier purchases — because all the research says incentivizing healthier purchases works better than restricting access programs.VirginiaYes. Letting people buy food works better than banning what people can eat. RachelAnd so they actually got a legislator to to come off of a bill that he had supported and to propose a new bill for an incentive-based program. So I think that education work in some political contexts was very successful.But then we saw the White House call governors and said, "Well, you couldn't get this through your legislature, so now you need to do it through an executive order." And that's where we really have seen the most harm done with these proposals that have come straight out of of governors offices under pressure from RFK. I think my long-term view of this is that we are going to have to see the harm done in a handful of states, and see how much of a mess it is for retailers. Still to be determined if retailers sue over these restrictions, which really put all the costs on them to police their grocery lines. I hope what happens is we have, at worst, a couple of states implement these rules, we see the harm done, and we walk it back. And we see that the MAHA thing was a fad that we recover from in SNAP. Because at the end of the day we're talking about a $6 a day benefit. People are not able to meet all of their grocery needs with SNAP, regardless. You may accomplish shifting the order in which people check out. Maybe we'll put all of our fresh, healthy foods at the front of the of the conveyor belt to use our SNAP benefits on, but we're still going to buy our kids the birthday treat that they deserve to have. So it's a big old waste of time, in my opinion. And I hope that it's a fad we are able to move on from in the long run.VirginiaI hope so. MAHA is the worst version of it, but we did have Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle arguing for no soda on SNAP back in the mid-2000s. So it does seem to be this thing that we keep circling back to. And I think it is part and parcel with "it feels good to do food drives, but not to make SNAP more robust." It's this idea that all poor people need is wealthy white people to tell them how to eat, and that will solve hunger.RachelYeah. You are right that that instinct has been there for a long time, and it it probably will outlive it. In a number of states the American Heart Association came out in support of these bills. We had some doctors groups come out in support of these bills. But where they would get stuck—and this is where these proposals quickly fall apart—is how do you define the ingredients of these processed foods. Even, let's say a soda. So you had, in some states, the proposal was, "anything with bubbles is a soda." And therefore you can't buy it with SNAP. But then you have the doctor being like, wait, I did tell my patient to buy the diet soda or the 30 calorie soda. VirginiaAnd what about seltzer!RachelIt's so arbitrary! And if you look at the way that grocery stores label their products, they're by category. They're not by healthy or unhealthy. There is no universal healthy or unhealthy label, as you well know. So it's all well and good when it's moralizing in the hypothetical. But I had to spend a solid four months sitting on a SNAP restrictions work group for the state of Ohio. It was appointed by our governor. And I was in there with industry folks, grocery folks, from health care talking about the nuts and bolts of how to put this into effect in Ohio, which we're going to have to do in the end of 2026. And once you get into the definitions, it falls apart very quickly. So I wish we could go back to focusing on the bigger important things, but I think we're going to have to keep re-educating people every time this wave of this fad, this intention comes around. People need to be reminded that SNAP is there as an economic support to supplement low wages. If we really wanted people to not need SNAP, we need to have a higher wage economy. And that would be a much more straightforward way to solve the problem. VirginiaIt feels very part and parcel with the whole ultra-processed food conversation, which, similarly, when people start defining it, they're like, well, wait, what is ultra processed? What do we mean? It's everything, which then quickly becomes nothing. RachelIt's a distraction. But here we are. We still work.VirginiaOkay, so it's December. This is the biggest month of the year for charitable giving. I think you did a great job of explaining there's a role for food pantries and food bank systems in all of this. But that's not the full solution. How should people think about charitable giving, especially this December, right now, given what we're up against?RachelI love that people are invested in charitable giving at the end of the year. I personally do the same thing, and I try to look at the organizations that are doing the most long-term policy advocacy, because I'm looking at the upstream solutions, and those are often the most under-resourced organizations. You can look at the 990s of organizations. You can look at their overall budgets online and see that your typical food bank, or really any direct service, often has a many millions of dollar budget. But an advocacy organization that's there to change a policy that would help a million people often has a budget of maybe a couple hundred thousand for the year. So when you donate to a policy advocacy organization or a legal aid organization, your donation goes a lot farther and is much higher impact. Because even if you can't give $10,000 and you can only give $200 or $50, you're going to make a really big impact on those smaller organizations' budgets. So that's one place I would think about. This year, I am doing a lot of donations around immigrant support, given the onslaught of what's happening in this country against our immigrant communities. There are a number of organizations, mostly small and sometimes kind of fitting into the mutual aid category, that are trying to provide direct support as well as legal support to immigrant communities right now as they're under attack. So that is what I think, in this moment, is a really good investment. At the same time, the charitable food system is very dependent on donations this time of year too, because lots of people in the community turn to them. They know that they might be able to get a turkey at Thanksgiving. They know they might be able to get a Christmas meal from them. So those are never bad investments. I do think they are very good stewards of the donations and the money that they get. But if you can look a little bit deeper in your community and see where a policy advocacy organization exists—every single one of your states has at least one or two core social justice organizations that would really benefit from donations this time of year.VirginiaAnd I'll just make the point that if you are giving to the local food pantry, think dollars over donations of goods, because they can do a lot more with your money. They can buy in bulk. They know more what their community needs, rather than you assuming that it's something you have in your pantry. That's that's probably like the least impactful way to donate.Rachel100 percent. And a very common mistake that well meaning people make all the time is donating products that are hard to readily consume. Donating a box of mac and cheese, but not the milk and the butter that goes with it. Or a can of beans that needs a can opener. If you're going to do canned goods, make it a pop top because so the people can open it. A lot of times homeless ministries really benefit from those canned soups or whatever, but they need to be accessible without a can opener. So if you are going to do a food drive—I know my kids' school does one, it's a great way for kids to get hands on experience with it being involved— just think through, could this be a meal on its own, rather than, is this going to be something that someone's unable to use without other fresh products?VirginiaLet's talk a little bit about mutual aid. This is something Burnt Toast as a community, we've been just starting to wrap our arms around. We did a very successful Mutual Aid drive at the start of November to help with the benefits shut down, and raised around $11,000 that we were able to distribute to, I think it was 62 folks in our community. So that was great. It's something we want to do more of, and I know a lot of listeners want to do it in their own communities. But there are some things that come up for folks. I've heard people say, "I don't feel comfortable donating to someone I don't know." And some of this, I think, is a little bit of that internalized moralizing stuff that we were talking about, where it's like, am I just giving money to a random person and I don't know what they're using it on? So talk us through your take on mutual aid and some of the concerns you hear coming up around it. RachelI think mutual aid is a beautiful thing that has existed for many, many generation. It hasn't just been in the modern online era.VirginiaRight now, it's a social media hashtag.RachelThat's right, that's right. But it's always been in communities, and you could talk to communities all over the country, and they would say they wrap their arms around folks and share what they have in times of crisis. And that's what the modern era of mutual aid is allowing us to do—but with people who don't live in our physical neighborhood, because we're so segregated as a society. My fundamental belief is that cash is the best way to provide someone with the dignity to make decisions for themselves on what their family needs in that moment. I have no idea whether you need a bus pass or a pack of cigarettes or money for rent or whatever you need to get through that day as a human being. You should have the autonomy to decide what that is. When I started this conversation saying I've worked on SNAP for 20 years, because it's the best thing we have—if we had a robust cash assistance program, I would work on that. There are really nice models in some communities of how to target mutual aid towards groups who are otherwise getting excluded from public benefits and other programs. Here in Ohio, we have a local, organic thing called AMIS, it stands for Americans Making Immigrants Safe. And it's a locally funded cash assistance program for families who are excluded from public benefits. They're seeking asylum, they're working with a lawyer to get their paperwork through. They're stuck waiting on their green card, whatever it may be. And so that is a way that cash can be distributed to folks who are getting excluded from SNAP and excluded from Medicaid. So I really like that program, because there are folks doing the work of the connecting. I don't speak the languages of everybody who needs connecting to that program, and I would never be able to find through Facebook those folks who need that the most. So I think that's a great model. But I also think another really cool model that evolved during the shutdown was an organization called Propel. They have an app that people use to manage their SNAP benefits. And we were talking as the shutdown was looming, and they were like, "What can we do? Should we encourage people to donate to food pantries or whatever?" And I was like, "No, just use your app to give people cash." And they did! They figured out a way to do it. I don't know how many millions of people that they helped, but they were giving a $50 cash payment to the same families who were losing out on their SNAP benefit. So I think that kind of creativity of just saying, "Trust people with $50 in cash and let them decide what they need in this moment." As the giver, you don't own the choice, right? If that person gets ends up buying something that you personally wouldn't spend your money on, that is not on you. And that is not a waste of a donation. That is you just putting goodness into the world and giving somebody else the dignity to decide with themselves what they need in that moment. So that's my take. Get over yourself. Just give people cash.VirginiaYes, yes. Thank you, Rachel. I love that so much. I think it's just a moment when you feel those thoughts coming up, and it's important to pause and say, oh, wait, this is me thinking I know how other people should live when of course we don't. Of course we are not navigating what they are navigating in a day. But we can all imagine how would it feel if whatever our source of comfort, or vice, or coping strategy is, was suddenly inaccessible because somebody was telling you it wasn't good for you. RachelAnd that's the beauty of what mutual aid can do. We do all the other moralizing in our public systems. Families in the child welfare system are heavily scrutinized and penalized. People who are experiencing homelessness are heavily scrutinized. People going through drug treatment, who have had a traffic violation. There are a million other ways we police people in society. We don't need to do that with mutual aid.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterRachelWell, as a longtime listener, I will say I've gotten great ideas from other people's butter. So thank you for having this segment. Honestly, the thing that brings me the most joy right now is reading Anne of Green Gables to my daughters. We are just about to finish the third book, which is Anne of the Island. And it's, you know, from a million years ago, set in Prince Edward Island in Canada.  I will say what is just cracking me up with each chapter is the way that parents are just as annoying in the early 1900s as they are today. Anne is a school teacher in one of the books, and the things that parents complain about, like my Johnny really deserved an A on that test, are all the same things that our poor teachers have to deal with right now. We have screens in our house. I am not some puritanical Little House on the Prairie mother, but it's the one thing we do before bed is we've been reading Anne of Green Gables. So now we're starting to binge all the different PBS series. There's Anne with an E, Anne of Green Gables. There are redos, there's a 1980s version that's amazing. So all things Anne of Green Gables right now are bringing me joy.VirginiaI'm so rooting for this in my own life. My kids don't take my book recommendations. So there is a copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting in my family room right now that I'm just, like, waiting patiently for someone to discover. If they know I want it too much, it won't happen. So I just leave things like that out. I'm really hoping to join you in this Anne of Green Gables magic soon.RachelYou can mention that Anne is a real troublemaker, that's what got my 10 year old into it. It was when I told her some of the snippets of the ways that Anne breaks rules. Then she was like, oh, all right, maybe I'll try it.VirginiaI love it. My Butter is a really good cookie recipe. It is a vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe, which I was extremely suspicious of—it uses banana instead of egg and peanut butter. But they are so good and chewy and it's so easy to make that I've actually been baking them more than just scooping the store-bought cookie dough, which I will always be a fan of, because the ease is unmatched. But this is a really easy recipe. They're super delicious. I don't think there's anything healthy or special about them, but if you have someone who can’t do eggs or whatever, it's a nice option to have. And this time of year we need a lot of treats.RachelMy daughter's art teacher just told me that she's having a fully vegan Thanksgiving, and I was super impressed with her, and trying to figure out how I could possibly gift her something at the end of year. So I'm going to try your cookie recipe. VirginiaYay! Rachel, this was so helpful and informative. Thank you for everything you're doing. Tell folks, how can we support your work? If we want to learn more, where should we follow you?RachelThank you for having me on. I have been listening to, and learning from you for many years, both on the parenting side, with little picky eaters with your first book, and—oh my gosh, I want to show you my fan girl real quick. I'm sorry. Cut this out of the podcast, if you want. But here is a copy of—I know this is like, not a live video thing where your listeners can see me, but I am holding up Fat Talk. I was a pre-order! Let me show you, and I got it signed by you at your local bookstore. But anyway, I love your books, and I have learned a lot from you over the years. So I just want to say thank you for that. In terms of where you can find me, I mostly hang out on LinkedIn. I lead a consulting team because I don't like real jobs. So we actually do consulting projects for lots of different organizations that are all in the SNAP advocacy space. You can also find us at our website, and learn a little bit more about the advocacy that we're doing and the organizations that we work with. But we are always trying to build more SNAP advocates, whether as a volunteer, as a person with lived experience who wants to go and testify before Congress and talk about why SNAP is important, or just someone who wants to write a check and support organizations. We can always point you in the right direction. So feel free to reach out if you're interested in learning more about SNAP.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!If you've ever received food assistance, tell us what else people don't understand about SNAP in the comments. And if you'd like to help with ongoing Burnt Toast Mutual Aid efforts, fill out this form. We'll be figuring out our next round of support after the holidays!

