There Is Dignity in Eating.

There is also dignity in eating. Yes you read me well. If you were taken aback or amused by what you’ve just read, it’s not your fault, you, like everyone of us, is a victim of a culture that finds fulfilment in delegitimising pleasure and legitimising pain as though pleasure, like pain, isn’t a legitimate component of human existential reality.

“You eat a lot,” “all you do is eat,” “you like food so much” – deriding statements like these are pervasively commonplace in our determined attempt to demean food and eating. But when we talk about food in this way, we’re often merely hypocritical rather than being true to ourselves.

Children, unlike we adults, are true to themselves when it comes to food; adult are captives to pretence. When food is being served at events, adults feign indifference, but once the servers mistakingly don’t serve them fairly or fail to serve them at all, their love for food, which is concealed under the repressive hold of pretence, begins to force itself out by way of bitter complaints and verbal aggressions. In less frequent instances, our “food-despising” adults have fought for food publicly

Decent living is about moderation. We should censure people when they go overboard in the amount of food they eat, but we should not fail to do same when they overwork themselves. But this is not the case in our world where foodie is derogatory but workaholic is a compliment. If immoderate eating harms the body, too much work kills the body!

Our glorification of work is roundly hypocritical. While we pretend to love the pain associated with work, it’s the truth that all human effort to advance technology over the centuries has been geared towards one goal – lessening of work and the pain associated with it. Why is it that when we celebrate yam we eat a lot of yam, when we celebrate music we play abundance of it, when we celebrate dance we dance a lot, but when we celebrate work (May Day) we rest from work? Work is pain!

Eating is a most basic natural need without which we cannot live, hence it’s incongruous to talk about it as though it’s a mere frivolous past time. Eating is one natural craving that should be indulged, there is nothing shaming or dishonourable about it.

There’s dignity in eating!

This is my meditation this midweek.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.