Tlon: Eating is a bit telling

This article on Eating is a bit telling is published in the number 13 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 25, 2025.

When, in 1850, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stated that “man is what he eats”, he did not intend to speak by metaphors: on the contrary, According to him, it was essential to underline the body dimension and material of human existence. The food we consume becomes part of us, our body, metabolic processes.
If he watched us today, Feuerbach would perhaps be amazed by how his intuition has been completely overturned: we no longer define ourselves through what we incorporate, but through what we exclude from our dishes. We are no longer what we eat, but we are defined above all by what we refuse: to join, in fact, it is what we choose not to eat, like food with too many sugars or industrial ones.
Our tables have turned into battlefields where foods are scrutinized, tried and often condemned to exile. And the value of a parent, consequently, passes from his ability to better select the right snack of his son, proper domestic diet.
But this new “food culture”, as Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek explain in
After work, he began to generate impossible standards (such as aspirational rules, if not as daily reality). “If being parents in the post -war period meant creating emotional bonds between mother and child, parenting today is presented as a question of cultivation of human capital”, an existential virtuosity tender that produces constant comparative anxiety.
This food revolution, in fact, sometimes hides a discipline that ends up becoming self -proposed.
If the positive effect of food care is undeniable – medicine, for example, has identified first unknown intolerances, freeing many from inexplicable sufferings, and we are more aware of how much suffering and exploitation there are behind the production of food -, around these legitimate needs, a mythology of the “prohibited food” has not been rarely developed, fueled by an industry of the well -being that has found in the nutritional restriction. Golden mine. Diets are alternating as seasonal fashions: Paleolithic, ketogenic, vegan, intermittent-each with dogmas, fetish foods and inviolable taboos.
Ortoressia, i.e. the pathological obsession for healthy eating, represents the dark side of this trend: a condition in which food purity thus becomes totalizing as to compromise the quality of life that we would like to extend.
But with food we should aspire to a pacified relationship, remembering that nourishment is not only biochemistry, but culture, relationship and impressions. The true food wisdom is not in the Orthodox adhesion at restrictive regimes, but in the ability to listen to one’s body, respecting needs and pleasures. It is not easy to find the time to listen to each other in the midst of daily delirium. Only in this way does the food stop being an obsession and regains its function: nourishing, of course, but also telling stories and evoking memories.

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