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• [PREVIEW] Hot People Problems

  Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your December Extra Butter episode.Today we've got a couple of rants and answers to your listener questions. On the agenda: ⭐️ The tyranny of School Spirit Weeks — especially during the holiday season! ⭐️ How it feels to date another fat person 👀🔥⭐️ How we're surviving — even thriving? — this Ozempic Season. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.Join us here! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 222 TranscriptVirginiaOkay, before we dive in, I have a quick rant, which I think the moms listening are really going to feel me on. I would like, Corinne, to quickly rant about school spirit weeks. Because they're really breaking me a little bit this year. Do you know what school spirit weeks are like?CorinneWell, I saw this on our agenda, and I was like, wait, what grade is your oldest child in?VirginiaShe's in seventh grade. CorinneOkay, that is too young for school spirit weeks. VirginiaOhhh Corinne. Corinne. Sweet summer child. School spirit weeks start in preschool. I've been doing this the entire time I've had a child attending any sort of school.CorinneBut that's the whole thing! That’s more work for parents.VirginiaCorrect. School spirit weeks predate a child's cognitive ability to have school spirit.CorinneThat's not fair! Then who is it for? That makes it seem like it's for the teachers. Not that teachers don't deserve to have joyful spirit filled weeks.VirginiaSure, sure, I always want to appreciate the teachers. I don't know that the teachers enjoy it that much either though.CorinneWho is setting this up?The PTA or something?VirginiaThe PTA sets up some of them. Part of the problem in my own school community, is that school spirit weeks come from several different factions, and they don't appear to have ever coordinated their calendars. The elementary student council runs one, so it's a bunch of fifth graders organizing it. So they're jazzed for it! But they're expecting pre-K through fifth grade to participate, which doesn't make sense because the younger kids can't do it themselves. And then the week after they do theirs, we have Red Ribbon Week, which is a drug awareness thing. So there are themes like "it's no sweat to say no to drugs" so wear your sweatpants. CorinneUmm, okay.VirginiaBecause I'm sure wearing sweatpants as children completely prevented both of us from ever trying any drugs of any kind.CorinneI was really thinking I could come up with some great themes for that week. But I shall say nothing more of that here. Not for fifth grade.VirginiaSo the high school does their own thing. The middle school and elementary school are sometimes synced up, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes both my children have a random pajama day, but sometimes only one. They just come at us. Holiday spirit week is coming up this month, but they can't be too "it's Christmas" because they're trying to be non-denominational. But it'll be like, "wear your winter hats!" "wear something with snow on it!" CorinneOh my gosh. Are your kids into it?VirginiaI am fortunate that my kids historically only care about the day they can wear pajamas to school. Of all the themes of the week, that's usually the only one they're really like, "I want pajama day." And if they're allowed to bring a stuffy to school. But I should also note that we may re-up this rant in June because for the final 26 days of the school year, my school does something called the ABC Countdown, where every day is a letter theme, and it's like "B is for beach day, bring your beach towel to school."CorinneWhat?!?VirginiaIt's like all counting down to the end of the year?CorinneWhy are we making school harder? I don't think I ever participated in a Spirit Day, I will say.Virginia I do remember Crazy Hat Day being something I was very passionate about in middle school.CorinneThat does sound like something you would be passionate about.VirginiaBut when they are like, "wear sports team stuff," we don't support sports teams, you know? Despite my recent foray into football, I'm not going to get either my children in an Eagles jersey. That's a non-starter. I don't know sometimes they're low lifts, but even when they're low lifts, it's another thing to remember. And I have so many things in my brain at all times related to my children. I don't need another thing to remember. I also do think, depending on the district and the depending the way it's executed, spirit weeks can be really ableist and classist. There is often pressure to buy special things. If it's a crazy sweater day and you don't happen to be a family that owns a whimsical Christmas sweater, what are you supposed to do? Go buy your kids something? Not to sound like a Scrooge, because this is a December episode, but I'm coming out against all school spirit, period, as a concept, at the moment.CorinneAs a child-free person, I'm with you. I would not be participating. VirginiaMine mostly don't care. So we mostly opt out. But every now and then, there's this last minute, suddenly caring about it and it's so much pressure. So I'm opening the floor up to the listeners on this one. I'm sure there are people who would like to share their own rants. And teachers, I want to know, do you hate it, too? Is it making your job better? In which case I will try harder to participate, because I want your job to be better. CorinneI mean, I'm just imagining having 20 kids at the end of the school year with beach towels. It doesn't sound like it would make teaching easier.VirginiaAnd that's just B day. You've got 24 more to go.CorinneI'm sure 50 percent of kids lose their towels. VirginiaWhat do they even do with the towels once they get to school? It's never been made clear. Well, that's my rant about school spirit week. Now I have one more topic for us to get into before we go to listener questions. I have been struggling with a lot of getting dressed anxiety recently. It seems to have upticked for me. Do you go through periods where it is harder to figure out what to wear than others? How would you say it ebbs and flows for you?CorinneI want to say yes. I feel like there are a few different factors. I think one factor for me, and I assume probably for you, it's usually centered around social events, or if I have to leave the house. VirginiaThe worst. CorinneAnd then the other thing is if I just don't have anything comfortable to wear.VirginiaPants in particular. If the pants are not comfortable, God, it's just the worst. How are you going to make it through the day? CorinneOne thing I've really been leaning into—which is probably a controversial thing to say, as someone who makes part of their living writing about clothes—I've really been leaning into sweatpants.VirginiaBecause we're trying to be drug free, obviously, for Red Ribbon Week.CorinneWhat even what was that? Sweat? No sweat to say no to drugs? It doesn't even make sense.VirginiaIt's actually quite sweaty to say no to drugs sometimes.CorinneI've been leaning into wearing sweatpants out of the house. I have some of the elastic ankle Old Navy sweatpants. And I did Google how do you make sweatpants look less like you're wearing sweatpants?VirginiaOh, and what did you learn? Because this is what I've been working on, too. CorinneI looked at a lot of pictures. One direction you could go is wearing a button down shirt with sweatpants, so you're kind of fancy on top, sweatpants on the bottom. I've seen some fancier shoes with sweatpants. Like a loafer or something. VirginiaOh, interesting. I hadn't thought about that. CorinneAnother direction people go is full athleisure. Like, matching sweatshirt, make it a set. I also saw a lot of people wearing sweatpants with a nice t-shirt and jewelry. Like chunky necklaces, that kind of thing.VirginiaOh, that's fun. This is giving me a lot of good ideas. CorinneYou could definitely search sweatpants outfits on Pinterest or something.VirginiaOkay, this is very helpful.I have realized, for me, 100% of the time, it's not actually about the clothes at all. I won't share too many details, because they aren't my stories to tell. But I'm in a rough parenting season, and I've had some stuff going on. Which is why spirit weeks are especially unhelpful to me. At the moment, there is enough on my plate. CorinneIt is quite full. Yeah. VirginiaAnd in the last two weeks, where it has been very intense, this wardrobe anxiety has spiked so much. One day, it happened right before I was going to get on a Zoom with you! It took me 25 minutes to pick out what to wear. Guys, Corinne does not care. I could show up in my pajama. There is no bar here. CorinneI probably wouldn't even have noticed. VirginiaBut I was trying on everything, and everything felt wrong, and everything felt uncomfortable. And I think this was just where my other stress was landing. But it was really hard to break out of the cycle and recognize that. Part of my brain was getting it. It was like, "Pick a shirt. It doesn't matter. You're getting on Zoom to talk to Corinne." But I couldn't do it. I was totally just spiraling. So the spiral part of my brain was just like, "Should I layer somehow??" So my question is: What do you do when you're in that panic spiral to break out of it? Because logic was not working.CorinneThat is a great question. I'm having so many different thoughts. Next time, you could text me and say, "What should I wear to the Zoom?"VirginiaI mean, that is a great solution to that specific problem. CorinneShould we start doing spirit weeks for Zoom, where we show up to record in our pajamas?VirginiaOr sweatpants, no sweat?CorinneIt's a great question. How do you stop yourself when you're literally spiraling? VirginiaBecause you’re never going to make it better. Trying on three more outfits won't make you like any outfit any better. CorinneI always end up with a pile of stuff on my bed that then I later just scrape onto the floor and into a laundry basket of shame.VirginiaI'm doing that load of shame laundry right now. It's so pointless. But the fact that I did it before talking to you was really clarifying that this is about something else. Because obviously, that's not normally something I stress about. And then, anytime I had to leave the house for even minor stakes, like school pickup or kids' appointment or something where I was going to be visible, it would happen again. And I did stress shop a little bit. I will say, I don't think that's the solution. But I did stress shop, and I did at least specifically target my stress shopping, where I was like, "I am trying to get a very cozy sweatshirt. That is my goal right now". Because, to your point about comfort, I was like, I think if I feel physically cozy and comfortable in what I'm wearing, it will lower my stress a little bit. CorinneYou have also talked in the past about being a real uniform dresser. VirginiaYes. I have a basic cold weather uniform of joggers and a sweater or joggers and a button down. So this is the other reason I knew, okay, it's not about the clothes. Because I already have the uniform. But suddenly the uniform felt completely wrong. And I was like, no, no, this isn't what I should wear. So I don't have answers. I'm just throwing it out there because I bet other folks have experienced this. And it sucks! If this is a place your anxiety goes it just is a really hard thing to break out of. But dressy sweatpants, I think, is, is my uniform. And maybe one other idea is: When I can feel it's going to be a week like that, just decide ahead of time that it's dressy sweatpants every day. This is not the week to try on the jeans that you keep trying to convince yourself work.CorinneThat's probably wise. Maybe if you find yourself spiraling, and it's like, how can you snap yourself out of it? Put on music. Eat something. Or do something else to like, bring you back down to earth. VirginiaI think your idea about texting someone, like texting you, or texting someone else and being like, "I'm in a wardrobe spiral. Tell me what to wear," is really good. Just so people don't worry too much, I have a lot of support. Things are okay. It's just I noticed this was where the anxiety was showing up, and it wasn't a useful place for it to show up. And I thought, hey, it feels sort of like a Burnt Toast topic. All right, should we get into questions?CorinneYes, I'll read the first question. Is it affirming to date another plus size person? I feel like it would be, and it's something I want. VirginiaHell yes. Thumbs up for me. CorinneYeah. I also feel like hell yes. VirginiaI mean, look, mixed weight relationships happen all the time. They're very normal. It is totally fine to be a fat person with a thin person. Fat people are sexy and attractive to all people. So it is not like only other plus size people will find you attractive. But I think there's some comfort and safety and a shared language.CorinneI agree with that. I think part of what has been affirming for me is also just being like, yeah, I am attracted to other fat people. So it makes sense that other people would be attracted to me.VirginiaYes, yes. 100 percent. I completely co-sign that. It's very freeing and fun to realize and explore.  Jack and I call it "hot people problems." Like, you know, if your pants don't fit, you know, leggings fall down a lot. Just all the ways that, fat bodies move through the world and are not accommodated. It's like we have this shorthand joke, like, "whoops, hot people problems."CorinneThat's really sweet. I love that. Like, you knock something over with your butt, and you're like, "hot people problems."VirginiaHot people problems! And I think it's really fun to have someone you spend a lot of time with be someone who really gets that and is in it with you, right?CorinneAnd I love that reframing where you're like, "oh, like, I did something I could be embarrassed of," but instead it's a positive thing.VirginiaIt doesn't feel embarrassing. It's just welp, that's happening again. And I could imagine being with a straight-size partner, even someone who's super affirming, and super into your body, you would still would feel a little more vulnerable sharing some of that stuff. CorinneYeah totally. I mean, I will also say, even if you're both plus size, like, you could still have very different experiences of stuff.VirginiaEveryone has their own stuff with their body and their history of their body. I mean, we answered that question last month about when one person is pursuing weight loss and one person is not, and how to navigate those sorts of things. All of that can still come up. So I don't think it's just "look for someone in a bigger body," but leaning into "you find bigger bodies attractive" is really empowering and great. CorinneTotally agree. VirginiaAll right, I'll ask the next question. How are you both feeling towards the scale and seeing your weight? I'm navigating this in the later stages of recovery. Why do numbers hold so much power over us?CorinneA great question. In some ways, I feel I am the wrong person to answer this, because I feel less activated by seeing my weight. I think part of my own internal work has just been caring less about numbers and letting a number just be a number. Measuring different parts of my body to figure out if clothes will fit, getting weighed at the doctor's office, it's all whatever. But I know that numbers are really hard for a lot of people.VirginiaWould you say there was a time in your life where numbers were a lot harder for you? CorinneMy relationship to weight numbers, at least for a long time, was, like, I actually am not able to control this, you know? Or the effort to control it is insane. So, like, why? I think I also realized early on that different people weighed such different amounts. I remember as maybe a teenager realizing whoa, I weigh a lot more than my mom, but we're the same pant size. Obviously not true anymore. But I don't know, weight is so arbitrary in some ways.VirginiaI think what you're articulating is where most people are trying to get! I think it's a really great place to be, and I'm there a lot of the time, and then I'm not always. And so I'm sort of a middle of the road on this one. I should also say, I've never been in formal recovery from an eating disorder. I think if you're doing that work, this is something to really be working with your therapy team about. So that's sort of a little different than what Corinne and I can share here. But I do think that's the goal. I do think there's a lot of power in letting the numbers have less power. I think where I've been able to make that progress is on clothing sizes. Because just learning the absolute complete lack of science or logic or rhyme or reason to women's clothing sizes is maddening but liberating. I am able to absolutely not care, and have a completely neutral reaction, to whether I'm in the extra large in a line or the 3X in a line or any size. Other than I'm annoyed if I'm in the 3X because I'm like, "well, this is fake size inclusion." But I'm not taking that on personally. Whatever size I'm wearing, I'm just like, oh, okay, that's what this brand is saying. And I think that's hard. I think that did not used to be true for me. And I think a lot of people feel a lot of attachment to clothing sizes and so really learning to just have no reaction to those because they just tell you nothing.CorinneMaybe my not caring now actually comes from weighing myself so much as a younger person. Because I remember seeing how my weight fluctuates over the course of a day. It fluctuates with my period. I won't say numbers, but a thin person could be like, "I just went on a big diet and I lost X amount of pounds," and I'm like, "that's me taking a poop." I could fluctuate that much from morning to lunch time. I don't know. VirginiaEverything you're saying is just gold. It is a lot about just continually reminding yourself of how meaningless these numbers are, how arbitrary and fluctuating they are, and giving yourself permission to step back. And that's just not always the easiest thing to do, depending on your brain chemistry and a lot of other factors. I mean, I will say I'm completely not triggered by having my neck or my calves measured. That is just like, huh okay, that's what that is. CorinneIn some ways, it is useful information to have. And if you can just let it be information, then there's no value attached to it.VirginiaI wrote