Functional and Dysfunctional Lunch-Attitudes

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by Tom Billings

Copyright © 1998 by Thomas E. Billings. All rights reserved.
Contact author for permission to republish.

Are you eating the right foods with the wrong attitude? Is it possible to spoil your good diet with a bad mental outlook? To become unhealthy in spirit even if sound in body? Judging by the troubles people on alternative diets often seem to have obsessing over food or maintaining a balanced approach to its role in the rest of their life, it often appears to be so.

The objective of this paper is to encourage readers to explore their attitudes toward diet and food, i.e., one's mental relationship with diet/food. Some of the common attitudes one may encounter in the raw/vegan movement are defined and briefly described. We begin with a look at functional (positive) attitudes, after which we'll compare and contrast them with dysfunctional (negative) attitudes. The motivation for this paper is to help raw-fooders (and conventional vegans) recognize dysfunctional attitudes in themselves and others, and to thereby assist in the process of moving toward a more functional attitude.

Not only can this be important to help improve your own relationship with food, but with the proper attitude, those who want their diets to be examples for others won't be so likely to end up alienating them--something that unfortunately happens as often as not.

In lunch-mindfulness, the diet is your servant. Here, one eats to live, rather than lives to eat. (In contrast, you are the servant (slave) of dietary ideology under the dysfunctional dietary attitudes discussed further below.) The practice of lunch-mindfulness lies between hedonism (ignoring your health, eating only for pleasure) and excessive discipline (strictly controlling your food intake at all times, often in disregard of your health). Lunch-mindfulness is moderation or the middle path: paying enough attention to food to have a good, healthy diet, but not so much that one is obsessed with food. One way to characterize lunch-mindfulness is as "appropriate" discipline, where appropriate means discipline that is driven by intelligence rather than dogma, and applied with restraint, in carefully measured amounts.

Because most of us live in a society that has a generally hedonistic approach to diet (and life), lunch-mindfulness and the middle path may appear to be "too disciplined" to those with a hedonistic bent. On the middle path, social situations may arise where deciding how much discipline to apply is a non-trivial question. (Such is life--I can only suggest that one think carefully regarding such decisions.) Ultimately, the point of lunch-mindfulness is that one has just enough discipline to take care of oneself, without making dietary ideology/discipline into a god. Lunch-mindfulness is based on the idea (common sense, really) that your health is more important than dietary ideology/dogma, and that excessive discipline is as much a problem as no discipline (hedonism).

One real-world complication that most of us face when trying to practice lunch-mindfulness is the common habit of eating for emotional reasons. When we eat for purely emotional reasons, we are not applying "appropriate discipline." Learning to eat mindfully and to control/avoid emotion-based eating can be a real challenge. There is no one solution to this problem, but some of the things that may help are:

• Finding your spiritual center (yoga, other spiritual practices).

• Be a witness of the mind when the emotions come up--analyze the emotions and your response (accept the emotions, try to control just the response).

• Avoid foods/situations that trigger the emotions, and

• Most important of all: Whatever happens, don't judge or condemn yourself--love yourself as you are right now.

The motivations for the practice of lunch-mindfulness can vary significantly according to individual circumstances and spiritual philosophy. A few select reasons to practice lunch-mindfulness are given as follows:

• A spiritual person might regard eating as a form of meditation, and/or a form of worship. Such worship could be to the divine fire (digestive fire) within, or, as one example of possible Christian views, one might consider the body to be the temple of God, and only clean food should be put into the temple.

• A non-spiritual person might view eating as a potentially healthy pleasure, and try to eat delicious but nutritious food (without obsessing on it).

• Another person might seek to minimize the effort required to achieve a good healthy diet.

Examples:

• A person (who has positive attitudes and motivation) following a 100%-raw diet as part of a healing program.

• A person following a (nearly) 100%-raw diet with positive attitudes and motivation, in a non-obsessive way, because the diet works well for them.

• A person following a 75-95% raw diet because it supports good health for them, and fits into their lifestyle.

• A person following a 75-95% cooked diet for the same reasons as above.

• Lunch-mindfulness can be incorporated into one's spirituality (as in the examples above), but it becomes dysfunctional (hence is no longer lunch-mindfulness) if one begins to think their diet makes them superior to others. Further, spiritual views on diet vary significantly; what appeals to one might not appeal to others. For example, some Christian denominations recommend vegetarianism, while others (e.g., certain small fundamentalist groups) condemn vegetarianism. For widest generality, it is best to exclude specific spiritual criteria from the definition.

• Certain advocates of veganism are quick to claim that their diet is more environmentally efficient than other diets, ignoring that their claim is logically dubious: it is based on the comparison of large-scale, non-sustainable production of plant vs. animal foods. The problem with such an approach is obvious: foods, whether plant or animal, should be produced in an environmentally sustainable way. If foods are produced in a sustainable matter, is the amount of resources used of great significance? (My view: it is not; in particular, others have the right to live--and use the earth's resources for their food production, whether plant or animal.)

