It's Not a Sin, It's a Food Choice

Somewhere along the way we ended up with all this moral context around our food choices.  A Ding Dong isn’t just a stupidly sweet petroleum product we occasionally opt to eat.  Instead, it’s wickedly delicious, a sinful treat.  What exactly is “sinful” about it? 

It's not really “good” or “bad” to eat a certain food, right? It's just a food choice. Different foods have different effects on our bodies. Some fuels are healthy for our engines, like gasoline, and some are not, like shampoo. It's smarter to run our cars on gasoline and avoid shampoo, but not “good.”

We use language that gives eating choices moral content.  This feeds into our feelings of guilt and shame about what we eat.  If you’ve ever found yourself eating your way through a shame spiral, you know that being ashamed of something doesn’t stop us from doing it.  It’s all part of the package to feel guilty about eating something, take it home to eat it in secret, and end up eating a whole lot of it to stuff down that feeling of shame.

As a negative shameful thing, calling it “bad” or a “sin” doesn’t help us stop doing it.  What about as a positive thing, as an enticement?

As long as certain food choices remain “sins,” that makes them more attractive as well.  It becomes a pleasurably guilty indulgence, a bit of naughtiness.  In general, I enjoy a bit of naughtiness – that's not a disincentive to me!  But if I can strip away the “minor sin” emotional overtones, perhaps I can view a bag of Ruffles as what it is – a bag of MSG-laden snack food that will momentarily excite my taste buds, then make me feel like crap and overeat the rest of the day.  A poor fuel choice.  Not a scrumptious bit of wickedness.