about weighing myself at the doctor's office out of curiosity a few months ago, and how that then did trigger a spiral, which surprised me. And so I don't want to weigh myself at the doctor's office ever again. So I think it's also worth noting, in which contexts will you feel more vulnerable engaging with these numbers? And that's a very vulnerable context for a lot of us. I am not going to have a scale in my house. I have daughters. I don't think scales are responsible home items, especially if you're a parent. But I do think I would feel more neutral if I were to randomly get on a hotel scale or something. Do you know what I mean? And part of it is, like, is this scale calibrated correctly? Did they put it on carpet and then it actually isn't working at all? CorinneThat's a great point, too. VirginiaThey're not giving you an accurate number most of the time. So I think it's also fine to, just as a protective stance, say, "I don't engage with those numbers." But if you do happen to come across it, remembering that it tells you very little about yourself.CorinneYeah. All right. How are you managing to stay positive in the Ozempic World?VirginiaOh man. Are we staying positive? CorinneI don't know. Before we started recording, we were talking about how both of us, and everyone we know, is holding on by a thread.VirginiaAnd not necessarily about Ozempic, just about life in general, the state of the world, government, etc. It's rough out there. CorinneIt's feeling like a hard time to be alive.VirginiaIt's hard be a human with a body these days. I think I am doing some protective things. I am continuing to curate my social media and unfollow people I need to unfollow. We talked about our love of Bad Skinny Girl TV, but I am mindful of how much skinny person content I consume, if I'm being honest. Especially when I was in the spiral in the last week of not being able to get dressed—because some of that did turn into body criticism. And I'm able to look at that now and be like, that was not useful. It's just a reminder that if you have something else going on, you'll turn it into dumping on your body, because that's what we've been taught to do. I'm doing that Fattify Your Feed series on the newsletter now, because, I want to keep looking at awesome fat people. I want to lean into that, as opposed to the toxic content.CorinneWell, I have been slightly wondering if we're starting to see a kind of Ozempic backlash, because The Cut just published that piece about kind of like GLP1s making life a bit miserable.VirginiaI was really interested they did that—because they certainly published some of the most pro-GLP1 content at the beginning of this whole thing.CorinneYeah, but at this point, the “I'm taking a GLP1” content is boring, because there's been so much of it. So now we've moved on to actually, there's another side to this story. I think we're still in the everyone's getting skinny thing, but.VirginiaI think, too, the more I hear people's stories and understand what goes into the decision for a lot of folks, the more I'm able to a have a lot of compassion for the decision. Very often it's not just "I want to feel better in my clothes," or whatever. Very often it is I need this to access fertility treatment. I need this to be treated fairly in my workplace. All of those sorts of reasons where it's like, you got to do what you got to do to survive and get what you need. So I'm less triggered by people's individual choices around it at this point. It's just like any other pursuit of weight loss—sometimes it makes sense to pursue weight loss, not because I think it's the "best thing" for anyone, but because it feels necessary. And so I'm able to say, well, it's feeling necessary to that person. And I'm glad it's not feeling necessary to me personally, but that's a function of a lot of privilege. I think another thing I want to say—and this is ironic, as someone who writes a newsletter and produces a podcast all about anti-fatness and diet culture—but being less engaged with the conversation is good sometimes. I don't mean be less engaged with our work, but, I've been thinking about it since we did our problematic faves episode. Like, it's okay to just let some of it skate by. CorinneYeah. Well at this point it's like, the Ozempic conversation has been going on pretty hardcore since.... 2023.VirginiaYeah, January 2023. CorinneThat's a long time to be getting mad every time.VirginiaWe're almost three years into it.CorinneI just can't get as enraged anymore.VirginiaAnd the conversation is not changing, right? "Is this killing the body positivity movement? What does it mean to not have food noise?" I'm getting the same interview requests over and over. Journalists don't have any new questions to ask me about it. So there's not a lot of news, or if there is, it's actually old news being repackaged. It doesn't change the core conversation around its role as a weight loss drug . So I think just finding ways to let it be, and stay true to what you want to do.Okay, okay, all right, I'm going to bring us up with the last question, which is a fun one. What is your fav winter holiday tradition and or food.Corinne Love this question. VirginiaI know you love these food tradition type questions.Corinne I love to talk about food. I mean, there's almost so many, it's hard to know where to begin. I feel like the first thing that comes to mind is soup. Aren't you not a big soup fan?VirginiaYou know, I'm reclaiming soup. I'm on a journey. CorinneI love soup so much. VirginiaI'm coming around quite a lot on soup this season in particular. CorinneOkay, great. Soup. As far as holidays go, I feel like my family usually does a big breakfast-y thing on the day of Christmas, and I really enjoy that. Like waffles and grapefruit and stuff. I love that. But I'm really here for all of it.Virginia Yeah, really not turning away any food traditions. I am becoming a soup person. And I realized a lot of that was about letting go of diet culture. I think soup has a very diet-y connotation, and realizing that that it is possible for it to be not remotely diet-y is how I'm able to enjoy it now, with a lot of bread, with a lot of cheese. There are many very non diet-y soup. CorinneCreamy soups. VirginiaCreamy soups! Love it. Probably my favorite Christmas tradition, since my mom is British, we always have crackers on the table. For folks who don't know are these long paper tubes. They're twisted at each end. They have a firecracker thing inside that just makes a bang. And before you start the meal, everybody comes, there's this complicated way you cross your hands, and everybody pulls the crackers together all at once. CorinneWow, that sounds so fun. VirginiaIt's always like herding cats. Like, is everyone ready to come to the table? Can we all hold the crackers? No one can ever remember how to move their hands. And then there are paper crowns inside and a joke, and sometimes little prizes and stuff. It's the tradition that I always felt like, as a kid, and as a British American child, made my Christmas feel special, because my American friends didn't have those. So I really love that my kids have that it's really fun. I think it has become a lot more popular here now. It used to be really hard to find them when I was a kid, and now there are tons of options. So that's probably my favorite holiday tradition. Food-wise, we always do roast lamb for Christmas dinner, which I love, and my mom makes all the cookies. And there are endless Christmas cookies that I love. I realized the other day, I think cookies are my favorite type of dessert. It's tied with brownies, but, I'm much more interested in a cookie than I am in a cake or candy situation. And so a holiday that's really celebrating many types of cookies, I just am like, yes please. CorinneI'm with you. I love cookies.VirginiaI also make a lot of really good pasta sauces this time of year, like the ones that you let simmer for a bunch of hours. It's just comfort food season. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterCorinneShould we do Butter? VirginiaYes, let's do some Butter. I have a pretty good Butter I think. I regularly update folks on what my 12 year old and I are watching for our mother/daughter bonding TV show time, and I have exciting news for the elder millennials, which is: We have begun our journey with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.CorinneI shall now admit that I have never watched.Virginia I had a feeling you might be one of the non-Buffy millennials.CorinneIt's very embarrassing. I don't know. VirginiaIt's okay. Jack has never watched it either.CorinneI don't know why I've never seen it, because it also feels like it's just a cultural reference point.VirginiaWell, and not to tell you your culture, but it's very big in queer culture?CorinneI was going to say. People are constantly like, you know, Buffy, and I'm like, no, I don't.VirginiaWell, it's a very big part of my culture, and it's the show my siblings and I bond over the most, so they're very excited that she's being inducted into it. And she wasn't feeling it for the first few episodes. For any parents starting it with a child of generation alpha or something: They are used to a higher production value. They are used to a crisper television experience. If you're coming from Wednesday and going to Buffy, you're going to be like, wow, the monsters are less scary here. But that's actually great because it also means it's more campy and less scary, which is good for a show we watch in the evening. And Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, was canceled for being a toxic man. So we have to hold that together with it was also a show very much made by women, written by women, and starring women. So I canceled Joss Whedon and keep Buffy is how I'm navigating that one, and we'll be discussing it. But she's in now. She's hooked. We're in season two. It's great.CorinneWell, since you're recommending TV, I'm going to recommend TV, too. I'm going to recommend the show Pluribus, which has just come out on Apple TV. I have only watched three episodes. One of the reasons why I'm recommending it is because it takes place in Albuquerque, which is really fun for me to watch. And it's from the creator of Breaking Bad. So if you enjoyed that, you might enjoy this. It's, it is a little more like sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, but it's raising some interesting theoretical questions. And I feel like if you have enjoyed shows like Severance or The Good Place, you might like it. VirginiaOkay, that sounds really interesting. How's the violence level? Because Breaking Bad got too violent for me.CorinneSo far it's less than Breaking Bad, for sure. It is kind of like a post-apocalyptic thing. So the first episode involves a huge event, but, like, it's not a gory event. VirginiaOkay, that's good to know.CorinneWhereas I'm remembering the first episode of Breaking Bad is pretty gory, I think they're dissolving a person in a bathtub or something disgusting.VirginiaYeah, it starts out hot and by the final season, I was like, I can't, I'm done. I can't do it anymore. I also have a lower threshold than most people for violent content on TV. But that sounds great.This was a great episode! We want to hear your favorite food traditions. We want to hear all the things in the comments. Come chat with us. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

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• [PREVIEW] Are Standing Pants Different from Sitting Pants?

  We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for your Indulgence Gospel — Thanksgiving Edition! We often skip an episode drop on this day, but given how high pressure Thanksgiving can be for food, bodies and people, we thought...maybe you need a little Indulgence Gospel, a little Butter, and a little distraction from whatever your holiday weekend entails?We've got you: A Helen Rosner-inspired fashion epiphany. Thoughts and feelings about Black Friday. A very good Corinne clothing rant.Our secret shame places. And more! You do need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month! Join Just Toast! Don't want an ongoing commitment? Click "buy for $4!" to listen to just this one. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈This episode may contain affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 221 TranscriptVirginiaOkay friends, buckle up for some good rants. I think this is a nice little Thanksgiving gift, to have a little Burnt Toast in your ears before you deal with whatever this weekend is for you. I hope it's lovely. But it is not always lovely.CorinneShould we take a moment to give thanks for the Burnt Toast listeners?VirginiaObviously. I give thanks for them all the time! We are very grateful for the Burnt Toasties, and very grateful for everyone who made it over here, from Substack to Patreon. We're now about a month and a half into that transition. And we really appreciate you. CorinneEverything is going smoothly.VirginiaSo let's talk about Thanksgiving a little bit. I feel like this is the time of year where I start getting emails that are like, "I've gained weight and I have to see blah, blah, blah relatives who are going to say a shame-y thing about it." Or, "What do I do when I'm at the table and my mom won't stop talking about her diet?" Thanksgiving is such a fraught time because there's so much delicious food, and people who are so weird about the food. CorinneWhen I saw this on the agenda to discuss, I had my own personal panic, because I was like, Oh my God, am I even doing Thanksgiving this year? What is the plan? At this point in my life, I live far away from most of my family. On Thanksgiving, I'm usually stopping by a friend's house, maybe bringing something. So it's pretty low key, and it's been so long since I've actually had to deal with this. VirginiaSo you don't have to do the big extended family thing?CorinneNope. And I want to say: If you don't want to go to your family's house, you don't have to go. I think there is all this pressure to keep doing things the way we've always done them. But you can change the plan. And, you know, Thanksgiving is kind of an effed up holiday.VirginiaWhat with being rooted in genocide. That's always a tough one.CorinneSo if you want to change how things are going, you could stay home and make a personal pan of stuffing, which is possibly what I'm doing. Can't say yet.VirginiaTo be clear, we're not recording this on Thanksgiving Day. By the time you hear it Corinne will know what her plans are. Thanksgiving is not a holiday that I have a lot of emotional connection to, either. My mom is British, so it was less of a focus for her when I was growing up. I don't think the food is delicious all the time, it can be a little bland. I get that people really love their mashed potatoes, and I am not ever here to carb-shame. But that is not my carb of choice. CorinneI love the food. VirginiaI'm with Samin Nosrat, who's always like, "Can it be a little spicier? Can it be more flavorful? Can there be a little more going on here?" Thanksgiving can get a little soft and mushy. Not always. I make an excellent fresh cranberry relish that really zings it all up.But if the way you do Thanksgiving is to always to reopen a bunch of old wounds, or put yourself in front of the firing squad on body toxicity, maybe don't go. Or at least, figure out a plan going into it! Do you have a group chat you can check in with? Can you take your breaks by offering to run out for more ice, or walk the dog? Going to hang out with the kids is often helpful, too. The parents will appreciate that. And if you go be with the kids, then you aren't talking about the politics or whatever the adults are doing.CorinneAnd you can get out some of your rage through running around and screaming.VirginiaDefinitely, yeah. It's tricky, though. And if you're going through it this weekend, we we feel you.CorinneI also would just say, no need to stand on ceremony. If someone's doing something weird, just tell them they're being weird. VirginiaYou're very boundary setting today. I like it. You're very like, Don't go! Tell them they are being weird!CorinneI'm just feeling like we have enough bullshit to deal with right now. If someone is telling you about their diet, just walk away.VirginiaThis is not the conversation we need to be having. CorinneYeah, come on. There's enough hard stuff.VirginiaI will link to things I've written in the past to give more nuanced scripts, if you want that option. But I'm with Corinne. I think we twist ourselves into trying to come up with the perfect response when the reality is—the other person's shitty comment is creating labor for you. So you can just be unavailable for that labor.Alright, let's talk about Black Friday. How do you feel about Black Friday? Corinne is our newsletter universe's resident shopping expert.CorinneI have such mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I love a sale. I feel true excitement receiving all the discount codes. On the other hand, do I need anything? No. On the other hand, will I participate? It seems hard to avoid, you know? VirginiaDo you try to make a list ahead of time? I often try to have a little note on my phone of big ticket items I've been thinking about. So I'll check for a good sale price on these.CorinneThat's smart. I have not done that in the past and maybe I should. I think in the past, a lot of my strategy has been to buy things that I restock. So last year on Black Friday, I bought a ton of my electrolyte drink tablets.VirginiaSure because that's a line item in your budget. Get a good deal if you can.CorinneAnd I think it could be a good time to buy electronics or whatever. Maybe I'll think about making a list. I also think it's a nice time to continue avoiding big box stuff, and choose to buy something from a smaller, local store, which maybe doesn't have the same extreme discount, but probably could really use the business.VirginiaBack when I always sent out holiday photo cards, I would always order those on Black Friday, usually from Minted or Artifact Uprising. All the photo sites have really good sales, so I would lock that in, and then it would mean they would come early enough that I could actually get them in the mail. So they would reach people by Christmas.CorinneWow, that's really smart. VirginiaIt's also a lot of a lot of executive function. And last year I didn't do photo cards, and I felt quite liberated. But also any photo holiday gifts, like, if I'm going to make albums, or get pictures of the kids printed for grandparent gifts, I will take advantage of the sale for that. That's the main thing I usually think to do. And if I've been thinking about a new item of furniture or a new appliance or something, if I start thinking about that in September, October, I'm like, oh, let me sit on that and see what the Black Friday sale is. I never do any in-person shopping for Black Friday, because I can't do crowds. I’m exclusively talking about online.CorinneWhen I used to do Thanksgiving with my family, we did sometimes go to Target or another place. It was very fun to be at Target, which is not normally open at midnight.VirginiaI haven't done that since probably, like, the 90s.  