Why We Judge Others’ Plates to Avoid Our Own Shame
“She orders the same greasy breakfast every morning,” my colleague whispers, nodding toward the woman at the next table. “How can someone do that to their body?”
This from the man who I’ve seen demolish entire sleeves of biscuits during late-night office sessions, who keeps emergency chocolate bars in his desk drawer like pharmaceutical supplies.
We are experts at detecting others’ dietary failures while remaining strategically blind to our own.
The psychology is elegant: external judgment creates distance from internal shame. By focusing on what others eat “wrong,” we avoid confronting what we eat desperately, compulsively, when nobody’s watching. The woman’s public greasy breakfast becomes our distraction from our private midnight raids on leftover rice.
“Tsk, tsk—look at all that sugar,” we say about someone else’s dessert while conveniently forgetting the three spoons of sugar we dissolved into tea an hour ago. Public consumption invites judgment; private consumption remains invisible to scrutiny, including our own.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we judge people by what they eat because food choices feel like moral choices, and moral choices feel like character revelations. The person eating salad must be disciplined. The person eating fast food must be weak. The person eating expensive cuisine must be pretentious.
These equations are mythology masquerading as insight.
Food is autobiography written in nutrition labels, but we’re terrible at reading other people’s stories. We see the meal, not the context. The rushed breakfast of someone working three jobs. The comfort food of someone grieving. The familiar dish of someone homesick in a foreign country.
Meanwhile, our own cravings hide in shame’s shadows. We intellectualize our desires (“I’m supporting local business” while ordering our third coffee today) or medicalize them (“I need the energy” while reaching for sugar that will crash us in an hour).
The cravings we hide reveal more authentic truth than the foods we display. They map our real hungers, our actual needs, our honest relationship with comfort and control. But we guard these revelations like state secrets while broadcasting judgment about others’ visible choices.
What if we offered the same compassion to others’ food choices that we secretly crave for our own? What if we assumed everyone’s eating patterns contain invisible wisdom about their circumstances, their struggles, their attempts to navigate human existence with whatever tools feel available?
The woman with the greasy breakfast might be choosing the one meal that reminds her of her grandmother’s care. The colleague with the secret chocolate might be self-medicating anxiety that has no other available treatment.
We’re all just trying to feed something deeper than hunger while pretending we’re only addressing appetite.
The mirror we refuse to see: every judgment about others’ food is confession about our own shame.
