Our interaction with the food we eat every day is romanticised to our collective detriment. A food can taste good, it can make you feel good and it can evoke memories. But calling it a relationship is a stretch. Let’s call it what it is: A transaction. We transact for our food. The way we pay for transport. We pay for shelter. We pay for food. This is especially true since most of us reading this are not directly involved in growing the food we consume. We feel comfort while in our home. But we don’t have a relationship with our house. 

We have a relationship with our body. When we eat something, our body is directly impacted by it. Eat too much, we put on weight. Eat too little, we are malnourished. Some of us absorb more, others less. Every food gives us different amounts of the different nutrients. Every single food is broken down into its constituent chemicals in the body which is itself a chemical soup. We decide what nutrients our body needs and how much it gets. 

Food does not care whether we ate it or not. Food gets digested, some of it incorporated into the body. Most of it lost. It is our head that manufactures all the things we feel as we eat. And our body pays the long term price for all our food decisions. So let’s call it what it is: our transaction with food affects our relationship with our body. Pretending like that transaction can’t be quantified and complicating it leaves all of humanity worse off.