And I don't think I ever did the midnight thing!Corinneit was just kind of a weird, fun, post-eating a lot of food thing, I think. VirginiaI get it! CorinneOne year we bought my mom an iPad, and that was really exciting. VirginiaOh, that's sweet. Speaking of Target, how are all your boycotts going? We haven't checked in about our boycott efforts in a long time.CorinneI was wondering about yours too. My Amazon Prime just expired in September, and I have continued to mostly not shop there. There have been a couple of things. When I was at my mom's, I needed a light bulb that I couldn't find anywhere else online, that I ordered from Amazon. And I did watch The Summer I Turned Pretty on Prime Video. Other than that, I've been avoiding it, and it's been fine. I do have a moment of annoyance sometimes. VirginiaIt creates a little more friction.CorinneI think Target has been a little harder for me, just in terms of clothes. I really miss even just browsing the Target clothes. VirginiaOld Navy is not quite the same. CorinneIt just sometimes feels like not enough variety. I want to be able to look somewhere else. I'm curious: Are people still boycotting Target, or are people still calling for that boycott? I'm not sure.VirginiaI know. I kind of keep hoping someone ends it. because I think their sales did really go down. I've seen some reports. (Here, here and here—which talks about a boycott of Target, Amazon and Home Depot for Black Friday!) So I'm like, did we do it?I will confess to one Target lapse. Okay, two Target lapses. In October, I had the stressful week of preparing for a child's birthday and also preparing to help run our school's Book Fair week, which is a very big, complicated event. And I needed to source party decorations for the child and tablecloths for the book fair. And time was what it was. So Target was how I had to get those things done. I wish I had made other choices, but in the time I had available, with the budget that we had for these things, it is what it was. So that was my one big Target lapse, and I am trying not to get sucked back in.But in terms of my own personal struggles with consumerism, I think it is kind of a good one for me not to have available. I was thinking about my house and how many fast home items I bought at Target over the years— like throw pillows or, oh, I need this candle holder. And I haven't been buying that stuff so much this year, and I don't miss it at all. My house is still cute. It's all fine. I've been going outside the box a little more if I need a home item. So I think that's been good for me to have to step back from.CorinneDamn. That's really powerful. VirginiaAgain, if someone tells us the boycott is over, fully expect to see me with a shopping cart of Hearth & Home throw pillows. Expect a relapse.CorinneOh God. VirginiaAlright, you were telling me before we started recording that you have recently had big feelings about driving pants versus standing up pants. Please explain.CorinneI know this is a thing. People are always like, "These are standing pants, but they're not comfortable to sit in." But I wore Old Navy jeans on my very extended road trip where I'm driving nine hours a day for four days. And I was like, you know, these jeans are pretty comfortable for driving. But then when I would get out at a rest stop, the same jeans were not staying up. I was struggling. VirginiaI do think sometimes sitting in clothes stretches them out of shape for standing.CorinneYes. This is actually why elastic in jeans is so useful. And the jeans that I'm wearing aren't 100% cotton, but I think they're like 98% or something. And I could probably use a little more elastic in these.VirginiaInteresting. CorinneBut also: Is this just a reality of being fat? Where you need separate pants for standing and sitting?VirginiaDo you think it's fatness, or do you think it's just, like... fabric?CorinneI do think when you sit down, your body changes shape. So how do you have clothes that accommodate your body like being different shapes at different times?VirginiaThin people are different shapes when they stand and sit, too.CorinneBut I think they have less dramatic shifts. The bell curve is less or whatever.VirginiaListeners: If you are driving in pants right now, or standing in pants right now, please change positions and tell us how you change shape. CorinneIt's all very relevant for a holiday in which we eat a lot of food, and perhaps change shape.VirginiaWe do need our stretchy pants. And I hear you on this. I often think, "I want to wear those pants later tonight and have them look good, so I can't sit in them all day at work, because they'll get baggy." And then I think, "What a high maintenance item of clothing you are, pants." Why do pants need such coddling from me? So I'm more on the side of, fabric is bad. But I suppose you're right. As fat people, we might be pushing our clothes more. So I think what I'm hearing is those jeans could not thrive in the fast-paced environment you required of them. And that feels like a them problem.CorinneSo is the answer just sweatpants?VirginiaIt usually is. It's what I'm wearing right now. It's what I'm wearing most days. I did just pull out an old pair of Universal Standard the Moro Ponte pant. You remember when I was so into those pants a few years ago?CorinneYes. The Ponti-Ponte.VirginiaAnd I didn't wear them at all last year! I had no interest in them for some reason, and I just pulled them back out, and I was like, yeah, I'm going to wear these. These are good, stretchy, cute looking pants.Corinne That's cool. That's great. VirginiaSo they're back in rotation. But the knees do bag out if I sit in them all day. CorinneSo annoying. VirginiaPants, be better. I mean, that's sort of the mantra of this podcast. Okay, I have another fashion-related matter for us to get into. I have had a real epiphany about what we even mean when we say fashion.And I would like you to look now to your texts for some screenshots I sent you. Helen Rosner is the source material. She posted this in her stories recently, and so we're giving her full credit for this. Because it's really resonating.CorinneYes, I've had this rant for a while about the styling thing, where people are styling this dress, and then they just put on more layers. And I'm like, yeah, that's not realistic. I'm hot. I don't want to style my t-shirt and shorts by adding a sweater. VirginiaAnd it made me realize, a lot of times I struggle with feeling like I've put together "an outfit," and it's because I know I'm going to end up just wearing the tank top, or whatever the base layer of it is. And that's not going to feel like enough of an outfit.CorinneAnd so then how do we style it? I was thinking about this this summer, because of my wedding outfit, which was basically a t-shirt and shorts with a blazer. And I was like, I know at some point I'm taking this blazer off. VirginiaAnd now I'm just in a t-shirt and shorts. But you did have cute pink socks!CorinneYes. I think the answer is socks. Having cute socks. So it's still felt styled, it still felt thoughtful. And you're not going to take your socks off. But if you're wearing pants, can people see your socks? So I think the answer is accessories. I want to think more about what other accessories would be good.VirginiaWell, and I think a corollary to this conversation is Zoom Fashion. Not for our podcast recording, where I'm literally wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, but when I'm gonna do a Zoom for someone else's podcast or a Patreon meeting or something. And I'm like, "I need to look polished and they can't tell I'm wearing nice pants." It's really hard to get the outfit to convey much when people only see your shoulders. And so then what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to have a lot of fancy blouses for Zooming purposes? That seems weird.CorinneJewelry. You're wearing a necklace right now with a sweatshirt, and it does look like an outfit.VirginiaI am wearing a necklace with a sweatshirt. I always wear this necklace. But yes, that's true.CorinneAlso, glasses. VirginiaThat is true. Glasses, like socks, are unlikely to come off. So that does help.Helen posted some other Stories where she says, “I feel too much of fashion exists only to be photographed on the sidewalk in Nolita. Like, where's the body? Where is life?”. And she talks about how fashion content is all sort of predicated on this lifestyle fantasy of running errands where you're going to be dressed cute to go to a bakery and a bookstore and maybe an art museum. And when is that ever our lives?CorinneTotally. I know. And if I'm having a day where I'm running errands, I'm wearing sweatpants.VirginiaYou need your standing up pants!CorinneThey need to stay up because my wallet is going to be shoved in one pocket, my phone in the other, and that's like two pounds.VirginiaShe says, "The dream of being out and about, browsing in a record store, picking up a paper sleeve of flowers, grabbing a flat white, the dream of engaging in inessential commerce in a walkable city." Like that is just not my life.CorinneAnd like, in a walkable city yet wearing heels or something that you could actually never walk in. Well all of this is why Big Undies exists.VirginiaIt really is. I am now articulating something you are always writing about.To take it one layer further, I think a lot of times this is bound up in when we are feeling aspirational about thinness. I've written about how for me, thinness is sort of bound up with looking like a character in a Nancy Meyers movie. I'm in a great sweater and jeans that do fit both standing and sitting. I'm walking barefoot on the beach. And fashion is just this whole aspirational lifestyle scam, where if you achieve a certain aesthetic you believe that you're going to have the life that matches it. As opposed to saying: What does my life actually involve, and what are the clothes I need to support that actual life? CorinneI don't really have anything to add to that. But I did just want to say that Helen mentions the styling trick of belting a coat. Like, using a regular belt over your trench coat or whatever. How many times have you seen that? And how freaking annoying would that be in real life? Like, you walk into the restaurant, take off your coat, and now you have a belt that you have to carry?VirginiaIt feels like you're undressing in public! Taking off your belt is what you do when you're about to go to the bathroom. So strange. That's very intimate to do in public space. CorinneBut people are like, "Have a baggy coat? Just add a belt!"VirginiaNo. I've never in my life done that. CorinneNever going to. Never would. VirginiaA lot of fashion is just very silly. Which we knew! I just appreciated how Helen distilled it. And I feel like it's useful for me to remember this when I'm going through my little social anxiety spirals about what to wear to things. Because that's often me trying to aspire to a lifestyle rather than dress the body I have and the life I have.CorinneYeah, and think about how much more you're able to actually have conversations and engage in what's happening if you're comfortable.This is a good reminder for Thanksgiving. If you're seeing people you haven't seen in a while.VirginiaAnd if you felt like you had to put a lot of effort into a holiday outfit, which can be a real thing. I mean, related, we were talking in the Burnt Toast chat recently about the pressure of wedding guests dressing. Anytime you have a more formal event, the stress of that can be so much. And I think it's the same thing, because it's requiring you to get out of your comfort zone, and then also to maybe physically wear something that's not comfortable. And it's like, what are we trying to do here?CorinneTotally.VirginiaWell in better fashion news, I want to share that I did just finally find a pair of tall, wide calf boots that fit my calves after doing a significant amount of research. But in not good news, I would like to report that the wide calf boot market is a complete and total sham. Like, it doesn't exist. The brands that claim to do wide calf boots--I am talking about Frye boots, I am talking about Inez, I'm talking about Nordstrom, DSW, all these shoe sites. I went through every one, looking at their boot measurements. And they consider a wide calf boot to be 16.5" inch circumference. CorinneYeah, that's not big enough. VirginiaThat is a straight-size leg! That is not a plus size leg. I am a fat person who doesn't even carry my weight in my legs. That's not the fattest part of me, and the boots that ended up fitting were a Lucky Brand boot that are labeled "extra wide" to have an 18 inch circumference. My calves are like, 17. One is just below 17, and one is just over 17. Also, PS, nobody's calves are the same size. So that was also fun to learn. I went down a real rabbit hole about this. CorinneI think mine are, like, 20?VirginiaWhen I say Lucky's extra wide calf—that's going to fit someone with, like, frankly, a Mid-Sized Queen-size calf.CorinneIf they're tall, how are you wearing them? You're tucking your jeans in or?VirginiaI could tuck jeans in with these. I had given up on that fantasy. And I still don't know that I will do that, because I don't know that I like that look that much for me personally. But I really just wanted them to wear with tights, which would not add a lot of weight. These are actually slightly wider than my calf, so there's room for a sock or something. But mostly, if you wanted room for a sock, forget it. It doesn't exist.CorinneDo they zip up the side?VirginiaThese are pull on. They're just wide enough that I can pull them on. But Lucky makes a wide and an extra wide calf. So go extra wide. The wide calf was like 17 inches. And the thing is, you can't get your exact circumference. If my calf is 17 inches, a 17 inch boot is not going to fit. There's definitely no room for a socks. You need a little give. I knew it would be bad, but I didn't realize it would be this stupidly bad. Knee high boots are really marketed, I would say, to people size 12 and below.CorinneI've heard of people taking boots to the cobbler and having them put in a little elastic insert.VirginiaLike a little gusset type thing.Corinne But also, do we want to do that work? Who has the time?VirginiaWhy is this my new part time job? I have bought boots from Adelante, which is a pricey boot company, but they do custom, so you send them your measurements.CorinneI heard that they are maybe going out of business, but...VirginiaWhen I checked for the particular this boot shopping season, they had an eight week ship time, and I did not have eight weeks to wait on this boot purchase. I needed it sooner, so that wasn't going to work for me. They also only have one tall boot style, which I already own. So I was like, well, that’s not quite what I'm looking for. I was looking something different.CorinneYeah, this is getting into my custom clothing rant. VirginiaYes, yes, please give us that rant. CorinneI've seen a lot of people suggesting brands that make up to like, XYZ size and then custom beyond that. And most of these are brands I haven't tried. So I can't speak universally. And there are some brands that I really like that do this, and so presumably they do a good job. However, I did recently order something custom, and this was from just a very small, one person type of situation. I sent them my measurements, and they made something according to the measurements. And it just didn't fit, right. I got it, and I was like, "I hate this." And I just feel like the suggestion of just wanting fat people to always order custom stuff is... Look, I'm glad the option exists. But it's not always an option. Sometimes you don't have the time. And why should I be ordering custom stuff that then if it doesn't fit I'm in this awkward situation where something has been made, supposedly to my measurements, but I can't use it? VirginiaIs that even returnable? CorinneYeah, probably not. VirginiaBecause if they made it just for you, they can't resell it, right? CorinneIf they're offering custom sizes. It's not going to be fit-tested. They're creating a new pattern, and they don't really know how it's going to work on your body until you put it on.VirginiaSo they'd need you to come in and have it fit to your actual body, not based on a set of numbers, right? CorinneAnd then you're just basically a guinea pig. It iss a good option to have sometimes. It's just not realistic in so many situations. And yeah, the wait time. It's like, you want me to order custom boots that I'm not going to get for two months, at which time winter will be over.VirginiaThis is reminding me, when we were doing Jeans Science, there was a brand, which I'm not going to name because they were very unhappy with me when I talked about this on Instagram. But there was a brand that you sent your measurements to—and their jeans were just nowhere close to fitting my body. Like, I literally wore them for five minutes, and they sagged so much I stepped right out of the pants. They just fell off my body. And she was like, "I don't understand. You sent us your measurements. They should fit."Corinne Like it's your fault somehow. VirginiaI double-checked my measurements. I'm sure I measured myself right, and they don't fit. And I think it's exactly what you're saying. People are not flat. We're not two dimensional. Our bodies change shape when we sit and stand. Just cutting clothes based off a few numbers is not going to work. CorinneRight. Just because you can make a shirt that fits 30 inches pit to pit doesn't mean it will be the right length when I raise up my arm. We're moving around in the world.VirginiaWe're living in our bodies. And the