Every story and every memory from my childhood is attached to food,” Dawn Lerman writes.
Our relationship with food starts at a very young age: what and how we eat is often determined by our environment and our upbringing. Our eating habits and tastes are cultivated by our family members’ relationships to food, for better or worse. Dawn knows this first hand. The author of the New York Times Well Blog series, “My Fat Dad,” shares her food journey and that of her father, a brilliant copywriter from the “Mad Men” era of advertising at Leo Burnett and McCann Erickson, in her new book, “My Fat Dad: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Family, with Recipes.”
Dawn spent her early childhood in Chicago constantly hungry as her ad man father—responsible for such iconic slogans such as “Fly the Friendly Skies,” “Coke is It,” and “Leggo My Eggo”—pursued endless fad diets from Atkins to Pritikin. At 450 pounds at his heaviest, he insisted Dawn and her mother adopt to his saccharine-laced, freeze-dried food plans to help keep him on track.
“As far back as I can remember, there was an invisible wall that separated me from my dad, a distance that I could never completely penetrate,” Dawn remembers. “His closest relationship was with the bathroom scale – his first stop every morning and his last stop every evening. The scale controlled his moods, our days, what we were going to eat and basically ruled our family life.”
Dawn’s mother never cooked and she witnessed her mother eat only one real meal a day—a can of tuna over the kitchen sink—while she dashed from audition to audition pursuing an acting career.
Dawn felt undernourished both physically and emotionally except for one saving grace: the loving attention she received from her grandmother, Beauty. Dawn spent every weekend with Beauty, and their time together instilled in Dawn a passion for cooking for oneself and others as she learned that the best food is prepared with the freshest ingredients. When she was with Beauty, Dawn learned to enjoy the adventure of picking out vegetables for supper, and spent hours precisely rolling out dough for the perfect strudel.
When Dawn’s father took a prestigious new ad job in New York City with McCann Erickson when she was nine, Beauty’s culinary education continued as she sent Dawn a recipe card every week with a twenty-dollar bill. Beauty’s recipe cards became Dawn’s life-line as she navigated Manhattan on her own.
When McCann Erickson suggested Dawn’s father spend six months at a Fat Farm in North Carolina in order to get a promotion, ten-year-old Dawn accompanied him for a summer. When they returned she tried to help him maintain his 175-pound weight loss by cooking her grandmother’s recipe cards with a healthy twist. From macrobiotics pie, to salmon with fennel and leeks (learned while spending a summer at Duke’s Fat Farm with her father), to Beauty’s family recipes, Dawn reflects on her colorful family and how food shaped her connections to those she loved.
