The book starts off with a conservation about her eating habits, which spirals into other various triggering conversations. Additionally, at the beginning of the book, you immediately recognize that Rachel is dealing with an eating disorder, and has been for the majority of her life due to childhood trauma. There are quite a few weird and disturbing fantasies that the main character, Rachel, talks about in great detail, which may be off-putting for some readers. I want to start off this review by explicitly stating that this book will NOT be for everyone. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche-both sacred and profane. Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam-by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family-and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting-until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.Įarly in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion.

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