pants need to both sit and stand, drive and walk. We really we need clothes that can do multiple things. I know people who wear petites feel this, too. People are always like, "just get it hemmed!" And that's so much extra labor to take something into the tailor, wait the two or three weeks while they get it hemmed, go back and get it. And then, does it work? Plus not everything can just be hemmed.CorinneSometimes I just don't have the capacity to message someone, "Could you possibly make this for me in a bigger size?" It's just a lot of extra effort, and I'm really annoyed at the suggestion that that is what I should be doing to be shopping in the right way.VirginiaAnd for any straight-sized person listening: Imagine if you wanted to buy something from The Gap, who I'm eternally mad at for not making plus sizes. And they didn't have your size, but they promise they'll make it for you. And so instead of being able to just walk into The Gap and buy a shirt, you have to email them, and wait for a response, and send your measurements, and get out a tape measure, and measure yourself, and make sure it's accurate. And send out that information, and then wait for the thing to arrive, and then it still doesn't. Like, I mean. Straight size people would never!CorinneI can get behind a sort of luxury Made-to-Order thing once in a while, but sometimes you just need a sweater.VirginiaYou just need the thing to fit. Custom cannot be the solution to fashions, lack of size inclusivity. That cannot be the answer. People would not be able to afford clothes and it just isn't sustainable or scale-able.CorinneI think the last thing we were going to talk about was our secret shame spots. VirginiaOh yes, this is a fun one to end on. It started because, in preparation for this episode, I was trying to find something on my desktop of my computer, and I said to Corinne, "I know I look like a person who has my shit together, but if you were to see the desktop of my computer or the inside of my car, you would know my truth."CorinneAnd and I was like, "Oh yeah, my desktop is also like that." I would say my car is not.But you know what one that is crazy for me, is my email inbox. Do you know how many unread messages I have? And I went through this, maybe, like six months ago. I went through, archived everything, started from scratch. I have 16,000 unread messages.VirginiaAnd this is your main email? This is your Gmail?CorinneThis is why people have multiple emails. But at this point it's like, how do I even go back? Like, I can't start fresh.VirginiaWell, I don't know. Because I'm now paying $5 a month for storage for my Yahoo address because it has so many emails in there. But I don't want to have to go in and delete because I'd have to delete thousands of emails. And I only use that email for signing up for stuff. I could just delete the whole thing, but I couldn't figure out how to do that because, of course, Yahoo is far more interested in me paying $5 a month for storage. And so I was like, fine, I'll do this. BBut my Gmail, I keep pretty on top of, because that's my has to be functional email. That said, I also do think I've actually been trying to increase my tolerance for a little more inbox chaos there. Because I think sometimes I can get very perfectionist about the end of the week, trying to clear out to Inbox Zero. I've been a longtime Inbox Zero person, and it's good for me to be like, "Nothing falls apart if I don't answer every email in here," or at least go through and process every email. I think that's how I feel about the desktop and the car too. It's good to have identified areas in your life where you can just be like, "Yeah, that's not where I have it together."Corinne I mean, it's not possible to have everything together all the time. VirginiaAnd I'm not even interested in trying. There are other parts of my life where I care. My house is pretty tidy because I am pretty compulsive about tidying my house. Daily bed maker here. I love a made bed. CorinneWell, can't say the same for myself. But, aspirational.VirginiaI want to hear what other people's secret shame spots are. They don't even have to be shames! Just your places where you're like, "I don't try here." What are your don't try areas? I think that's fun to think about. Especially as we launch into a busy time where we all need areas we don't try too hard in. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterVirginiaOkay, I'm gonna do my new red Adidas, which Corinne influenced me to buy. By which I mean she said, "I found these Adidas, and they are very Virginia-coded, and you should buy them." And I added to cart before she finished that sentence. They are a slight platform. They are bright red with purple stripes and a kind of neon red trim detail. They are super cute and I love them! And you were correct to tell me to purchase them.CorinneHow's the fit?VirginiaThey are so comfy. And I would say, run a smidge big. I go back and forth between a size 7-7.5 And I don't ever want sneakers to feel too tight, because you want to be able to wear socks with them. So I got the 7.5s, and they're roomy—like maybe I could have done the 7. There's definitely room for a sock. Unlike tall boots. I will say — I am still working up my nerve to style them, which is sort of interesting. I mean, I'm wearing them, but a couple things I've put them on with, and then I've been like, "Do I have clown feet?" They're very red. And I love red shoes. I'm surprised at my reaction. They're so cute. I'm wearing them, don't worry.CorinneI feel like they’d be great with jeans.VirginiaYes, here's what is tricky. With a wide leg jean, the jean covers so much of the shoe, you lose some of the cuteness, and then you just see the brown rubber of the platform sole, and that's less cute to me. So if I had a note for Adidas, it might be that the platform sole doesn't need to be brown. It could have also been red, and then I think I'd like them even more. I think it's just that thing where you're like, you have a new thing and it feels like such a statement. See all previous conversations. Virginia, just wear the shoes. CorinneThat's funny. VirginiaThey're pretty adorable. But yeah, what are you thinking? Are you making an Adidas purchase? This is not sponsored by Adidas, by the way.CorinneI have just regular Adidas Sambas that I actually love, and wear a lot, and are kind of like maybe at the approaching the end of their lifetime. So I want to get another pair. I think that I might be sized out of the cute platform ones, because I typically need an 11.5. But there is a men's version that's not quite the same, but very similar, and obviously doesn't come in as fun colors, but I might try those. There are some off-white and navy ones that I thought looked good.VirginiaI mean, I will say the platform is the least interesting thing about them to me. I think the colors are really fun. So if they could just do better colors! CorinneSometimes they have good colors. I feel like you just have to check back. Okay, my Butter is a food product, which I discovered on my road trip. Where was I? I don't know. I was somewhere, and I saw these little delicious-looking candy bars, and I bought one. And now I'm obsessed, and want to order boxes and boxes of them to my house. The brand is Mayana Chocolate. I think the one I liked was, I think it was "coconutty bar," or it was something with coconut in it. But they're really chubby. They're chunky, so they're very satisfying to eat. VirginiaThat sounds yummy.Corinne And now I am wishing I had one with me. So if you see them in a store near you, buy one or stock up. And send me some.VirginiaWell, this was fun. I hope everyone's driving safely and or cooking efficiently. And that you have lovely holiday meals, and nobody says weird things about bodies to you. And we'll see you back here next week! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

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• You Don't Have to Be a Super Ager

  You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Debra Benfield, RDN.Deb is a registered dietitian/nutritionist with 40 years of experience helping people heal their relationship with food, movement and their bodies. Her work sits at the intersection of anti-ageism, body liberation and trauma-informed care, offering a radically compassionate alternative to diet and wellness culture—especially for those in midlife and beyond. After turning 60, Deb began questioning the dominant narratives around aging, vitality and beauty, and quickly realized the majority of resources still centered weight loss and youthful appearance as the ultimate goals. In response, she created what she couldn't find: A framework for nourishing the body that honors body respect, prioritizes liberation and embraces the full spectrum of aging. Deb is the author of the beautiful new book Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body.  Deb came on the podcast back in 2023 and we had what was really the first, or certainly one of the first, conversations we've had on Burnt Toast about the intersection of ageism and anti-fat bias. That discussion helped lay the foundation for how we're continuing to talk about those issues. Deb is someone I always turn to for resources and wisdom as we're navigating those conversations here. I am so thrilled to have Deb back on the podcast today, to talk about her new book, how diet culture has hijacked the menopause discourse, and why peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are actually giving you all the protein you need.  Unapologetic Aging comes out on December 16, so now is the perfect time to pre-order it as a holiday gift for yourself, your mom, or anyone you know in midlife and beyond! And don't forget that if you've bought Fat Talk from Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off your purchase of Unapologetic Aging there too — just use the code FATTALK at checkout.And if you value this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 220 TranscriptVirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book, Unapologetic Aging, which comes out on December 16. I loved the book. I think it's such a valuable contribution to this whole conversation. It's really a guide to living well in midlife and beyond without, as you put it, "the whole diet and wellness mess." It's also a very powerful reckoning with how our ageism and fatphobia prevent us from doing the things we really want to do at this time. DebI'm trying to create some awareness of our internalized ageism, because I think it goes unnoticed. If anybody is listening to your podcast, my hope is that they've already done quite a bit of work looking at their anti-fat bias. So then it's about looking at where those two meet, as you notice changes in your body. So I created a book that helps you with your awareness and with how you could look at making choices to support yourself and mending some of the body stories you carry about your aging and about changes. That includes being in a larger body, and some pieces around body image and intimacy. Body liberation as you age is such an important legacy for the generations to come. VirginiaI want to start with something I underlined right in the introduction. You wrote that we so often hear “You haven't aged a bit!” And this is considered a grand compliment, right? But you're immediately questioning why. Unpack that for us.DebAgain, hoping that your audience is already aware of how “you look great,” if you lost weight is a problematic thing for someone to hear. It's very similar. It's a very parallel compliment in that you just calcify this belief that looking older is bad and looking younger is always better. That very definite binary that we impose upon ourselves. It is very much like looking thinner is always a victory, and looking larger must mean you're failing in life. VirginiaIt's so interesting when you step back from it. Why do we not want to look like we've been living? Why would I want to look like a younger, less accomplished, less mature person? Not to criticize my younger self—but why wouldn't we want to own the aging that we've done, and the living that we've done? DebWe've just internalized all of this fear. And I get it. I understand that to pass as younger gives you more social collateral, and theoretically you lose relevance in our very ageist culture. So I get it. It's disempowering to say the very least. And it's a perpetual fight. I'm not a fan of fighting my body overall. And I think that's what's at the center of my book: What happens when you stop fighting, and instead befriend, and care for, and lean into the connection and relationship you can have with your body? How beautiful it is, especially at this time in life. There's so much liberation there that I'm very attracted to that for myself and anybody that wants to talk to me about it.Join Burnt Toast! VirginiaI have a kind of funny story to confess. As I was reading your book, a moment came up where I had to recognize, oh, this is my own internalized ageism showing up. The backstory is my boyfriend, Jack is nine years younger than me. So we have an age difference. And he was talking about a friend, and he referred to her as "an older woman." And I realized the person he was talking about was the same age as me, and I immediately was like, "What do you mean older woman? Why are we using the phrase older woman?" And he just looks at me and he's like, "Babe, it's a good thing. That's a neutral description. It's a neutral term." And I was like, oh, I need to reclaim "older" or "old," just like I've reclaimed fat. So now our joke is, if you say older women, you say, "parentheses complimentary," to clarify that it's meant as a good thing. DebWe're just socialized to think “older” is negative.VirginiaObviously you shouldn't even need that parentheses!DebWell, we all do. I do it too. We all do. It was just so deeply, deeply ingrained, just like all the stuff around anti-fat bias.VirginiaI remember last time we talked about language when you were on the podcast. And we were talking about how we like “elder,” but there are other terms that do feel more negatively imbued. So it's not necessarily that you have to reclaim every term around aging, but it is worth looking at why is this term hitting you this way?DebAnd we may be different in the way things land with us, too. I mean, clearly with you and Jack. VirginiaYeah, totally. I was like, Okay, called out for my own ageism. So something you write about quite a few places in the book is this phenomenon of what you call “super agers," which we see constantly on social media. They're always showing up on Good Morning America. Super agers are folks who are over 70 or 80 and still windsurfing or doing yoga or  rock climbing. It's pretty much always some incredible physical feat that someone's doing in their later years. And we have such a tendency to celebrate that, but you're very clear that that's not necessarily a straightforward celebration of aging.DebWhen I was thinking about this, I was also watching the New York City Marathon. And all the celebrations tended to be focused on people with disabilities, older ages. It was very interesting to me. And larger bodies! All of them are grouped together as celebrations because they pushed through some sort of social limitation to accomplish this thing. And again, as always, there is some truth in that. I do have respect for people that work hard to accomplish things. And aging is fascinating in that we become more unique and heterogeneous the older we become. The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the more  possible disease diagnosis and treatments, medications. I mean, so many things happen with each passing year. We're very unique. There are just as many ways to age as there are to live your life. I just want to put forward the fact that you don't have to be in a super human category to be aging well or successfully. It's not unlike when you say “Good Fatty." You're a “Good Fatty," if you work out right, and if you work really hard on your body and being healthy. All the healthism that starts to rise up. So it's very similar with pushing yourself despite your age.VirginiaThere are two layers to it. There's this thing where it's actually quite patronizing to the person doing the activity. Like, oh, good for you. You're doing this despite all the odds. Which you wouldn't say to a thin, able-bodied 25-year-old running a marathon. Then it's, wow, you've worked hard and have skills and experience. And then also it's contributing to this artificially high standard of what we need to aspire to. So now it's not enough to just try to  preserve my mobility as I get older. I also need to be able to do a headstand.DebThe hard part is that, yeah, I do want to celebrate these accomplishments. Of course. I think that's amazing. I saw something about this woman who beat the world record and how long she could hold a plank. And she was about 10 years younger than me, so I immediately got on the floor, of course, to see what I could do. And there are so many little things on social media about tests of your capacity as you age. If you can get up from the floor in a certain way. If you can put on your socks and shoes without sitting down. And what happens, of course, is we judge ourselves, we compare ourselves. And I don't know how helpful that is. I mean, if it motivates you to see if you can shift and change some of your habits, to see if maybe you could work on balance, maybe that's uesful. It's very important to have healthy feet, for example, but to what end? That's what happens for a lot of people. It's like, hell no, I can't do that. I can't do this so why try? A lot of the research on ageism shows that this narrative about decline and fear mongering does not do us any favors when we believe those negative story lines. Fear doesn't motivate us. It makes us feel like we're doomed. And there's actual data showing that we live longer with a much more positive mindset around what it's like to be in an older body. VirginiaIt's making me think of how much we narrow the definition of health when we do this. When we say, Can you get up off the floor without using your hands? That is a sign of how healthy you are. Well, I can't do that every day. That's not something that's available to my body every day now. On the other hand, I recently increased how much weight I'm lifting when I strength train. I can lift a much heavier weight than I could