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Double chocolate ice cream soothed my pains and let me know that everything would be all right. Frozen pound cake wrapped its arms around me and gave me comfort. Oreos made love to me, and take-out lasagna sated my passions.

Food has always been center stage in the lives of humans. Like air and water, it's a building block of our survival. But we celebrate food. Feasts mark our passages through life and food can give us a pleasure as special and keen as any solitary sexual pleasure. Food pleases and eases our souls.

We are a gregarious species, we humans. We need to gather together. We need support, nurturance and intimacy from others. We need to talk and touch. We need a lot and sometimes we don't get all we need. Especially we black women.

Our cooking never lets us down. Like singing, dancing and athletics, cooking is a place where we blacks are allowed, even expected, to shine. Our kitchens are the hearts of our homes. We cook and feed and nurture. We comfort and give and at the end of the day we sit at our table and we comfort ourselves too. Good food is like good lovin'. There's no such thing as too much.

Good food had taken us through the fire and we've survived. A big woman was a strong woman and Lord knows we needed all the strength we could get. We had to be the strong ones, strong for our families, for our communities, for ourselves. Strong for our men too, because that was one thing they weren't allowed to be. A strong black man is a threatening black man. So whom do we lean on when the world is heavy on our shoulders and our backs are bowed?

We cry out to the Lord and moan in the church. We fan our faces and lift our heads, gathering strength from the Lord. And we reach for another slice of cornbread. Being slim was the least of our concerns. If the food was there and it tasted good, we'd be fools not to eat it.

It's only in the latest generations have we come into competition with white women. In our grandmother's time it was unheard of for a black woman to be judged on a white woman's terms. No, we are not on equal terms with them yet, but with every generation that passes we come closer. Now, we go head to head with them on promotions. We may audition for the same Hollywood roles. We possibly draw the glance of the occasional white man who is above considering color when he looks for his potential mate. And if we are thin enough, we may even make the cover of Vogue magazine. To compete on their playing field, we've accepted their rules.

We know how important being slim is to them. When we step outside our own world, fat is no longer strong, proud and fine. In the main, white America perceives fat people as uncontrolled, uncaring, sloppy, dirty, low-class. If we judge ourselves by their terms, fat is bad and food becomes the enemy. . . . continued.