What If You Weren’t Scared of Your Kid Being Fat?

In an early episode of her podcast, Burnt Toast, Virginia Sole-Smith joked about starting a regular segment called “Can my kid eat that?” where the answer would always be “Yes!” A self-described anti-diet journalist, she wasn’t really joking: “I get a version of this question every single week, so I’m going to keep answering it.” How many days per week can a 2-year-old eat ice cream? “There are seven days in a week. Your child can have ice cream seven days a week. There is no law against this.” What about a 13-year-old who, left to their own devices, would eat an entire box of Oreos? “Pour a glass of milk — so they can dunk them?”

“Oreos come up a lot, man,” Sole-Smith says, laughing while snacking on a bowl of Cheez-Its in her home office in the Hudson Valley. “I mean, I like Oreos fine, but it’s really the fact that you’re not letting yourself have Oreos that makes it feel like Oh my God, I’ll be powerless over them.” She seems more amused than exasperated, though she finds herself repeating this point often — that restricting food only makes us more obsessed with it. A 41-year-old mother of two, she knows her generation has been programmed to believe that allowing their kids unlimited access to sugar and processed foods is unhealthy or even bad parenting. A central premise of her work is that, actually, it isn’t.

It’s a bad day for journalism: BuzzFeed is shutting down its news division, and Insider laid off 10 percent of its staff. Sea-turtle nests around the world are in danger from flooding. In far less depressing news, SpaceX’s Starship exploded today Succession style, but we’ve gotta give props to the principal integration engineer for his commitment to spinning the narrative, describing the event as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello are reportedly back together, so get ready for more zombie pap walks. We’re saying, “Hell yes!” to Dorilocos. And we’re saying that Katie Holmes is so friggin’ cool, man.

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