  An additional complication here is that promoting environmental efficiency as a virtue puts one on the proverbial "slippery slope." In effect, the idea usually becomes that "it's good to use the earth's resources to make plant food for me, but it's bad to use the earth's resources to produce animal foods for you." Another way to state that argument: "I have my plant (vegan) food--you should eat vegan or starve!" The latter quote is not very compassionate, but then genuine compassion, in my opinion, is rare in the vegan movement--where compassion is often used as a weapon against those "murderous" meat eaters (at least that's what the "compassionate" extremists suggest that meat-eaters are). Personally, I strongly disagree with the extremists.

  Showing concern for the environment when choosing your diet can be laudable. However, allowing such concern to put one in the position of advocating that others cannot (or should not) use the earth's resources for their food, or condemning others because their lunch uses more of the earth's resources than your lunch uses, is not laudable (such attitudes are reprehensible, in my opinion). Condemning others for their use of the earth's resources for legitimate food production is a clear illustration of placing dietary dogma above the rights of others--it is a dysfunctional lunch-attitude, to be avoided.

Typical Examples:

• An ethical vegan who believes that he or she is "more compassionate" than a meat-eater.

• A puritanical raw-fooder who believes that he or she is "purer" than those "poor souls" who eat "dead" (cooked) food.

Raw-food zealots who engage in some of the following behaviors: hostility, threatening others, plagiarism, intellectual dishonesty, and/or promoting the dietary equivalent of racism, because they are under the delusion that their 100%-raw vegan diet makes them "superior," and the ends justify their negative means.

It should be mentioned here that some raw zealots promote lunch-righteousness by actively spreading the false myth that a 100%-raw vegan diet makes one "superior" to those who eat cooked foods. Not only is this false, but it is a form of bigotry.

In her book, To Eat Flesh They Are Willing, Are Their Spirits Weak? (1996, Pythagorean Publishers), philosopher Kristin Aaronson nicely summarizes the moral trap of dietary self-righteousness (p. 18):

No one who feels morally superior ever is, for the simple reason that [self] righteousness is itself a moral taint. We may feel better, feeling that we are better; but the better we feel we are than others, the worse--and worse off--we will be. We can be corrupted by a good thing, by too much of a good thing, by taking a good thing much too seriously.

Typical Example:

• A person with lunch-identification is easily upset when his/her diet is criticized, challenged, or questioned, because he/she interprets criticism of the diet as personal criticism.

• Zealots lashing out with hostility against all who dare to challenge their delusions about their supposedly "perfect, natural, ideal diet."

• Raw zealots denying the humanity and/or existence of people with different diets--e.g., referring to them as "mutants," or saying that an existing race/group of people will go "extinct" because they don't have the "ideal" diet. Calling others "mutants" and implying that they are less than fully human is the language of bigotry--the same as practiced by hate groups. (See Note 1 at end--the word mutant can be used in a civil, non-hostile way.)

Note that conforming to strict religious rules about diet is not necessarily lunch-obsession, as religions are (presumably) based on love, and love is not a pathological emotion. Also, one might need to pay considerable attention to food for a short period (the length of which will vary with the individual) after switching diets. Such attention is not considered lunch-obsession if the attention declines substantially after one gets habituated to the new diet.

Typical Examples:

• Someone following a 100%-raw vegan diet for negative (pathological) reasons (i.e., fear of cooked food, mucus, protein) discovers that a "raw" dish just eaten actually included a cooked ingredient. The wanna-be 100% purist then feels "impure" and/or "sinful," and may seriously consider doing a fast as a form of penance. This is the kind of nonsense that can occur when one has the negative motivations promoted by dietary purists.

• An ethical vegan eats a prepared food without checking each ingredient for the presence of (horrors!) animal products. The vegan learns after eating it that it contained a tiny amount of animal products, and feels guilty and impure.

• Lunch-obsession can be considered an eating disorder (mental imbalance) when it has a significant negative impact on a person's life: orthorexia nervosa (see article mentioned above).

Think back to when you first got into raw/living foods (or conventional veganism) and experienced a big improvement in your health. You were probably very enthusiastic then, and your personal attitude towards food was probably more dysfunctional than it is now. Over time, you have (or probably will) move to a more functional attitude. The point, of course, is that we can--and do--change.

As zealots are criticized here, it should be mentioned that zealots also have a choice: they can remain as examples of dysfunctional attitudes, or they can choose to change their ways and embrace a functional style. That is, it is not the goal of this paper to divide people into a good "us" (functional) vs. the "bad" (zealots and dysfunctional). [Side note: dividing people into "us" (good vegans) vs. "them" (bad non-vegans) is a characteristic feature of the vegan movement--unfortunately.] Instead of division, I encourage all (including the zealots) to discard their dysfunctional attitudes, and work toward a positive attitude, one that is guided by genuine compassion.

1. Some raw writers use the term "mutant" to refer to abnormal elements in the body--e.g., mutant sugars, mutant enzymes. Such usage is perfectly legitimate and non-hostile. What is hostile is to say that another person is a mutant, and inferior, because their diet is different.

2. Thanks to those who reviewed earlier drafts of this paper for their suggestions which have, hopefully, helped to make this paper more "mentally digestible."

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I hope you found the material above to be interesting. Good luck with your diet and health!

--Tom Billings

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