when I was younger and could get up off the floor more easily. And so it's kind of a wash to me, like, which is healthier? And that's setting aside the aging discourse around strength training —we'll get there. I just mean, there are so many different facets of health. And those two examples are just talking about physicality. That's before we get to mental health, or all of the other ways we can measure health. And I just think it's so interesting that we constantly narrow how we define health and how we're grading it.DebWe're so influenced by these “longevity bros.” We're just so, so inundated by those types of messages, especially on social media and podcasts, that it totally narrows our definition of beauty, our definition of  what it is to be well and to live well. One of the things that we need to do at midlife—and I think midlife invites this when you're staying in touch with yourself— is to embrace a reflective period. It's like, okay, I clearly have less time in front of me. What are my values? How do I want to sail the ship? That is something that happens in midlife, and I think it's very important to clarify how you want to spend your time and energy now. And for some people, it is getting up off the floor without using their hands. For a lot of people, not so much. And that's okay.Support our workVirginiaThey are morally neutral activities.Another phrase I underlined in the book, because as soon as you wrote it, I said, Oh God, I'm hearing that everywhere, is people saying, "Well what I've always done isn't working anymore." They're usually referring to how they're eating or how they're moving their body. Like, I always used to do X, Y and Z, and now it's not working anymore. You have such a smart reframe for this. Because was it ever working? DebYes, what do you mean by "working?" Working to fit your body into a certain size and shape, or maybe functionality? Why are we holding onto that? I don't think that serves us very well, because our bodies are supposed to change. I talk a lot about this metaphor of the monkey bars, that in order to move down the monkey bars, you have to let go of one to move to actually move forward. If you cling and grasp, you will stay, and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in continuing to move forward, whatever that looks like. To evolve and change and become is the beauty of midlife and beyond. That's the opportunity, that's the emergence that is available to us. So this focus on holding on to what's been working, as in, keeping ourselves in the same size dress, or whatever the story is, that's another one of those, like, I can still wear the dress I wore when I went to prom in high school.VirginiaThat's a big achievement. Staying your high school size forever.DebI don't think it's serving us.VirginiaIt's really not. It's really a way of staying stuck, as opposed to letting yourself change. When we fight change, we make it so much harder on ourselves.DebBut the social conversation is maintained. Maintaining that freeze frame--it doesn't make any sense to me. It just doesn't make sense. But I see it and hear it, and people spend a lot of money on it.VirginiaDo you think that wanting to freeze frame is also behind so much of the menopause discourse right now? DebAbsolutely. What I hear in the menopause space is fear mongering about change. And that's getting more and more extreme, in my mind. We are talking to each other right after you've probably seen the very viral conversation about how in menopause, your brain eats itself. Thankfully, there has a lot of pushback on that by people I respect, because there's absolutely no data. It was a rodent study, and the rodents died soon after menopause. So clearly their menopause is not the same as human menopause. But the fear mongering gets people. It just hooks you and makes you feel like you should do whatever this is being sold. But the research does show that our brains change in very interesting ways. As we get older, our brains have more capacity for being flexible and adapting. So that's a beautiful thing. I like celebrating the fact that we find ways to continue to live our lives as fully as we would like to, and age the way we want to age, without all this pressure and fear. Fear, in and of itself, is harmful for your brain, by the way. VirginiaWith the menopause discourse being so loud right now, especially on social media, it feels like all of diet culture is boiling down to two things that we are supposed to do as much as possible: Eat all the protein all the time, and strength train constantly in our weighted vests. The book, I want to be clear, is so much more than that. You have so many great tools, journaling prompts, strategies to help people do this really hard work of figuring out how they want to relate to their bodies and take care of themselves in this life stage. But I do want to get you to give us your hot takes and reframes on protein and strength training, because those are the two that we get the most questions about by far.DebAs most things in this arena, there is some truth. There's a kernel of truth. It's just gone too far. It's gotten too extreme. My preference is to really honor the unique person and their needs, and I also prioritize mental health. If you are a person who has had any history of disordered eating, chronic dieting, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, then the fear mongering is going to be very harmful for you. And triggering. There is research that shows there's an increase in relapse and development of new eating disorders [at this age]. Obsessing over numbers like protein grams is harmful. I don't do it. I don't recommend it for anybody. I think understanding where protein is in our food is smart. You probably already know that. And making choices where you include some protein most of the time is helpful. You don't have to do it every single time you eat. But that is kind of how things naturally happen anyway, without a lot of effort. Unless you're a person who doesn't like protein-containing foods at all—and that can be true—then it may require more effort on your part. My favorite example is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I just love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or peanut butter in anything. I feel like my body goes “thank you” every single time I give myself that. It works. And I've heard that from many clients, too. Pleasure centers light up. You get carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's such a great combo. It's a beautiful food choice, and it lasts forever. You don't have to keep it in the fridge. Another example is a charcuterie board, where you have some cheese, you have some ham if you eat meat. There tends to be a little bit of protein along with the carbohydrate and fat, naturally. So you don't really have to get down in the numbers. I encourage you to pay attention and make choices that include protein. But I think it's completely unnecessary to count the grams of protein.VirginiaI love that the takeaway is eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yes, done, sold. DebAnybody listening to this and has ever worked with me is probably laughing really hard right now, like, there she goes again. Peanut butter and jelly is my solution to all the things. VirginiaIt's one of the most perfect foods! I had a phase where one of my kids basically lived on Uncrustables, and I was like, no notes. It made packing lunches so easy. We could always have them with us. It was delightful. Join Burnt Toast! DebOkay, strength training.VirginiaLet's do it. DebHere's the thing that I want people to hear me say: No matter what you do, you lose muscle mass. It's not like doing all the things it's going to stop that, because it doesn't. So that's a fact. That's an opportunity for acceptance that your body softens. There's something about that that I find very inviting. I love that my body is softening. I really, truly do. I'm attracted to the softness that's available to me that didn't used to be. I'm naturally kind of like-I don't know if anybody ever watched Popeye? Popeye's girlfriend's name was Olive Oyl, and that was my nickname when I was a kid, because I was just long and lean. So softening is exciting for me. I've never really had this softness, so I think it's sweet. And there's a softening that I'm attracted to around taking the edges off of all of our anxiety and our preoccupation with being perfect. I have a lot of positive associations with softening. There are also some health protective aspects of having more storage space. That's what body fat is. You will be safer when the next virus comes around. We're in that time of the year where we're all going to get this and that virus. So you have more storage and your bones are a little bit more protected. Weighted vests... well that's a huge conversation. VirginiaAs a fat person, I'm already wearing my weighted vest at all times.DebIt's just anti-fat bias that you would need to be as lean as possible and then strap on some extra weight. I'm sorry. It makes me laugh every time I think about it. I'm sorry if people see me laugh when I see them without walking and they are wearing their weighted vests. I'm just entertained. VirginiaAlso, caveat listeners: If any of you are like, no, I just love my weighted vest, we're not taking it away from you!DebI'm not judging you if you're doing it. I totally get that you're just trying to do the right thing for yourself all the time. We all are. It's just, I'm not falling for that one. Weighted vests are on my “I'm not falling for it” list. But yes, we do need to do things that include bearing your body's weight and extra, if that's possible, and of course, the data supporting heavier weight is there—if that's interesting to you, if that's accessible to you. So many women contact me and say, I just feel like I'm not doing it right, because I just can't make myself do heavy lifting. And that's okay, too. Making yourself spend time doing something you hate doesn't feel in my mind like the thing you want to do with this precious part of your life. Because it's more and more precious. I'm in that category. Maybe I'll get to a place that I want to. I'm sure it feels good to feel yourself be powerful and strong. Yes, I get that. I'm a yogi. I love doing yoga poses where I hold my body weight. And I'm also a single mom, so I do a lot of lifting naturally in life. I do all the things around the house.VirginiaI think it's so interesting, because I do enjoy strength training, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't genuinely enjoy it. Because for me, the form of exercise that I detest and get caught in this "I need to make myself do it" cycle is cardio. And if they were pushing cardio as hard as they push strength training, I would be a mess. So that's just to underscore—any way you're moving your body that makes sense for you is good. And if you can find joy in it, even better. DebAbsolutely. And feel playful!If you can find some playfulness, and if you can find some social connection, you're also doing things to help your brain and your aging process be with other people. Finding community and finding some playfulness is very, very healthy. VirginiaI love that. DebSo yes, of course I want people to keep moving. But not in this prescribed, "can you hold a plank for three minutes" way. And not in ways that disconnect you. That's probably the biggest thing for me is when you start counting grams, you get disconnected from your body. You get all in your head. When you start judging your body to make sure you're doing it right, you're disconnecting from your body again. Things that keep you connected and in your body are what I'm all about encouraging.VirginiaI love that.Are there any habits or lifestyle practices, or anything that you're like, "well, if people could add on something...?" And I realize I sound like I'm undermining our whole conversation here, because I'm like, "tell us one habit we need to have!" and that's not what you're about. But I'm just curious what you think people benefit from doing more of in midlife? DebMy number one go-to is adequacy. I am very afraid that people are starting with a diet culture mindset which is so inadequate for supporting our bodies. And I notice that the symptoms of being undernourished are exactly the same symptoms that women experience in menopause. Brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, problems with sleep, loss of libido. It’s the exact same list. So I worry that this "blast your belly fat" conversation is contributing to our menopausal experience, peri and post. You are not going to age well if you are living with scarcity and under-nourishing your brain and body. So that's my number one concern, because I hear it so often, and because diet culture has so skewed our perception of what is adequate. I feel like it's a very common experience. Trying to feed yourself throughout the day, trying not to skip, because there's a lot of that going on, a lot of skipping. Because morally, we feel like we are being good and superior thanks to diet culture when we ignore a request for fuel from our body, that little hunger that pops up. And you're going to have more food noise, by the way. I don't know if you want to get into GLP-1s today, probably not.VirginiaI mean, when are we not getting into it? Feel free to throw it in. DebI would not be getting into it if it wasn't so commonly recommended. The new thing now is microdosing for the menopausal changes in your body. I mean, I'm not going to make a bold statement against GLP-1s, because I have many clients that are benefiting, that are in recovery with type 2 diabetes, that are benefiting and doing well. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this facelift plus GLP-1 phenomenon. I believe in bodily autonomy, so I also don't want to diss anybody from making that choice, but discerning what you want from what the social construct is imposing on you requires some time. And that's the other thing that I want people to do in midlife, is to do some checking in with themselves, to get some clarity about what they really want versus what they think they should do. And how can you tell the difference?VirginiaWell I love all of that, and it feels, in so many ways, more doable than counting your protein grams and wearing your weighted vest. I hope people are receiving it that way. And your book is just such a great guide. It's like being in conversation with you. You're just so warm and wise and grounded and gently moving people through what can be heavy work, but there's a lot of joy to it as well.DebYeah, thank you. I tried to create little body breaks, chances for people to just go drink some tea and look at the sky, take a few breaths, because it can be very hard to look at the stories you carry about your body, and do you want to still carry that.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterDebI am in love with the Samin Nosrat book.VirginiaThe new one?DebYes, Good Things. Well, the old one too, but the new one.VirginiaAnything Samin does, really.DebAbsolutely. I mean, her work is such a beautiful antidote to diet culture. I send people to her Netflix series, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, because it's pure food joy, without a single tiny second of nutrition anxiety. It's so rare to find. It's so rare. But she has this--what does she call it? The roasted vegetable salad matrix? I've  dog-eared that page. I just keep it on my counter, because there are so many cool ideas about mixing and matching, and that's kind of how I cook anyway. It's like, what do I have? What's on sale? Can I do some extra roasting on the weekend when I have time? And what can I throw together as I go through the week? Little bit of crunchy, a little bit of bright acid, little bit of sweet. You can make sure you throw your protein in there, too.VirginiaI haven't gotten all the way through the cookbook yet, but I love it, and I love the way she writes about food, and about giving herself permission to seek pleasure. There's a really lovely essay in there about that.DebAnd not perfection! I mean, she rages against that perfection piece, which I think is so helpful. And try to invite people to join each other. Because the other piece about aging is you want to stay in community as much as you can.VirginiaWell, that leads us perfectly into my Butter, which is last night I had the absolute joy of going into Brooklyn for Kate Baer's book launch event with Joanna Goddard at Books Are Magic. Kate Baer is a phenomenal feminist poet. I probably don't need to introduce her work to anybody. Her new book is called, How About Now? There are so many fantastic poems in it. And just the experience of sitting in—it was actually in a church because Kate draws such a big crowd, they have to have it off-site from the bookstore. So we were in a Unitarian Church, and there were probably at least 300 women, most of us in midlife or beyond, just sitting together to celebrate poems about our lives that make us feel seen. I have goosebumps just thinking about it again the next day. It was really such a gift to be in community with so many women. DebThat sounds amazing. VirginiaKate is such a sweetheart, and I’ve been rooting for her a long time. Yes, now let's talk more about your work. People need to preorder Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body. It's out December 16. That makes it a fantastic holiday gift for any midlife person and beyond midlife person in your life. What else? How can we find you and support your work? What else can we do? DebWell I have a Substack called Unapologetic Aging and you can find me by my name. I am most commonly found on social media on Instagram, but you can find me anywhere, just by my name, Deb Benfield.VirginiaThank you so much for being here. Deb, DebI just want to say one more thing about purchasing the book. The last time we were together, we talked a lot about grandmothers and mothers and the generations, and I think my book is the perfect gift for your mother, If you're trying to have this conversation. VirginiaI agree with that. All the Burnt Toasties who write to me and say, "What do I do about the thing my mom says?" This is what you do.DebAnd have a conversation. VirginiaAbsolutely. Thank you so much for being here. DebThis was really wonderful. Thanks for having me. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Support Anti-Diet Journalism!

