Diets have always been as much about a philosophy and a kind of cult culture (in the general sense, not the religious sense) as they have been about actual food.
Go all the way back to the days of the ancient Greeks and you find all sorts of crazy diets and theories about how they don’t just feed you, they really make you better (in some existential sense) and embody some optimized vision of humanity. Take a look at any diet fad today and you’ll find the same attitude, the same associations, the same language. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.
But why is this so common? I think the answer lies in the connections between the regulatory, protective, and provisional systems of the body and those same systems as they manifest in the mind. I’m not saying religious attitudes can be reduced merely to delusions of the body’s instincts, but rather that the complex systems of the conscious mind rest upon the simpler systems of the instinctive or unconscious mind and share much of the same architecture. And the simpler are caught up into the meaning of the complex, as the foundations of a tower are caught up into its spire. Things that exist and affect us at one level can easily get confused and mixed in at another. Small and simple things have a very deep and complex meaning for us.
It’s not hard for people to identify with the things that they take into their bodies and to line them up with an ideology. These ideologies connect to some deep psychological instincts inside us. These diets don’t just serve a physical function of nutrition or weight loss, but serve as a way of aligning our dietary experiences with our ideological narratives.
And that’s how many of these diets are marketed. Not merely as a way of getting food or nutrition or a way of cooking, but as a way to optimize our being itself, as THE WAY to get food and THE WAY to eat. This diet isn’t just good for you nutritional, it’s good, full stop. It will fulfill your need existential needs and align with the organization of your life. It will make you attractive and morally admirable, it will connect you to your community and the larger world harmoniously. It will give your life direction and focus and meaning.
So there are a lot of feelings involved. It’s not just cooking, not just eating or food science or nutrition. It’s about meaning and identity and a moral/holistic vision of humanity. People have often treated food in this way, across many many cultures. The details vary, but eating is a very important experience for us. It’s more than just survival for us. It is a part of our human experience on so many levels. Family meals, holidays, social gatherings, dates, banquets, festivals, religious observances, daily rituals, how many of these center around or include food and drink as a primary element of their structure? Food isn’t just food, it’s a kind of social and cultural currency.
So that’s why people get so worked up about diets, present and historical. It’s not just food to them. It’s who they are. And they’ve centered an important part of their identity and moral vision on how they eat. They’ve ritualized it and invested in it. So they’re likely to get very upset if your criticize it.
All of this is useful to know, but it does raise one further question. Should what you eat play that important of a role in your life? Is it a good idol to set up and look to for your identity, health, value, moral excellence, etc, or is that asking a bit too much of a god that isn’t quite up to carrying that much existential weight? Well, that’s something to chew on.
Making Nobody Happy 