no okay the other thing that’s so fascinating about roman’s particular eating habits. and i don’t think the show is really doing this on purpose but it’s still there so whatever. is that you do see him eating fruit, specifically, and like... fairly often, relative to the other characters. it always reminds me of those cases of ‘fasting girls’ in the middle ages and early modern period because so many of those cases will report that they only/specifically ate fruit (often berries iirc?) and they’d have all these reasons. like fruit wasn’t ‘sustenance’, so their bodies were still ‘unsullied’ by food; it was insubstantial in a way that other foods weren’t; its sweetness often recategorised it and made it not ‘count’. and then some of these girls also just had their own idiosyncratic logics about it as well

like i’m not saying roman is a medieval fasting girl, lmao, but i do think it’s an interesting window into how not-eating can be slotted into so many different cultural and social narratives, and different meanings can be made from it. fasting girls typically portrayed themselves as transcending the body (by destroying it... naturally) but also as, like, victims of their own lack of appetite. often that lack was construed as being a gift or curse from god, hence the phrase “anorexia mirabilis” (miraculous lack of appetite)

and then like, fasting girls weren’t quite the same as, eg, a catholic saint like augustine, who didn’t eat (or drink water, which some fasting girls did and others didn’t) specifically because he sought a higher spiritual pleasure than the simple bodily enjoyment of sating his hunger. he wasn’t seeking pain, per se, but he did feel that physical pleasure was at best a distraction from his worship, and at worst a self-indulgent perversion of his spiritual nature. and then augustine, in turn, wasn’t quite the same as the protestant self-denialist dietary reformers of, eg, 19th-21st century america, who often did/do seek suffering for its own sake in a very pointed way** 

and then there are others still: for example, hunger artists who starved themselves as a public art form. in kafka’s short story, the hunger artist does experience hunger and pain and misery, but also can’t find a food he likes. he’s ultimately replaced by a panther who “wants for nothing”—that is, the not-eating is relocated to a discourse of desiring. or, simone weil ‘feeding on light’ rather than food, which obviously draws from stuff like augustine but is configured with a distinct philosophical understanding of god. or even, like, chris kraus’s “aliens & anorexia” which draws from weil but is a very different attempt to speak and recreate the language of not-eating (& also ties it to sex and love and aliens... actually i think romangirls [gn] should read that book)

and then all of these are distinct from our current dsm reading of not-eating, which toggles between 1) it’s a Brain Sickness that needs a medical cure or 2) it’s an act of free will in pursuit of [control/beauty/love/etc]. and this can be traced to maudsley’s case studies, but also to the early 19th century psychiatrists (aliénistes) who laid a lot of the modern groundwork re: the stomach-brain connection, the use of force-feeding to treat various illnesses, etc

anyway like. no two people who don’t-eat are going to experience that the exact same way, but there are still these sorts of families of experiences. archetypal narratives i guess. and i do get a kick out of the thought that roman’s experience of not-eating is, at least cosmetically, a little medieval. though in his case, obviously he also has a lot of psychosexual baggage (“i eat you, you eat me”) and like a million other things going on lol

**max weber kind of sucks and this divide is more complicated and historically contingent than just catholic vs protestant but whatever