sydney adamu from the bear kind of helped me with my disordered eating and i don't know how to feel about it

"I watch a lot of movies and TV. I do not have many hobbies." - ayo edebiri

Sitting in an Apple Store on the Upper West Side, you could see black people in their early twenties bickering over the film American Fiction. Those two people would happen to be my longtime friend and I, as I told him how much I hated the film, and he boasts about how amazing it was. He tells me how it’s so meta about the way it shows the black experience, especially within the arts. I say it’s so meta in a way that cheapens the black experience and the characters it’s written about. Being on opposite sides of a debate has been our shared love language since 2016, so our passive aggression toward one another was how we said, “Thanks for still being in my life.”

After I finally got him to see my point about why I disliked the film, he asked me one simple question: “What’s one black female character you think is written well"?”

Our conversations have always been a back-and-forth game of babble tennis, with the other’s hesitance being a sign of our upcoming win, but for once, I actually pondered the question. As a long-time television enthusiast and new cinephile, I wanted to really sit and think of all the black female characters in media. Most of all, I wanted to shut him up with an answer he couldn’t refute.

The right person was someone who sat right in my face, as she’s my profile picture for numerous social media accounts. I smiled at the pure thought of how much I loved the character and knew victory was mine. With confidence in my timbre, I said, Sydney Adamu from the Bear. And as I assumed, he gave me a simple nod and agreed with me, giving me the win I deserved.

It’s no shock that The Bear is one of my favorite shows. The show itself is partially why my blog exists, as the hate for Molly Gordon’s Claire Bear got to an all-time high, which only pissed me off enough to tap into one of my favorite hobbies. However, my indifference and empathy for Claire don’t trump my love for Sydney Adamu and her actress, Ayo Edebiri. For the first time in my life, I felt seen as a black woman or an adult in general. With diverse characters and even more diverse writers’ rooms, some tropes for black women continue, but none of them ever connected with me. Sure, as a teen, I found solace in Glee’s Mercedes Jones, but I'm not very loud, socially or vocally. I loved Angela from Boy Meets World, but other than our matching anxious attachment styles and crushes on Shawn Hunter, she didn’t do it for me either. Even in other female characters, I could never look at them and see myself. 

When I started The Bear, I knew I was in for an anxiety-inducing, comedic ride about undealt trauma, processing grief, and, of course, the art of cooking in the restaurant industry. I knew I would end up liking Sydney, but I had questionable hopes of how excellent her character’s writing would be, as it is still rare to have zero complaints about the writing of black female characters. However, I didn’t expect to see myself in her. A twenty-something-year-old still living with her dad with crippling debt after making a slew of mistakes by trusting other people is just trying to get herself on the path of completing her wildest dreams and being recognized as the best in her field, so she can prove that all those obstacles were actually worth the amount of pain and suffering she endured—did the writers get a hold of my journal? After completing the two seasons, I was completely hyper-fixated on the show. All I could think about was The Bear and I saved hundreds of edits of Sydney, the other characters, and the infamous ship that is sydcarmy (don’t get me started on them; that will have to be a whole other post).

Unfortunately, something crept up every time I watched the show. This show showcases a lot of food, which sounds more than obvious. However, there’s a montage in the second season where Sydney spends a whole day doing a food tour around the city of Chicago as she tries to further her food palette and explore what her restaurant can add to the already unique flavor palette the city has to offer. During my initial watch, I couldn’t fathom the number of calories she was eating in one afternoon. The programmed MyFitnessPal in my brain started to go off and lose count until it sent me into a spiral.

Calorie counting is a useless party trick my brain can do on its own without viewing a single nutritional value graph now. I know that this isn’t a healthy trait to have, but I also won’t sit and say that I’m recovered or even on the journey of recovering from the tidal wave that is my relationship with food. There are days where the feeling of fullness is both a blessing and a burden, just as there are days when I contemplate being lightheaded from a lack of nutrients. It’s an ongoing struggle that I’ll probably deal with forever or until I’m old enough to realize I’m going to die soon anyway. It’s taxing, but I’ve always stayed true to never use it and judge what other people are eating. Sydney Adamu may be fictional, but the same rule should apply to her.

