Krankjorum Means Business

Eating is awesome. Food provides us plenty of energy to survive lesser times, like late Wednesday afternoons at work when the vending machine is broke. Eating is further a sensuous and physically pleasurable experience. Like the need to fornicate, the need to eat reminds us we aren’t too far removed from our furry animal cousins.

Consequently, deciding what foods to eat, much like anything pertaining to innate physiological urges shatters people into rigid dietary camps – or cults - that bond together to fight the evils of the physical body. What and why we eat cannot be merely about satisfying a need. It must be an ethical choice, indicative of moral standing and preferably defend shared values against an enemy. 

Food cultists in particular loathe and are obsessively occupied with fat, and fat people. Fat kills. Fat people are lazy, jealous, stupid and contagious. Both must be destroyed with trying rules – like eating two per cent of one’s bodyweight in vegetables, minimum –  that leave cultists feeling exhausted but virtuous on their never-ending journey.

Another way to validate one’s worth as a member of a food cult is by ridiculing outsiders. Besides, it is unfathomable anyone not belonging to, or questioning drinking the Kool-Aid could be anything but a cohort of the enemy – fat and lazy. Ad hominems usually employed by fourth graders are a great way to deal with this type scum.  

Attacking heathens reinforces cohesion within the cult and strengthens the followers in their resolve to stick to an arbitrary list of personal biases declared as dietary dogma, as compiled by a Guru. Foods not in the canon are not to be eaten, ever, in any quantities. Why? Because.

That is okay. Food cults aren’t about critical thinking or scientific nutritional research, they are about unconditional dedication and absolute, black-and-white discipline. There is no difference between one slice of pizza and ten slices of pizza, because cultists can’t count beyond two. They’re proud of it, too.

But what about eating as an awesome experience? To eat whatever you fancy, whenever you fancy? In the modern lard-laden environment, this would likely make you fat. The solution would be keep eating what you fancy, just (much) less of it. To learn count between one slice of pizza and ten slices of pizza.

That would mean having to learn true self-control and impulse inhibition faced with awesome foods, which is one of the defining characteristics of a human being versus its furry animal cousin. No wonder then, indeed, that food cults are de rigueur nowadays.