Don't Preach about Micro-scoping Everything We Eat

There is a wealth of online wisdom available about how to choose and how to be very careful about what we eat; however, some of this advice seems too preachy and, at times, irritating. There is something very simple and unsaid about food that is good - you have to close your eyes to the obvious things that will not agree with a nutritionist's advice. Soulful food is invariably high in calories. Perhaps this is why it is so happy and big, and yes, it contains a lot of fat too, which you cannot enjoy if your conscience keeps asking you questions about the calorie count. However, what irritates me is that the people who have infused this habit of counting and measuring everything we are about to eat seem to have comfortably forgotten that we don't have that many choices. So many kitchen and grocery essentials are no longer in the safety zone. The simplest of herbs and spices, too, are now adulterated. We are trying to make the most educated decisions, buying what has been packaged better and procured more sensibly, at a premium rate.

Now, whatever little is left is, whatever scanty food options have managed to survive the commercialization holocaust, don’t need to be put under the lens in such a magnified way.

There is a limit to how much we need to read into each food label. Why is this not the state government’s responsibility to handle? There are blogs about how some of the most common sweeteners are now cancerous or irritate the gastrointestinal lining. We shouldn’t need to check out the details across so many ingredients, many of which are highly industrial in nature and are not even in public ambit. As a consumer, you want to be aware and make educated choices, but when you are biting into a juicy-looking steak, you shouldn’t be thinking about whether the marbling pattern indicates plasticized meats – yes, this is actually happening, now at a neighborhood food chain, near you!

It’s the kind of absurdity that reveals how deeply modern food anxiety has burrowed into daily life. People aren’t eating anymore; they’re performing vigilance. Every bite is an interrogation. Every craving becomes a moral test. The act of feeding oneself—once instinctive, joyful, inherited—now resembles an exam no one remembers signing up for. And beneath this constant scanning lies a quieter fatigue: the sense that ordinary people have been tasked with policing a system far bigger, murkier, and more industrial than any individual conscience can realistically manage. No one at the dinner table volunteered to become an amateur toxicologist, yet here we are, squinting at ingredient lists that read like chemical inventories and pretending that this scrutiny will somehow repair what was broken upstream.

The tragedy is that the joy of food has been displaced by the performance of “purity.” This cultural obsession with micro-scoping every grain of salt, every trace of oil, every unfamiliar word on a label has created an atmosphere where flavor is secondary to fear. Food has become a site of moral signaling—proof of discipline, of restraint, of belonging to the tribe that supposedly “knows better.” But wisdom has little to do with it. What people call mindful eating often resembles a defensive maneuver against a world that keeps asking individuals to compensate for failures they did not cause. And in that sense, perhaps the real indulgence is not the butter, the ghee, the fried crust, or the sugary bite—it’s the momentary refusal to let industrial chaos dictate one’s emotional relationship with hunger.

What gets lost in this nutritional surveillance culture is the simple, almost ancient truth that appetite is one of the last remaining instincts that hasn’t been fully colonized by modern systems—though not for lack of trying. People forget that flavor was once a language: a way families expressed affection, a way communities formed bonds, a way memory anchored itself in the body. Now that language is constantly interrupted by warnings, advisories, and the low-grade panic that accompanies every headline about some newly discovered threat lurking in what used to be considered food. It is difficult to savor anything when the mind has been conditioned to parse each bite into risk categories, running silent calculations that drain pleasure long before the stomach has a chance to register fullness.

The irony is sharp: never have people had more access to information, and never have they been more confused about what is safe to eat. The excess of nutritional data hasn’t clarified anything; it has only deepened the sense that one could always be making a “better” decision. This constant self-surveillance becomes its own form of hunger—a hunger for certainty in a world where certainty no longer exists. And so, instead of trusting their own senses, people end up negotiating their meals with an endless stream of external authorities, each claiming to hold the definitive truth about what the body should or shouldn’t endure. The body itself, meanwhile, waits patiently, still knowing what it likes, though few remember how to listen.