This post is Part 3 of a series.

In the first and second parts of this post, we’ve considered how eating too little heightens the value of food, in fragile, rigid ways, and how recovering makes it possible to shift to far more flexible forms of appreciation. In this final part, I want to say a bit about the broader implications of getting to this sort of long-recovered gratitude for food.

One reason for my gladness about how I relate to food now is that I think it’s pretty likely that within my lifetime there will be at least one serious food supply chain collapse, whether that’s due to another pandemic, climate crisis, mass migration, war, or some combination. (Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent cli-fi novel The Ministry for the Future has all of this on my mind right now.) And thinking about anticipated regret and how powerful a driver of good decisions it can be (see my blog series here), I take comfort in the fact that I’ll be able to look back and know that while we humans had it so good in this core material sense, I made the most of it. I’ll know that once I was recovered, I didn’t waste this age of abundance by messing about with dieting or fussiness, and I also didn’t take any of it for granted, as if humans had some sort of inalienable right to plunder the planet for all it has; I knew the food was........

© Psychology Today