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• [PREVIEW] How Much Did You Pay Your Pumpkin Stylist?

  Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your November Extra Butter episode.Today we're talking about our problematic faves! These are shows, musicians, influencers and other pockets of culture that we want to enjoy without thinking much about them, even if there's discourse. We'll get into: Our favorite Bad Skinny Girl TV shows. The straight man who has Corinne's heart. Is Virginia a pick-me girl now? And so many more!!! To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber. If you haven't joined us yet — we've extended your Burnt Toast gift access deadline! Check your email for "claim your free month by 11/20!" And do it TODAY! Join Extra Butter🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 219 TranscriptCorinneToday, we're going to do a fun little episode where we talk about problematic faves...although it's a little more nuanced than that. This is kind of inspired by a TikTok by Caro Claire Burke. She also has a Substack, and a podcast which we love. Caro says: The inherent flaw of a platform like TikTok, for a cultural critic like me, but also just for anyone, is that you look on someone's feed and you only see the shit they care about. And you get the impression that this person is constantly, chronically online, and that they care about everything. And that makes me feel tired with other people, and it makes me feel really tired with myself. So I thought I would cleanse my feet a little bit by sharing five things I couldn't be bothered to care about, five things where I constantly go, it's not that deep—even though it probably is that deep—as a means of just creating a small sanctuary for myself in a world that is rapidly falling to shit. And her list includes the Skims Merkin, discourse about whether protesting is cringe, her own marriage, and Hailey Bieber.VirginiaInteresting choice for her to put her own marriage on the list. I honestly respect it. CorinneIt's like, if it's working, don't look at it too hard, you know?VirginiaI love this whole concept. I think Caro does great work. But it was a really hard assignment for me! Because we are so chronically online and we care and we dissect everything. I think it's a good exercise though. Not because we don't want to hold problematic people accountable, but because we do get to be people, and sometimes just exist and just let something exist. Okay, so you're like, cringe-ing, a little every time I say problematic fave. Is that just because it's a very overused term, or because you think that's not quite what we're doing?CorinneGood question. I feel like the things on my list aren't necessarily problematic? Or they're not problematic yet, but I don't want to look too deeply into this, you know? I want to let it be something I enjoy, and not have to wrestle with it. I think there's also a way in which we try so hard to do things right with consumerism, like, boycott the right brands and shop for things in the correct way, or hold people accountable. And yes, we should do that. We should try to make the world a better place. And, it's exhausting, and we can't realistically do everything right all the time.VirginiaI think that's really fair. Maybe the other reason these aren't quite problematic faves is we are not naming people or institutions...Oh wait, I might be? But we're trying not to name people or institutions who have a known track record of already being wildly offensive in some way. But we see the potential for them to go in that direction. Now that I said that, there are a couple on my list that are already maybe problematic. So we'll get there. But it's different from being like, "this person is a well established problem, and I just find them delightful anyway." It's more like, oh, this could be a thing, but let's not overthink it right now.  I feel like this is a little like brain break we all need.CorinneOkay, the first one that came to mind for me was TV related. I feel like there's a certain genre of show that I like to watch that is very fluffy, very detached from reality, or at least my reality, and I just like to watch it. So I just can't really get that much into the discourse. And I'm talking about shows like Emily in Paris, And Just Like That, the Sex in the City reboot. I just want to zone out and watch them.VirginiaI mean, we did do a Live all about how bad the final season of And Just Like That, was. CorinneIt's true. VirginiaSo we did contribute to the discourse. And I totally agree with you. We were like, well we're watching it anyway!CorinneAnd now that it has been canceled, I do feel a real loss.VirginiaTurns out I do want to see women in their 50s wearing absolutely absurd outfits and spending far too much money on cocktails. Where else are we going to find that in our lives? My first one is also TV-related and very adjacent. I put down Nobody Wants This, the Kristen Bell, Adam Brody romcom, but this is a whole genre, I think. And Just Like That, Emily in Paris, Nobody Wants This. There are so many! I call them Bad Skinny Girl TV.CorinneOh, wow. I mean, Emily in Paris is absolutely Bad Skinny Girl TV.VirginiaThe thing I have to be mindful of with these shows is, if I watch too many, too constantly, it can trigger some body stuff. That's my one legit flag on these shows. If you look at too many really skinny, pretty Hollywood actresses, sometimes it starts to get into your brain a little. So, you know, be mindful about that. But otherwise, it's like Nobody Wants This...the second season was so dumb. It was so dumb, it was just a retread. CorinneI didn't even know there was a second season. VirginiaMy 12 year old and I just binged it. Kristen Bell plays a just sort of unlikable main character. But because it's Kristen Bell, you're along for the ride regardless. She's being immature and making strange choices and wearing so many odd shirts. I don't really understand who chose the shirts for that show. They always have weird holes in them, or, like, barely cover her torso in some complicated way? And yet I was like, yeah, seems greatCorinneNow that we're saying this. I'm also thinking abotu how I love to watch all the detective, cop, FBI, CIA, MI5 shows. Also extremely problematic. Propaganda for evil forces.VirginiaACAB, except for TV cops? CorinneI know in my heart these are forces for evil. And, like, I love to watch them on TV. VirginiaWe will solve this murder.CorinneI'm rooting for the detective.VirginiaThese shows I'm talking about also often do often have some thinly veiled, or not-so-veiled fatphobia. And I am just, for the most part, able to just sail on through it. I will also put something like Gilmore Girls in this category. There is a valuable cultural discourse around Gilmore Girls. There's a lot about it that doesn't age well. And it will still be a comfort watch for me forever. All right, what's next for you?CorinneAll right. Well, this came up when we were discussing doing this episode. I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna have to really think about what mine are..." And you were like, "Yours is The Gap." And to be clear: The Gap does not make my size. I cannot wear clothes from The Gap. And yet, I'm constantly looking at their website. I like their clothes, and I feel like I've recommended them to you, Virginia, because I'm like, "well if you can wear them, you might as well." Like, I'm not interested in being mad at The Gap for not making my size.VirginiaYou’re like "They get a pass, their advertising is so charming."CorinneI think with The Gap specifically, I have some deep-seated childhood stuff, because The Gap factory outlet was the closest real clothing store to where I grew up. It was just where I just wanted to go. VirginiaIt was the beacon of fashion and culture in 1990s Maine.CorinneBut I do feel like I maybe have this more broadly with clothes where I'm just kind of like, "if they make something and it fits you, you should wear it."VirginiaBecause the options are so slim. And I think I'm always like, "No, I have a responsibility as someone who can wear this brand, because I should be trying to put my money towards the brands that are more size inclusive."And I think that's true, and I'm wearing a pair of Gap jeans while we record this conversation. But I hear you, you're like, "I have nostalgia for this brand. The clothes are cute." Why are you going to waste energy being mad at The Gap for not being better. There are just other hills to die on? But also, Gap, make plus size clothes! Old Navy is doing it. CorinneIt's so dumb. It's truly just boggling.VirginiaYou're the same company. If they can do it, you can do it. I just really believe you can. So I am mad at The Gap, but Corinne is giving them a pass.CorinneWhat else do you have?VirginiaOkay, my next ones are the home design influencers Chris and Julia Marcum. They are @chrislovesjulia on Instagram. To be clear, I've written a think piece about Julia Marcum, so I have applied the discourse to her. And I continue to follow them. And it's weird, because their aesthetic is not my aesthetic. I don't know how familiar you are with their content?CorinneI'm not familiar. I'm only familiar with them because I've heard you mentioned them so many times.VirginiaOkay so quick backstory: The Marcums are Mormon home design influencers. They live in North Carolina now, where they moved for her health from Idaho, which has a complicated backstory. And they have three daughters and a really pretty Bernese mountain dog. Their current home is enormous. The previous home was enormous. They live in these enormous homes, which she's decorating as if they were historic mansions? Her taste is so intense. Just click around at some of the visuals and you'll see what I mean. And it is a hyper level of overconsumption. I experience the ick regularly while looking at her content. I'm like, oh she's already put in a 30 foot long marble kitchen island, what more can she add? And then she does. They just bought a lake house they're going to start renovating that is bigger than most people's homes they live in. It's this just excessive display of wealth and consumerism. And I'm fascinated by it, and have purchased more than one item she has recommended.CorinneBecause it's not a hate follow or hate watch?VirginiaWell, they are a problematic fave. I think they are actively problematic. I think they are representing the peak of influencer culture, where they're constantly pushing Amazon Prime stuff, they're constantly pushing Wayfair, they're constantly rolling out a new product line to sell you. They're very much pushing the idea that your house should be a level of perfect that none of us can actually sustain. That you should always be renovating every room. They renovated their entire living room, and then re-renovated the entire room. Every room is always getting done in this super intense manner. It's bad![Post-recording note: Actually, they painted and decorated their living room, to a degree that most of us would have said was "done." And then fully renovated the same space.]CorinneAnd you look at it and you're like, yeah, I am going to buy that.VirginiaI'm like, it's so cozy. It's not even my taste! I just, I don't know something about it is weirdly soothing.CorinneHow did you discover these people? VirginiaI don't know how I discovered her. I mean, I follow a lot of home design content. I like home design. It's a soothing hobby of mine. But I have realized it's a tricky hobby to have on the Internet, because influencing as a business model makes it always, more and more and more in this way that's tricky. You should see their backyard. They have this outdoor kitchen that could seat 12. It's wild. CorinneThe dream. VirginiaIt's not even! But it is weirdly addictive. CorinneOkay. My next one is Chapell Roan. VirginiaI was going to put her on my list, but I couldn't really think of anything problematic about her! CorinnePeople are constantly getting mad at her on TikTok, I can't even remember why. It's like, she complains, and then people get mad that she's complaining, and I just can't. I'm just like, "Leave her alone."VirginiaYeah, I'm not following that at all. That's not interesting to me.CorinneIt just happens periodically.VirginiaOh, because she did the whole thing about, like, "I'm not going to talk to you if you say hi to me in public?"CorinneThat was one. It's happened a few times. Occasionally she'll get mad about something, or get worked, up about something, and then will post kind of a ranty TikTok, and then people have a big backlash to that, and I just can't. VirginiaOh my god, she's a 26-year-old pop sensation. Just let her be, let her be herself.CorinneI feel the same about Sabrina Carpenter. I like her. Sorry. Everyone hated that album cover. I don't care. I just can't. I wrote a Substack post about it. I don't care. I think the album cover is fine. I like her music. I think she's really cute and funny. VirginiaThere was take after take on the Sabrina Carpenter album. Can we not? CorinneI just love her.VirginiaI mean, this is reminding me of that great chapter in Samantha Irby's most recent book, where she talks about liking something that people think is bad and that she's just like, "Well, I like it." No follow up. And the power of just being like, "Well, I like that bad thing."CorinneDefinitely how I felt about And Just Like That.VirginiaClearly not how I feel about Chris Loves Julia, but maybe it should be? Anyway, yeah, Sabrina Carpenter. Chappell Roan is constantly playing over here. I'm not interested in investigating further. All right, my next one is definitely inspired by this is one of the things that I've taken from the Julia Marcum aesthetic. But it is also its own standalone trend. She's just one of the influencers pushing it, which is porch pumpkins. Are you aware of the porch pumpkins craze? CorinneIs this just like putting a pumpkin on your porch? VirginiaNo, it's putting piles of pumpkins on your porch. CorinneOh, okay, I have seen people do that.VirginiaWait, there was a Wall Street Journal article. I'll find it.CorinneWhen I see people do this, I'm like, I'm tired. I don't have the energy to be stacking pumpkins on my porch.VirginiaAccording to the WSJ, "Families are paying north of $1,000 to create Insta perfect tableaus for porches and yards." CorinneOkay, so how much did you pay for your pumpkin stylist?VirginiaLet me tell you about me and my porch pumpkins. I've been craving this look for a few years, ever since Julia Marcum first posted it. And she bought fake pumpkins, which she just keeps on hand