There is no “right” way to eat. You wouldn’t know that, though, given how much we scrutinize each other’s diets.
Much like child rearing, exercising, and shopping habits, food is one of those things we all make judgments about based on our own, individually concocted rulebook. Order DoorDash too much? Lazy! Think people should slow down on eating out and learn to cook? Inconsiderate! Our society stigmatizes and shuns overweight people, but it can also take a critical eye toward thin people, especially if the perception is that they’re “cheating” by taking a medication to drop some pounds. There’s a political layer to it as well. Conservatives chafed at Michelle Obama’s push to make school lunches healthier. Progressives are now skeptical of the Trump administration’s new MAHA-inspired, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-touted food pyramid. Everyone thinks they’re the ones making sense.
I recently stepped onto this land mine on purpose. I documented a lighthearted weeklong experiment during which I ate per the White House’s food guidelines and budget. (It prioritizes whole foods, full fats, and proteins, and is supposed to be doable for $15 a day.) The story went viral, which, yay! I enjoy it when people read my stories. Then the comments started to roll in, which… oof. People have a lot of feelings about food.
Debates about food are rarely just about food. They’re usually a proxy for fights about identity, class, politics, and control. We moralize food, categorizing certain types as “good” or “bad,” in an attempt to establish order in a chaotic world and to feel a sense of autonomy over our health. We see eating not only as a form of sustenance but also as a signal of character and discipline.
“We love, in our country, to polarize things,” says Jill Chodak, a dietitian and the director of food-based healthcare at Foodlink, a food bank in New York. “I just don’t think that it works, because every person is different, every family is different, dealing with different budgets and socioeconomic things.”
Eating is simple, and it’s also incredibly complicated.
Not to be too navel-gazey here, but I’m a little scared of reader emails. I am always open to feedback, but because people often forget there’s a human being on the other end of the computer, things can get nasty quick. Despite the aversion, I bucked up and read through all of the emails and comments on the RFK diet story and gave them a long think.
Some readers wrote with cooking tips (thank you!) and stories about their own health journeys after cleaning up their diets. Some thought a $15-a-day budget was much too high and a sign I’m out of touch. One person called me “Marie Antoinette of the 21st century,” which is a cute burn, though I fear my living standards don’t support it. Others argued that the $15 amount was too low, especially considering other de facto grocery items, like paper towels, dish soap, and cleaners.
One man emailed me to say I was “Stoopid” and should get a refund for my journalism degree. (Luckily for me, I don’t have one.) Most of the commentary was not explicitly political, but deeply personal. People described struggles with disabilities and their personal efforts to make food work on a budget. They discussed the merits of different approaches to eating across generations and cultures. The comments were full of people apparently determined to settle arguments, big and small, about how we eat with anonymous strangers on the internet.
A lot of readers were curious if I’d lost weight, to which I guess I’ll say it’s hard to lose or gain more than a pound or two over the course of a week. More broadly, I wish we could all just get over the size obsession.
There may be no right way to eat, but there are definitely wrong ways to disagree about it.
Beyond the written responses, several readers agreed to talk to me on the phone as well.
One of them was Troy Large, 64, a former miner who lives in what he describes as “Middle of Nowhere,” Nevada, who switched over to an “actual food diet” about a decade ago. He’s spent years refining his culinary theory, which focuses on 10 categories of whole, unprocessed foods, most of which are found on the grocery store’s perimeter. “I’m not a fundamentalist about it,” he says. At a cookout, he’ll have whatever’s coming off the grill. He believes above all, food should be a social thing. He’d probably still eat chips if they were cooked in lard. “I’m not like somebody who’s freaked out that I’ll get poisoned to death. I just don’t do it at home. Something for me.”
The two big challenges of eating this way, he says, are bread and spices. He avoids baking soda and instant yeast, so making his own bread is a time-consuming process, but he does it. It took him a while to get the hang of flavors until he bought a book on spices. “I truly can go to a fridge that’s almost empty, look at what I have, and figure out how to put it together,” he says. The endeavor helped him get back in shape after gaining weight when the oil field he worked at shut down years ago. After all of this effort, however, he remains fairly ambivalent about it. “Now, I don’t know if any of this stuff helps you or not,” he says.
Dawn Perrault, 63, in Tennessee, is a mortgage loan processor by day and a pizza restaurant owner by night (or, rather, weekends). She tells me my RFK Jr. diet story “brought up so many memories” of her own food struggles over the years. “I’m one of those yo-yos,” she says. Sometimes she’s heavy, sometimes she’s thin. Perrault has lived various lifetimes when it comes to food — eating a lot of peanut butter with her husband when they were young and broke, learning how to cook healthy on a strict budget when she became a stay-at-home mom, and now, making meals from scratch as they’ve gotten more financially comfortable, even though she hates the grocery store. Perrault isn’t judgmental about it, but she worries younger generations may be losing a knack for the kitchen.
