A reflection on intergenerational hunger, healing, and the body as home.
I was born in 1985 and grew up in a small North Queensland town. When I started primary school I was the only visibly non-white kid: half Australian, half Chinese Malaysian, learning early what “different” looked like. Later, when my parents moved me to a bigger primary school (largely due to being bullied), my brother and I were two of the very few kids who were visibly Asian or mixed-Asian.
By the time boys entered the picture in late primary school and high school, I’d already learned what “pretty” meant - white, blonde, familiar - and I knew I wasn’t it.
My mum migrated from Malaysia, bringing with her the smell of soy and sesame, the stories of migration, and the insistence on thrift and nourishment.
Within me I carried her accent, her cooking, her lineage... and also the subtle and not-so-subtle lessons that difference was something to control. In the 1990s, any lunchboxes that stood out were teased: honey soy chicken wings, Chinese New Year leftovers, anything that earned me the "ching chong chinaman" taunt. I learned to avoid them. Sandwiches and pies were safer. “Normal.”
It took decades to understand how that small-town survival strategy was rooted in something much older and larger: colonialism’s long shadow over food, body, and belonging.
I was born in 1985 and grew up in a small North Queensland town. When I started primary school I was the only visibly non-white kid: half Australian, half Chinese Malaysian, learning early what “different” looked like. Later, when my parents moved me to a bigger primary school (largely due to being bullied), my brother and I were two of the very few kids who were visibly Asian or mixed-Asian.
By the time boys entered the picture in late primary school and high school, I’d already learned what “pretty” meant - white, blonde, familiar - and I knew I wasn’t it.
My mum migrated from Malaysia, bringing with her the smell of soy and sesame, the stories of migration, and the insistence on thrift and nourishment.
Within me I carried her accent, her cooking, her lineage... and also the subtle and not-so-subtle lessons that difference was something to control. In the 1990s, any lunchboxes that stood out were teased: honey soy chicken wings, Chinese New Year leftovers, anything that earned me the "ching chong chinaman" taunt. I learned to avoid them. Sandwiches and pies were safer. “Normal.”
It took decades to understand how that small-town survival strategy was rooted in something much older and larger: colonialism’s long shadow over food, body, and belonging.
Reclaiming body, food, and ritual
After the birth of my second child - and more recently, after a miscarriage - I found myself craving the old Chinese postpartum tradition known as 坐月子 (zuò yuè zi). The English translation, “confinement period,” sounds crappy and doesn’t do it justice: it’s a month or more of deep rest, warmth, broth, and nourishment after childbirth.
I began to see its wisdom: the permission to stop, to be held, to eat deeply and often.
I still cook honey-soy pork belly as a restorative meal; the smell hits something deep in me. It’s not just comfort food. It’s remembrance. Safety. Being of value.
When I stir that pot, I think of my mum.
She often says there was “no food insecurity” in her childhood... and yet when she tells me stories of her Penang upbringing, I hear a different story...
“One whole chicken had to feed eleven people in a two-bedroom flat,” she says. “My father gave my mum two dollars a day for lunch and dinner. She’d buy what was cheapest: bean sprouts, tofu, small mackerel. I’ve seen her eat rice with one bird’s-eye chilli and a teaspoon of fish paste and call it a meal. Chicken curry was a luxury.”
“We didn’t have the luxury of drinking milk. It was black sweetened coffee and bread for breakfast.”
“Twenty cents pocket money for school: five cents each way for the bus, ten cents for noodles. Some nights we’d wait for my father to ride home on his pushbike with end-of-day market sales. Whatever was left became dinner.”
And on top of all that, they kept animals - not as pets, but as food.
“It was hectic, ah,” she laughs. “Eleven people in a two-bedroom flat and my mum still hatched chicks. We had baby chicks cheep-cheep all day and night! Pet cats giving birth under the bed. Some chickens kept under the kitchen sink, and laying hens down in the backyard. We even had Muscovy ducks - they were like guard dogs. My mum named one Ah Hep, because that’s the sound it made when strangers came too close.”
