Recently, I made a post on instagram talking about food and morality. As I was writing the caption I realized I had quite a bit to say about the topic, so I wanted to expand my thoughts here!
The short of that caption is that food (re: diet) does not give you moral high ground, nor does it make you inferior.
Currently diet culture is feeding us the lie that if you eat “junk food” you must not care about your health and will inevitably develop diabetes or hypertension. They also feed us the opposite by implying that by eating “clean foods”, counting calories, or buying organic, you now magically have become the pinnacle of health.
Neither of those scenarios is definitively true.
We cannot magically become an example of health by only eating clean foods. We also don’t develop diabetes overnight by having a donut.
It is time to remove our food choices from our morality. Food is amoral. It cannot behave. It is not good. It is not bad. Food, is food.
Let’s leave behind the idea that eating a certain way will make you a better person. Let’s leave behind the idea that someone’s eating habits can tell you about their character, integrity, or morality.
This whole facade of food morality is rooted in bias. The bias that everyone has access and the resources to eat healthy. Share on XThat is simply not true. There’s an estimated 43 million Americans living in poverty. Affording “clean foods” is often not their top nutrition priority. Getting enough food is a priority.
There are millions of Americans living in food deserts. In a food desert there is very little access to fresh fruits and vegetables for at least 1/2 a mile in urban areas or 10 miles in rural areas. In other words, someone has to travel miles to get to the closest store with fresh fruits and vegetables. This also assumes they have reliable transportation. It is not the easiest to transport several bags on public transportation. Paying for taxis or Uber/Lyft can get expensive.
In more rural areas, traveling more than 10 miles to the nearest store is not a short trip. I was recently in a smaller town in Oklahoma for a rotation. The only food available in the town came from the gas station or the casino. Otherwise the nearest grocery stores were 25 minutes either north or south. That’s a long drive, and what are you going to do without reliable transportation. There’s no public transportation out there.
The greatest assumption for both environments is that the available fruits and vegetables are a) good quality, and b) affordable. They will most likely be left at the store if they’re not appealing or too costly.
All of these factors and more play into someone’s food choices.
Basing judgments about someone on their food choices ignores almost every factor that is involved in food acquisition.
Let’s all save some energy here and focus on our own food.
Make food decisions that help you meet your goals. Make food decisions that make you feel good. Have the donut or the kale, or have them both in the same meal. Do what is right for you.
Today is the best day to change your life,