“Nobody seems to be able to cook anymore, because so many people grew up with fast food or convenience food, and I think that it became almost a lost art in a way,” she says. It’s not as hard as people think — a lot of what she knows she’s picked up through cooking shows.
John Clancy, 64, a retiree in Las Vegas, also thinks making food at home on a budget really isn’t that challenging. He admits he does have some advantages — his house is spacious enough that he has a large pantry and a garage freezer, which allow him to stock up. Given that he’s no longer working, he’s got plenty of time to review grocery store ads, clip coupons, and make a meal plan — though he says that only takes about an hour and is quite straightforward. “In the last decade or so, the instantaneous gratification and retail therapy and eating out as a lifestyle has even gotten more accelerated,” he says. “There’s the double-edged sword of technology that allows all this stuff.”
My trifecta of (barely) baby boomers made some good points. They were also nice and normal about it. Their food philosophies are structured by realities — time, space, age, interests, tastes, worries — but they don’t view them as universal truths. That’s not true of some of the other online commentators. There may be no right way to eat, but there are definitely wrong ways to disagree about it. What other people eat doesn’t really affect you — you don’t have to eat it. This is a piece of armor my mom gave me when I got made fun of for getting lunch at the school cafeteria as a kid, instead of bringing it in from home, which was quite the faux pas in 90s-era Wisconsin.
I also spoke with Robert Moredock, a 77-year-old retiree from Las Vegas, who, along with his wife and disabled son, eats on a strict $925 a month food budget. As he describes how his son’s dietitian pushed the family to limit red meat and starches and incorporate more fruits and veggies, he jokes that his wife is saying, “Yuck, yuck, yuck,” in the background. Moredock shops for “opportunity buys,” and, like Clancy, gets good use out of his freezer space — he bought up a bunch of 20-pound turkeys for sale on Amazon for the holidays, and he’s been making all sorts of soups and sandwiches with them. “We eat well and without skimping at all,” he says.
When I ask Moredock why he thinks food evokes such emotion in people, he tells me he isn’t sure it’s about the food. “I think it’s about the whole country’s polarized and not tolerant towards views that they don’t really support,” he says. He felt my story was biased, too, and didn’t like the tone. Our conversation was polite and amicable, even though I had not entirely appreciated his written tone, either. Moredock’s the one who emailed to call me “Stoopid.”
Everyone could probably find a way to improve their diets in some way, shape, or form, except for maybe Bryan Johnson (the longevity guy) and JLo. In normal conversation, we would all likely admit to some form of overdoing it on snacks, relying too heavily on delivery, skimping on veggies, or some other vice. Life is short, Doritos are delicious, and no one is under the impression they’re freshly grown in the garden.
In directing criticism at individuals, we ignore the bigger economic and commercial forces that shape our eating habits.
It’s easier than ever to get takeout with a few taps — and easier than ever to tumble into a furious argument about whether that makes you irresponsible, ignorant, entitled, enlightened, or doomed. Layer onto that the lingering toxicity of diet culture, the guilt and shame wrapped up in weight, and the very real constraints faced by the disabled and the poor, and it’s not surprising that a weeklong diet experiment turns into a moral battleground. In directing criticism at individuals, we ignore the bigger economic and commercial forces that shape our eating habits. We could all stand to have more grace around food, for others and for ourselves.
Chodak, the dietitian, says it’s important to approach the issue with curiosity rather than judgment. It’s not just what people eat but why, and the answer is almost never that they’re just lazy. They’ve got busy work schedules, are rushing kids around, have other obligations, and, in that context, cooking a full-blown, 100% perfect meal from scratch is one of the first things to go. “I have to balance what my body wants with what my body needs,” she says. Plus, America’s nutrition education system leaves much to be desired. “No one teaches people how to feed their kids,” she says.
As for me, the RFK diet experience was mainly positive, even if I am ground beefed out for the foreseeable future. I get it on the whole, unprocessed foods thing. I’ve since converted to whole milk over alternative milks because I should get more calcium, and it tastes better in my coffee. I bought a new spice I really like, and am contemplating the soup suggestions I got from readers.
Most things didn’t stick. I’ve returned to my regular programming, which includes more salads, sandwiches, and, thankfully, dessert. I have reincorporated my favorite nighttime snack of cheese and peanuts. I am still not a great cook — when I’m just making food for myself, I have a hard time caring. But for the record, I make a banging veggie pizza.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
