White Is for Witching

Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide, self-harm, and disordered eating.

Food and eating are key to White Is for Witching. From Luc Dufresne’s peach pastries to Sade’s cooking in the Silver House, food represents care, affection, and familial bonds. The son of a pastry chef, Luc courts Lily Silver with peach tarts; Sade bonds with Miranda Silver through fried dough mixed with chilies. However, food becomes complicated for Miranda and her female ancestors, as they live with pica and, consequently, have a somewhat different view of food.

Pica is a medical condition that triggers compulsive eating and swallowing of non-foods. People who live with pica often chew on fabric, plastics, or other materials. All the Silver women in the novel exhibit symptoms of pica, beginning with a woman in their distant past who practices self-harm and consumes her own flesh. As the Silver House describes her, this “woman was thought an animal,” and her “way was to slash at her flesh with the blind, frenzied concentration that a starved person might use to get at food that is buried” (27-28). This woman disappears from the family’s known history, only remembered by the house. After Anna Good marries Andrew Silver, her loneliness in the Silver House manifests as pica symptoms, as she consumes acorns, leaves, and pebbles.