As I rewatched the show, the counting got quieter, and the montage became much more than the food she was eating. It’s beautifully shot and gives us more insight into who Sydney is in the close-knit food industry of Chicago as she talks to friends and peers. I am equally obsessed with her Paloma Wool jacket and the gorgeous outfit she has on underneath it. The montage just became a scene—a sequence that was filmed, edited, and has so much more before and after that. So much continues after those three minutes.

“I wanna cook for people, make them happy, and give them the best bacon on Earth” is one of my favorite quotes from Sydney. One of my favorite moments in the entire show is during the show’s famous under-the-table scene, where Carmy asks Sydney if she still loves to cook and connects it with the fact that she loves taking care of people, exclaiming that’s what her passion for cooking is rooted in. This connection was not new to me, but hearing Jeremy Allen White say it over and over again caused a breakthrough within me. Sydney’s relationship with food is strong since it’s how she shows others that she cares, whether it’s trying meals from different chefs or cooking meals herself. Maybe my relationship with food can be similar.

Living in New York City, you get the privilege to try as many cuisines as possible, from the fast-casual to the Michelin-starred. It’s a way of connecting with people and showing appreciation through my behavior as a guest while providing self-care by actually eating something. I also love cooking for my loved ones, whether it’s as simple as making a bowl of instant ramen or planning my contribution to Friendsgiving. Food has no place in the world to be scary when it is made by people who greet you with a smile.

Even in today’s culture, where people cannot stop talking about “being big-backed” for that act of eating, Ozempic being the life hack for every celebrity who doesn’t need it, and ED culture’s mean resurgence on social media, it's as important as ever to remember (or at least try to remember) that not eating just makes you miserable. It like really sucks. Being in a constant battle with that misery and allowing it to fester helps no one in the scenario. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” means nothing when skinny just makes you feel even more pathetic and you’re trapped in an infinite pendulum of the two emotions.

It kind of feels stupid that a character from my favorite television show got me to realize this, but stupidity shouldn’t be the takeaway of my discovery.

While talking to my coworker about my procrastination in writing this essay, she told me that Sydney is one of her favorite characters. “Sydney is like the first… modern woman I’ve seen,” and I couldn’t agree more. As Gen Z and even millennials tackle adulthood, we crave art that looks like us. A part of it is physical diversity in ethnicities, disabilities, and queerness, but another part is characters that are written well enough to actually relate to us: the everyday adult. I’ve always been a big advocate for the former, but I never realized how much I needed the latter.

Gen Z craves media that shows both our selves and our older counterparts how we feel as adults, like past generations had with Living Single, Sex and the City, Girls, and Insecure. Every time new art releases into the world, like Brat by Charli XCX (a woman in her early thirties reflecting on her relationship with partying and the people in her life), Sabrina Brier’s Tiktoks (humorous exaggerations of everyday scenarios seen in the modern day), and coming-of-age projects from Rachel Sennott (existential crises fueled that use comedy as an outlet for expression), the more we realize that our personal experiences aren’t so original and isolating, which makes breathing a lot easier.

Whoever lumped books, music, television, and film all into the word content and started to call the act of enjoying those mediums, media/content consumption should be stoned, ideally. The use of those words sucks the affection out of it and cheapens it to being some cog in the capitalistic machine. Art and the diversity within it are how we continue to learn more about one another, thus creating and harnessing community. Sometimes a television show is the only reason you can eat, concerts are the only thing that can get you to shower, and seeing a new film will be the only thing to get you out of bed, but those connections that art has in our lives are vital and should never be taken for granted. As Ayo Edebiri said, “I don’t know if I have good taste or bad taste, but I have a lot.”