I can almost hear them: the hiss of the duck, the chorus of chicks, the pulse of survival running through that tiny, cramped flat. Buying meat was a luxury, so you raised what you could. A kind of domestic alchemy that turned scarcity into self-sufficiency.
I began to see its wisdom: the permission to stop, to be held, to eat deeply and often.
I still cook honey-soy pork belly as a restorative meal; the smell hits something deep in me. It’s not just comfort food. It’s remembrance. Safety. Being of value.
When I stir that pot, I think of my mum.
She often says there was “no food insecurity” in her childhood... and yet when she tells me stories of her Penang upbringing, I hear a different story...
“One whole chicken had to feed eleven people in a two-bedroom flat,” she says. “My father gave my mum two dollars a day for lunch and dinner. She’d buy what was cheapest: bean sprouts, tofu, small mackerel. I’ve seen her eat rice with one bird’s-eye chilli and a teaspoon of fish paste and call it a meal. Chicken curry was a luxury.”
“We didn’t have the luxury of drinking milk. It was black sweetened coffee and bread for breakfast.”
“Twenty cents pocket money for school: five cents each way for the bus, ten cents for noodles. Some nights we’d wait for my father to ride home on his pushbike with end-of-day market sales. Whatever was left became dinner.”
And on top of all that, they kept animals - not as pets, but as food.
“It was hectic, ah,” she laughs. “Eleven people in a two-bedroom flat and my mum still hatched chicks. We had baby chicks cheep-cheep all day and night! Pet cats giving birth under the bed. Some chickens kept under the kitchen sink, and laying hens down in the backyard. We even had Muscovy ducks - they were like guard dogs. My mum named one Ah Hep, because that’s the sound it made when strangers came too close.”
I can almost hear them: the hiss of the duck, the chorus of chicks, the pulse of survival running through that tiny, cramped flat. Buying meat was a luxury, so you raised what you could. A kind of domestic alchemy that turned scarcity into self-sufficiency.
Food Scarcity and Intergenerational Trauma
Food scarcity wasn’t always about famine; it was about hierarchy. About who deserved abundance.
My mum’s generation grew up in the economic shadow of colonial Malaysia, where imported white rice, condensed milk, and canned meat were symbols of progress, while local staples were seen as poor people’s food.
That inheritance runs deep. My mother’s thrift, her insistence on finishing every grain of rice - they weren't habits, but survival skills. They shaped how she fed me, and how I learned to equate thrift, control, and restraint with safety, virtue, and love.
This is intergenerational trauma around food: not starvation, but the constant message of make do, don’t waste, don’t ask for more.
It’s the trauma of small appetites, of learning that to be good is to need little.
So when I cook honey-soy pork belly now, it’s more than comfort. It’s reclamation. It’s feeding a lineage that learned to survive on scarcity and silence.
My mum’s generation grew up in the economic shadow of colonial Malaysia, where imported white rice, condensed milk, and canned meat were symbols of progress, while local staples were seen as poor people’s food.
That inheritance runs deep. My mother’s thrift, her insistence on finishing every grain of rice - they weren't habits, but survival skills. They shaped how she fed me, and how I learned to equate thrift, control, and restraint with safety, virtue, and love.
This is intergenerational trauma around food: not starvation, but the constant message of make do, don’t waste, don’t ask for more.
It’s the trauma of small appetites, of learning that to be good is to need little.
So when I cook honey-soy pork belly now, it’s more than comfort. It’s reclamation. It’s feeding a lineage that learned to survive on scarcity and silence.
Clockwise from top left: The small concrete flats many sprawling Chinese families inhabited in Penang, Malaysia in the 1960s and 70s; My mum and three of her sisters (she had a total of seven siblings); my uncle outside the front of their rented flat; aunties. Feature photo at the start of this article is of my aunts and uncles... before mum, her little brother and two more sisters were born.
Inherited thrift and the long Shadow of scarcity
That survival instinct lived on in me.
In high school, my best friend and I would scour the reduced-to-clear section of the supermarket after school, giddy over “luxury” foods nearing their use-by dates: triangles of expensive cheese, half-smashed desserts, deli-end salami. It felt like finding treasure, like tricking a system that said abundance wasn’t for people like us. We would gorge on them in the local park.
