But I like to like the things I like! Sacrifice, enjoyment and ethics.

“You can tell I like food too much

I really, really dislike it when people say that. The most recent time someone said that to me was today, and I was at a loss as to how to respond. I know that what the person meant is that they would like to be skinner, but food is delicious so I eat too much of it and now there is too much of me. They say it with a rueful, regretful tone. If only they had more control, if only food didn’t have such power over them, their virtue would shine through their lean, lean bodies.

I’m always amazed at how our society manages to make a sin, make a wrong out of our most basic desires. There’s a pervasive idea that virtue and goodness are things which happen when we prevent ourselves from experiencing ‘too much’ enjoyment. Especially when what you’re enjoying is something basic, something uncomplicated. People don’t get called sluts or pigs for enjoying too much opera, or too many good books.

The thing about opera and good books, of course, is that you have to learn to like them, and not everyone has the combination of resources, inclination, cultural and social incentives, and time to do so. No matter how gluttonously you devour yet another deliciously marvellous book, no matter how delightfully the prose sends a shiver up your spine, you would never be expected to show regret in your enjoyment. Enjoyment of a good book sends a signal that you are a person who is educated and classy enough, intelligent and cultured enough to choose to do so.

Food, though? We think of food very differently. Where enjoying a good book is purely enjoyable, food is fraught. It’s tied up with bodies, with perceived attractiveness, with class, with self-control or ‘letting yourself go’. It’s not just pleasure, it’s a guilty pleasure. From carrots to cookies, every item of food comes with its own moral weight, its own message of virtue or sin.

But you know something? Food is lovely. Food is delicious, and it is satisfying in a way that nothing else can be. And while it can worry and evoke guilt, it can also comfort. A month or so ago, I made a rather terrible cheesey pasta bake, which I managed to ruin in precisely the same way that my granny sometimes used to ruin macaroni cheese. At the end of a long day, I could imagine nothing so comforting as this lumpy, grainy sauce, tasting like my granny swearing blind to my mother that she hadn’t done anything wrong and hadn’t left it, not for a second, and didn’t the child like it anyway*?

I don’t think that we should need excuses to enjoy food, though. Not that we were ‘good’ and went to the gym earlier. Not even that it’s been a long day and this tastes just like the way my granny made it- although that is always wonderful. In and of itself, food can be delicious. We have to eat it several times a day- why shouldn’t we enjoy each of those to the full? Let go of guilt, of a sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ foods, eat when we are hungry and until we are full, savour and enjoy each bite to the fullest extent? Forget about ‘too much’, and enjoy as much as you do, like as much as you do, take as much pleasure from food as you can? Can’t we let go of rueful, self-effacing resignation, of judging and being judged as greedy, of giving calories a moral weight, and simply like to like the things we like?

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*turns out she was right, actually. I didn’t leave it either- I managed to mess it up in an entirely more creative way. I’m not going to tell you what it is, though. Making lumpy cheesey pasta sauce like my granny did sometimes is something I’m going to keep between me and her memory 🙂

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But I like to like the things I like! Sacrifice, enjoyment and ethics.
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5 thoughts on “But I like to like the things I like! Sacrifice, enjoyment and ethics.

  1. 2

    You tell ’em, girl!

    Assorted thoughts and responses:

    1. I have been complaining about the moral words people use about eating for years. There are enough things to use your conscience for already! Shouldn’t guilt be reserved for situations where you’ve harmed something more than your own waistline? Even if you feel guilty over every single thing you later decide wasn’t a great idea, is food really the biggest deal? If there’s anyone out there who makes so few mistakes that eating a bag of crisps is the biggie, can we swap, please?

    2. Whenever my mother was asked by one of her children “Is this food good for you?” she always gave the same answer, which was “Yes! All food is good for you. In moderation.” This seems eminently sensible. Of course food is good for you.

    3. Bodies like to be used. Erm, that is, fulfilling a biological need is pleasant. Resting when you’re tired, eating when you’re hungry, peeing when you have a full bladder (What? We all do!) are all simply enjoyable.

    4. “Eat until we are full” is the absolute best advice here. Until being the key word. Stuffing your face mechanically or out of worry or boredom? That is not actually very enjoyable. I don’t know which is more distressing – to have to eat when you aren’t hungry, or to be unable to eat when you are. Which do you think?

    5. “Happiness is liking what you’ve got to do”. Granted, that is from Brave New World, and conditioning everyone from embryohood on up to like doing just the one job they’ll have to do for life is taking it to extremes a bit, but – you do have to take in calories. Can’t really avoid it. Might as well enjoy it!

  2. 4

    I agree that… moralizing food choices gets taken *way* too far, and we treat some things like they’re inherently bad instead of being merely things we need to enjoy in moderation. But, I think at least to some extent, food guilt like this is a clumsy proxy for, well, future harm from overindulgence.

    If we overindulge in exercise, we have immediate negative reinforcement–pain, or minor injury. If we overindulge in reading, we get papercuts and eyestrain. But you can easily eat enough to become morbidly obese without suffering any immediate perceptible harm, particularly if you do not also get adequate exercise. And while, again, society is too focused on excess weight (in fact, some studies suggest that people who are mildly overweight tend to live longer than people who are “normal” weight), morbid obesity is not healthy.

    Basically, the little voice saying that you have to “earn” that piece of pie is a proxy for a much more calculated complication of “Well, given your overall diet, and level of exercise, and your metabolism, this is how much pie you can have without negatively affecting your health.”

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