Food is more than just fuel — it’s

also pleasure
By
Carrie Dennett
On Nutrition
How do you view food? Is it a source of fuel, pleasure, or a bit
of both? I recently had an email exchange with someone who
argued that food is supposed to be fuel — period — and that
to view eating as a form of pleasure was a gateway to food
addiction.

I had to respectfully disagree.

Obviously, food is fuel for your body, and filling your tank
with the quantity and quality of food your body needs will
help you operate at your best. “Running on fumes” or
regularly filling up with foods that are low on nutrition will
leave you feeling lackluster.

But food is also pleasure. If nothing else, this is true from a

pure neurobiology standpoint: Our brains are wired to register
pleasure when we have experiences that we need to repeat in
order to survive. If food didn’t provide pleasure, our species
would have died out, because our ancestors would have had
little motivation to put in the effort required to hunt a woolly
mammoth and sleuth out roots and berries that weren’t
poisonous.
Unfortunately, our brain’s reward circuitry doesn’t always
mesh well with the abundance of highly palatable food in
today’s modern food environment — especially if you find
yourself stretched so thin by personal and professional
responsibilities that the only pleasure you feel you have time
for is food. After all, we all need to eat, and as one of my
patients pointed out to me, you can eat chocolate while doing
the laundry.

The key is balance. Consuming food as fuel and deriving no

pleasure from it is joyless, but if food is your biggest pleasure,
it’s easy to veer into overindulgence. Using food as a primary
source of pleasure can be like a canary in a coal mine — a sign
that deeper needs aren’t being met. But if food is just one of
many things that bring you pleasure, enjoying it can lead to
better-for-you choices, because we ultimately want our food to
taste good and leave us feeling good. It’s not terribly
pleasurable to end a meal feeling like you’re full-to-bursting
and on your way to a food coma.

Pleasure can contribute to feelings of satisfaction after a meal.

From a physical standpoint, satisfaction means eating enough
to abate hunger. But if you get no sensory pleasure from your
meal — either because you didn’t like it or because you were
so distracted you barely noticed you ate it — you may be left
unsatisfied and feeling that you need to find something else to
eat, even though you aren’t hungry anymore.
A balanced, varied, nutritious diet allows for both pleasure and
health; a rigid, restrictive diet does not. Most people find a
variety of foods pleasurable, and some of those foods are more
nutritious than others. What makes a food pleasurable? Taste,
of course, but also temperature, texture and substance. It’s
why you might prefer a cool, crisp salad in the summer, and a
warm, filling vegetable soup in the winter.

Being able to appreciate the subtle pleasures of whole and

less-processed foods — an appreciation that can be cultivated
— will help you make choices that please your palate while
providing the nutrition your body needs to thrive. Denying
yourself favorite foods that you feel are lacking in nutrition
can lead to reactionary overeating when you do allow yourself
one of these “forbidden” foods. Odds are you’ll wolf it down
with a side of guilt, erasing the very pleasure you hoped to
find.

QS Discuss how the writer balances her argument between

“nutrition” and “pleasure” vis a vis food.

Qs Explain the following as used in the piece and with

reference to context: (A) Food Coma
(B) Sleuth out roots and berries (C) Reactionary overeating

QS What is the writer implying through the comparison:

“Using food as a primary source of pleasure can be like a
canary in a coal mine.”
Qs Write a brief and creative note on “My relationship with
Food”.