By the time I got to uni I was a master of stretching a dollar. I collected every supermarket voucher I could find, learned to dumpster dive behind Woolies, Coles, bakeries and cafés, and perfected the art of scoring free meals.
The all-you-can-eat Hare Krishna buffet was my holy grail. Seven dollars for a mountain of dhal, rice, halava, and chai. I’d eat until my stomach hurt, chasing that feeling of fullness like safety.
That buffet is what led me into my first yoga classes. I started going just to eat... and ended up staying. I did my first unofficial yoga-teacher internship with the Hare Krishnas and taught for them for a few years (a whole other story in itself, but that's a cult dynamic tale for another day!).
My whole yoga journey - the meditation, the breathwork, the philosophy - started with hunger.
I was always moving, too. I rode my bike everywhere - to yoga, to uni, to part-time jobs, and for recreation - even after I inherited my granddad’s old car when he passed away. I’d keep the car parked for weeks to save on fuel, pedalling through rain and heat because efficiency felt like virtue.
Eventually, that same drive toward thrift and endurance turned inward.
During my veterinary degree in my early twenties, movement became obsession. Exercise tolerance became a badge of strength, as did losing my period for a year due to hypothalamic amenorrhoea caused by low energy availability. Exhaustion felt like worth. What began as resourcefulness - the bike rides, the frugality - blurred into over-exercise and food restriction: different expressions of the same ancestral need to survive by control. A full blown eating disorder.
It’s funny how the body carries stories forward. How adaptation can become armour, and armour can harden into a cage.
In high school, my best friend and I would scour the reduced-to-clear section of the supermarket after school, giddy over “luxury” foods nearing their use-by dates: triangles of expensive cheese, half-smashed desserts, deli-end salami. It felt like finding treasure, like tricking a system that said abundance wasn’t for people like us. We would gorge on them in the local park.
By the time I got to uni I was a master of stretching a dollar. I collected every supermarket voucher I could find, learned to dumpster dive behind Woolies, Coles, bakeries and cafés, and perfected the art of scoring free meals.
The all-you-can-eat Hare Krishna buffet was my holy grail. Seven dollars for a mountain of dhal, rice, halava, and chai. I’d eat until my stomach hurt, chasing that feeling of fullness like safety.
That buffet is what led me into my first yoga classes. I started going just to eat... and ended up staying. I did my first unofficial yoga-teacher internship with the Hare Krishnas and taught for them for a few years (a whole other story in itself, but that's a cult dynamic tale for another day!).
My whole yoga journey - the meditation, the breathwork, the philosophy - started with hunger.
I was always moving, too. I rode my bike everywhere - to yoga, to uni, to part-time jobs, and for recreation - even after I inherited my granddad’s old car when he passed away. I’d keep the car parked for weeks to save on fuel, pedalling through rain and heat because efficiency felt like virtue.
Eventually, that same drive toward thrift and endurance turned inward.
During my veterinary degree in my early twenties, movement became obsession. Exercise tolerance became a badge of strength, as did losing my period for a year due to hypothalamic amenorrhoea caused by low energy availability. Exhaustion felt like worth. What began as resourcefulness - the bike rides, the frugality - blurred into over-exercise and food restriction: different expressions of the same ancestral need to survive by control. A full blown eating disorder.
It’s funny how the body carries stories forward. How adaptation can become armour, and armour can harden into a cage.
Colonialism lives in the body
Reading decolonial thinkers and anti-colonial approaches to eating disorder healing (including Nalgona Positivity Pride’s work and Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body) helped me name what I’d been living.
Eating disorders and body control don’t exist in a vacuum. They echo the same systems that once controlled land, labour, and language.
Colonialism taught that mastery was moral: over hunger, over emotion, over the natural world. Whiteness was defined through self-restraint; the “civilised” body was small, disciplined, and pure. The “other” body - darker, rounder, hungrier - was excess to be managed. (I talk more about how colonialism ties into eating disorders in this article).
In the wellness world, that thinking never disappeared; it just chucked on a pair of yoga pants and started swigging green juice.