and brings out every year to make her pile of pumpkins. And I was like, well, that's actually a more like responsible way to do it, right? To buy and reuse your pumpkins every year? Except then I priced out her pumpkin collection, and it was like, $800 and I said to my then-husband, like, should I buy all these pumpkins? And he said, no. CorinneAnd that's why you got divorced.VirginiaExactly, yes. No — he was right. But every fall, I'm like, I kind of wish I had that. It looks pretty. I'm not going to spend that money, but it does look cool. So then this year the kids wanted to get pumpkins. And so Jack and I took them to a little local pumpkin patch, and I discovered the trick is to go the Saturday before Halloween. The pumpkins are on deep discount. And I now have 14 pumpkins on my front porch that I spent only $70 on.Corinne14 pumpkins is a lot. VirginiaIt is a lot! They just kept giving us more. I paid $70 for maybe, like, seven pumpkins. And I was still like, well, $10 a pumpkin. We'll feed them to the chickens. Jack's like, I can bake something with this cheese pumpkin. I was like, it's it's fine. And then they were like, here. Take more. Take more. I was like, well, now the pumpkins are basically paying me to be on my porch.CorinneSo funny. VirginiaI think it looks delightful and harvest-y, and I like that. It's a trend that works for both Halloween and Thanksgiving. So you can leave it up for a while. And then you could feed the pumpkins to your chickens, or bake with them, if that was the type of person you were, or throw them in your woods and let the deer eat them, which is what I would also do. CorinneWhen I was at my mom's house in Maine, we did get a pumpkin for her front steps, and it immediately got eaten by squirrels.VirginiaAnother reason to wait until the Saturday before Halloween. So you're not trying to make this trend last all fall. I think it's also like, at this time of year, I'm getting sad about the leaves falling. I'm getting sad about the coming cold, anything that makes me like anything better. It's a pile of pumpkins. They're pretty, that's all.CorinneThey are. The pumpkins in this photo are very beautiful. VirginiaYeah, no, that's the key. You don't just get orange pumpkins, you get the Cinderella pumpkins, the fancy gourds and whatnot.CorinneAnd also, how is this WSJ article/photo, leaving out the fact that there are 14 foot tall skeletons in the background?VirginiaYes, in that photo, they are also doing the very tall skeletons, which is a trend I'm not on because I don't know where to store it. Where does one store the 12-foot skeleton the rest of the year?CorinneI don't know. And those are also like $500, I think.VirginiaThey're not cheap. That's like $2,000 in Halloween decorations just on their porch. It's a commitment. And I didn't go that route, but I just enjoy it. That's all.CorinneDid you put them out and step back and rearrange them? VirginiaI sure did. CorinneOkay, my next one is Tom Colicchio from Top Chef. I love to watch Top Chef. I find Tom Colicchio delightful. Do you watch Top Chef? You don't. VirginiaI know nothing about him. He's a person who exists in the world, is what I know.CorinneHe's a chef. He is a host of Top Chef. He's a little like, tough love, you know? He's very critical. He'll really tell you what's working or not. But he also is a heart of gold, good guy. And I don't want to know if he's a bad person in real life. I find him very lovable. VirginiaYou don't want there to be a scandal.CorinneI'm queer, but I'm very here for Tom Colicchio. He's balding. He's always wearing weird hats and stuff. I just love him.VirginiaThat's adorable. Wait, I have to Google him so I have a face. CorinneHe's not like, a hot guy. At least I don't think so. VirginiaI need to know what man attracts Corinne. Ok, ok I get it.CorinneI would not necessarily say he's my type.VirginiaWell and he's 63, he's a little old for you. CorinneHe is, and I think he's happily married. I just find him lovable.VirginiaWell, I think that's great to just unequivocally love a straight, white man. How often can we say that? That's a good one. All right, between porch pumpkins and Mormon home design people and now what I'm about to say, I am just really outing myself as a bougie suburban mom. It is what it is. But my next one is the Starbucks drive through. I do love the Starbucks drive through. It is not environmentally friendly. It is not a company I feel good about giving dollars to. I do boycott them when people remind me about the boycott. But when I am doing my mom thing, running errands, getting kids to places, the Starbucks in our town is right near where we go for doctor's appointments, and sometimes you need a cake pop or an egg bite to get you through a medical thing. And that's right there with the coffee.CorinneWhen I saw this on the outline, I was like, am I going to admit that I also love the Starbucks drive-through. VirginiaPlease do! Solidarity. CorinneI am going to admit that, and I will say I did boycott them for a while because of the unionization stuff, and my solution to that now has been to go to the Starbucks in my town that is unionized. So I will say you can look up if there's a unionized Starbucks near you. Worth looking into. VirginiaI'm sure there's not. [Post-recording note: But there is in NYC!]CorinneAnd I did just double check and they're not on the BDS list, which I thought they were.VirginiaThat makes me feel a little better.CorinneI know. I love to go to a cool local coffee shop. And then sometimes I just want that sugary stuff. I also never know the sizes. I'm always like, can I have the large and they're like, venti? But I want, like, the tall, sweet, milky drink.VirginiaJack is not a Starbucks guy at all, and does not speak Starbucks. And we went to Starbucks when we were traveling, and my whole family orders all of our complicated drinks. And he's just like, can I just have a black coffee? And they were like, what?CorinneI feel like you can get him into it. VirginiaAll our complicated drinks came out, and they were like, a coffee? Did you say you wanted a black coffee? It took them, like, an hour to just make him a regular. CorinneI know. There’s a whole thing. I feel like fast food restaurants you have to, like, learn how to order from them.VirginiaYou have to speak the lingo. When I'm dealing with my voice stuff, which I periodically am, people can probably hear I'm a little raspy today. The medicine ball at Starbucks, which is an off menu item, is a really good get if you're having a sore throat.CorinneYeah, I will also say they're incredible for traveling. When I'm doing road trips, I'll often go in the morning, because they open at 5 or 6.VirginiaAnd you can get something predictable, like, you know what it's going to be, and you know you can eat their egg sandwich.CorinneI also want to add that I know a lot of them do actually pay better than smaller coffee shops and offer a lot of benefits that small businesses don't or can't.VirginiaI feel that information is both excellent to have, and not in the spirit of this episode. CorinneTrue.VirginiaBecause now you are discoursing Starbucks. CorinneI'm so sorry. I really am. VirginiaIt's okay. I discoursed Julia Marcum quite a bit. It's hard to talk about these things without discourse. I also just want to say drive-throughs in general are such a help to parents or anyone caregiving, because you can get the thing you need and not have to get the kids out of the car. My kids are old and they can get themselves in and out of the car, but in my infant/toddler years, oh man. I was like, Why can't everything be drive through?CorinneAlso for driving cross country with a dog. I don't want to leave her in the car if it's 100 degrees, but I do need to get food. VirginiaI do need to eat! So this is how we do it. So, drive-throughs are bad for the environment and also great sometimes. CorinneOkay, the last one on my list is Lizzo. VirginiaWhoa, problematic fave. Sorry, she is.CorinneI know, but I like her music, and I find her charming and delightful, even when she's talking about diets on podcasts. I'm just like, okay, I feel I can ignore it. VirginiaWell, look. If we're going to look past the flaws of our Bad, Skinny Girl TV, why wouldn't we look past the flaws of Black, fat women, you know what I mean? She deserves the same pass.CorinneThat is how I feel.VirginiaI love her music. My eight year old loves her music because she learned the word bitch from it. And she  likes to use the word bitch, and then be like, "I'm saying it in the Lizzo way, Mama." CorinneOh, that's funny.VirginiaAll right, speaking of my kids, I brought up this whole concept at dinner last night because I was trying to brainstorm my list. And I was like, guys, you have to help me think of my problematic faves. And I said, maybe the Eagles / NFL is a new problematic fave? Which I've gotten into because of Jack. And Jack was immediately like, yep, yep, it's super problematic, and I love it. So Jack's a huge Eagles fan. I've started watching Eagles games with him. I don't know what's happening, but I'm here for the player gossip and the sort of general world of it, which I find interesting. And I'm usually reading a book or doing something else while we're watching, but I like it. And I said at dinner, "Well, it's not like I really understand what's going on with the sport. I just kind of like the atmosphere of it."And my 12 year old goes, "Mama, now you're being a pick me girl!" And I was like, wait, am I? What's a pick me girl? And she said, "You're like, 'I don't know what's going on with the sport. Like, only boys really understand it. But I just like it, I guess.' That's such a pick me girl thing to do. You only like it because your boyfriend does!"CorinneI do think there's a pick me thing about being into sports because boys are into sports.VirginiaWell, I'm 44 and I've never before in my life attempted to like sports at all. And she was like, yeah, that makes it worse. It'd be different if you'd always liked it. Because my dad's side of the family is really into football. She's like, "You never watched it growing up with Granddad." I was like, no, I sure didn't. Wasn't a pick me girl then. CorinneWow. Called out.VirginiaCalled out. Middle schoolers are brutal. I was like,"Does my feminist credibility get me off the hook on this at all?" And the eight-year-old wants me to add that once they understood the concept of a pick me girl, they now co sign that Mama is being a pick me girl about football and no, being a good feminist does not erase that.CorinneGetting ganged up on! I do think sports is a good example of this, though. VirginiaI mean, the NFL is a mess. We were watching a game last week where this guy on the Giants broke his full foot off?! It was terrible. And he's like 20-something, and probably his football career just ended. CorinneThat's really awful.VirginiaAnd Jack told me the NFL is a 501c3, which seems wrong. They make quite a lot of money. I don't think they should be a nonprofit.[Post-recording note: They were actually a 5016b and gave up that status in 2015, but the point still stands.]CorinneYeah, that is confusing. VirginiaNot great. But Eagles does have an Autism Research Foundation, so that's nice. And I've noticed a lot of, a lot of feminist Hollywood people I like, really like the Eagles. Quinta Brunson is a huge Eagles fan. Also, Hannah Einbender from Hacks, said "Go birds" in her Emmy acceptance speech, along with "Free Palestine." And I was like, yep, here for both those things. So a lot of cool people like the Eagles.CorinneThe Eagles do seem like the the team to back.VirginiaThey're like the progressive team. I mean, until they're not, because it's football, and they trade the players around all the time. I don't know. I truly don't understand the sport at all, which apparently, again, is making it worse. CorinneI feel like, eventually you'll start. VirginiaI mean, I can't underscore enough that I did grow up in a football family, and none of it ever penetrated, so I had a lot of chances. I'm enjoying it more now.CorinneI'm into football for the snacks.VirginiaYes, I'm enjoying the food and, the Sunday afternoon ritual of it. On a Sunday afternoon, I just want to lay on the couch and chill. So sure, it could be football. It could be bad skinny girl TV. I'm just letting it wash over me totally and eating good snacks. ButterVirginiaOkay should we switch to non-problematic faves and do some Butter? CorinneYes, absolutely. What's your Butter?VirginiaMy Butter is that it is time to plant your fall bulbs. If you have not done it already. I really recommend everybody do some bulb planting. No matter how nascent of a gardener you are, you can't fuck up bulb planting. Like, get a bag of daffodil bulbs and dig some holes and put, three bulbs in each hole and cover them up. And that's all you have to do. CorinneWow. Maybe I should do that! VirginiaIt's so easy. It's very foolproof gardening. Bulbs are really like, you don't have to water. You just stick them in the ground. It doesn't even matter if you get them right side up, they figure it out underground. They're like, oh, I'm upside down. I'll flip around somehow. I don't know how they do it, but they'll be fine. And then in the spring, you're going to have daffodils, and you're going to be so happy. CorinneThat is a good Butter.VirginiaI try to plant them every year. Last fall I skipped and I regretted it. Critters do eat some, but daffodils are pretty bulletproof. And also alliums, nobody really wants to eat them. So those are my recommendations. Do some bulb planting. CorinneCool. That's a good rec. I'm going to recommend a recipe which is Korean BBQ style meatballs from New York Times Cooking. It's a really good recipe. It's very easy. It's a low lift. It's ground beef, crushed ritz crackers, scallions, soy sauce, garlic. And you basically just mash that all together, make it into little balls and then bake it. And it's very filling and delicious, and goes with any kind of carb-y thing you want to serve it with. I've been eating it with potatoes. VirginiaThis sounds awesome,.CorinneIt's just delicious and satisfying and easy.VirginiaAll right, I want people to tell us what their problematic--I'm sorry I don't have a better term--what their problematic faves are, what their moments of culture where you are unavailable for discourse. You just want to enjoy it. What are yours? Put them in the comments! I feel like we may need to do a master list of delightful favorite things. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

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