When Food Loses Its Meaning

I have a quarterly meet-up with a group of friends bonded by our mutual love for dim sum. At a recent gathering, we shared updates, challenges, and the things we were connecting with in our lives.

One friend mentioned attending a talk by Samin Nosrat on her new book. Nosrat described this new publication as not just a cookbook, but as a philosophy for meaningful living. A significant part of that "good life," Nosrat said, was cooking and nourishment. That all she held dear was communicated through cooking and food.

I noticed how much joy as well as grief I felt hearing that story. My growing sadness at a culture increasingly telling us that food's only value is nutritional—that pleasure, memory, and connection don't matter. That the dominant cultural story is increasingly one of a sterile hunger.

What changes for our connections when eating and nourishment lose their cultural value? How many stories, experiences, joys, and sorrows are woven through our relationship with food? Where is the larger conversation about what we might be missing out on?

Let this be the season of understanding the depth of our relationship to food.

I want to talk about how we understand our relationship to food beyond one dimension. I want to invite us to get curious about what it means when that relationship fundamentally shifts.

GLP-1 medications are changing how people experience food, including at times pleasure in food. Beyond this is the rhetoric of diet/wellness culture intensely driving the binary of “good” and “bad”. Are we being asked to accept a future where food becomes merely fuel, stripped of its cultural and emotional significance?

This conversation is happening in some spaces, but not widely enough. Many major wellness spaces or online influencers promote a simplified food as fuel. How do we make space to recognize that food is not only nutrition?

Let this be the season of embracing curiosity about what I enjoy, and why.

Let this be the season of remembering how food introduced me to people.

Let this be the season of honouring how food helps me stay connected to those who have passed.

Let this be the season of recalling how food helped me better understand a person, their community, their culture.

Let this be the season of celebrating how food brought people together.

Let this be the season of acknowledging how food fueled justice movements.

Let this be the season of remembering that food is a full human experience.

This post isn’t about having the answers. It is about staying curious. What are we losing in the process? What is being held up? How is anti-fatness guiding us further away from care for each other? We need to pause and ask: what is being lost and why?

If you've been thinking about this too, or if you've felt this quiet grief, I see you. Let's keep talking.

Are you a therapist or body worker who is interested in fat liberation and wants to deepen your practice and conversation, we would love to have you join us in the Fat Liberation Lab. These are the kinds of conversations that we need a space to grapple with, to find our collective footing and consider how we can move in a way that embraces body diversity, fat care, and the dignity of people.