You can still see the colonial appetite everywhere: the hunger to consume what’s exotic, while rejecting the people who make it.
In late August 2025, a crowd of hundreds of anti-immigration marchers trundled through Sydney streets under the banner of “Australia First.” Some wore polo shirts and nationalist symbols, others came draped in flags. A handful of politicians showed up for photo ops, pretending not to notice the neo-Nazis and white-supremacist groups marching right beside them.
A few hours later, several of those same marchers were photographed laughing over plates of dim sum at a Chinese restaurant. (7NEWS Australia, 2025). The irony would’ve been funny if it weren’t so familiar.
Eating disorders and body control don’t exist in a vacuum. They echo the same systems that once controlled land, labour, and language.
Colonialism taught that mastery was moral: over hunger, over emotion, over the natural world. Whiteness was defined through self-restraint; the “civilised” body was small, disciplined, and pure. The “other” body - darker, rounder, hungrier - was excess to be managed. (I talk more about how colonialism ties into eating disorders in this article).
In the wellness world, that thinking never disappeared; it just chucked on a pair of yoga pants and started swigging green juice.
You can still see the colonial appetite everywhere: the hunger to consume what’s exotic, while rejecting the people who make it.
In late August 2025, a crowd of hundreds of anti-immigration marchers trundled through Sydney streets under the banner of “Australia First.” Some wore polo shirts and nationalist symbols, others came draped in flags. A handful of politicians showed up for photo ops, pretending not to notice the neo-Nazis and white-supremacist groups marching right beside them.
A few hours later, several of those same marchers were photographed laughing over plates of dim sum at a Chinese restaurant. (7NEWS Australia, 2025). The irony would’ve been funny if it weren’t so familiar.
Eat the food. Fear the people. The colonial story in one photo. Source: 7NEWS Australia (2025) This image says everything. The colonial impulse to consume what’s useful, discard what’s inconvenient, and still feel righteous doing it.
It’s the same impulse that built wellness culture: the clean-eating, detoxing, unsafe breathwork & cacao ceremony-throwing, white sage-smudging industry that mines other people’s cultures for purity points. (I discuss this further with Katya Weiss-Andersson in this episode of the podcast.)
When I saw those images I felt a flash of something old. The same heat that used to rise in my cheeks when kids at my North Queensland school mocked my mum’s accent, or pulled their eyelids to a slant when she came to pick me up after school. The same sneer on the parents who smirked in approval, pretending it was harmless. The same snarl that I now see on the faces of grown men chanting “go back where you came from!”.
It’s all the same story - the coloniser’s story. Eat the food, take the spice, borrow the wisdom... but don’t you dare be the person it came from.
It’s the same impulse that built wellness culture: the clean-eating, detoxing, unsafe breathwork & cacao ceremony-throwing, white sage-smudging industry that mines other people’s cultures for purity points. (I discuss this further with Katya Weiss-Andersson in this episode of the podcast.)
When I saw those images I felt a flash of something old. The same heat that used to rise in my cheeks when kids at my North Queensland school mocked my mum’s accent, or pulled their eyelids to a slant when she came to pick me up after school. The same sneer on the parents who smirked in approval, pretending it was harmless. The same snarl that I now see on the faces of grown men chanting “go back where you came from!”.
It’s all the same story - the coloniser’s story. Eat the food, take the spice, borrow the wisdom... but don’t you dare be the person it came from.
Unlearning the Fear of Enough
For those of us raised between cultures, the collision runs deep: between our immigrant parents’ survival under colonialism and our own search for belonging beyond it.
Our mothers’ thrift becomes our frugality. Their survival becomes our perfectionism. The same thriftiness that once protected us can morph into self-denial, restriction, and the chronic guilt of having enough.
I still hear the whispers of that scarcity.
I can’t stand to waste food. I have my own little menagerie of chickens now (and several worm farms) to eat our scraps. But I’m way too soft-hearted to kill our chooks... they’re part of the household ecosystem, our beloved pets! (This is partly why I never made it as a vet). When the kids waste food, I feel my chest tighten. I have to balance that old panic with what I’ve learned as a dietitian (the division of responsibility in feeding, thank you Ellyn Satter) and remind myself that throwing scraps to the chooks is not a moral failure.
And yet.... the echoes persist. I still feel the pull of a free meal. I still get a rush from “making do.” But now, if I feel like eating something, I’ll buy it - even the ridiculously overpriced $12 Italian almond biscotti. I savour it with a vanilla black tea (with milk), aware that this too is healing: the act of feeding myself without guilt, without scarcity, without needing to earn it.
I know my privilege: that I can afford these things now, that I no longer have to live in survival mode. After 15+ years of being self-employed, it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve really felt the grip of thrift loosen, that I’ve started to trust abundance without fear.
And not everyone has this privilege.
Decolonising wellness isn’t just about politics or language. It’s about listening to the body - and to the generations behind it - until we can tell the difference between wisdom and wound.
Healing from disordered eating isn’t just about what we do (or do not) eat.
It’s about remembering the long history of why we learned to hunger in the first place.
✨ Want to bring this into your own practice?
👉 Download my free practitioner guide: Working with Clients with Disordered Eating for Naturopaths - packed with weight-neutral care tips.
🌿 When you sign up, you’ll also join the waitlist for Body as Earth: Foundations in Disordered Eating Awareness for Naturopaths, Herbalists & Holistic Nutritionists and receive supportive emails to help you practice in a way that moves beyond symptom management to explore the deeper roots of disordered eating: trauma, disconnection, diet culture, and the lingering impact of colonial and patriarchal health narratives.
In thriving, not just surviving,
Casey Conroy
Accredited Practising Dietitian | Naturopath
Our mothers’ thrift becomes our frugality. Their survival becomes our perfectionism. The same thriftiness that once protected us can morph into self-denial, restriction, and the chronic guilt of having enough.
I still hear the whispers of that scarcity.
I can’t stand to waste food. I have my own little menagerie of chickens now (and several worm farms) to eat our scraps. But I’m way too soft-hearted to kill our chooks... they’re part of the household ecosystem, our beloved pets! (This is partly why I never made it as a vet). When the kids waste food, I feel my chest tighten. I have to balance that old panic with what I’ve learned as a dietitian (the division of responsibility in feeding, thank you Ellyn Satter) and remind myself that throwing scraps to the chooks is not a moral failure.
And yet.... the echoes persist. I still feel the pull of a free meal. I still get a rush from “making do.” But now, if I feel like eating something, I’ll buy it - even the ridiculously overpriced $12 Italian almond biscotti. I savour it with a vanilla black tea (with milk), aware that this too is healing: the act of feeding myself without guilt, without scarcity, without needing to earn it.
I know my privilege: that I can afford these things now, that I no longer have to live in survival mode. After 15+ years of being self-employed, it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve really felt the grip of thrift loosen, that I’ve started to trust abundance without fear.
And not everyone has this privilege.
Decolonising wellness isn’t just about politics or language. It’s about listening to the body - and to the generations behind it - until we can tell the difference between wisdom and wound.
Healing from disordered eating isn’t just about what we do (or do not) eat.
It’s about remembering the long history of why we learned to hunger in the first place.
✨ Want to bring this into your own practice?
👉 Download my free practitioner guide: Working with Clients with Disordered Eating for Naturopaths - packed with weight-neutral care tips.
🌿 When you sign up, you’ll also join the waitlist for Body as Earth: Foundations in Disordered Eating Awareness for Naturopaths, Herbalists & Holistic Nutritionists and receive supportive emails to help you practice in a way that moves beyond symptom management to explore the deeper roots of disordered eating: trauma, disconnection, diet culture, and the lingering impact of colonial and patriarchal health narratives.
In thriving, not just surviving,
Casey Conroy
Accredited Practising Dietitian | Naturopath
References
7NEWS Australia. (2025, August 31). Anti-immigration protesters slammed after dining at yum cha restaurant after Sydney rally. 7NEWS. https://7news.com.au/news/anti-immigration-protesters-slammed-after-dining-at-yum-cha-restaurant-after-sydney-rally-c-19876530
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