Chocolate cake

RioIriri has written a personal essay examining good food-bad food beliefs and the psychological self-torture people put themselves through over every bite of food. She talks to those struggling with healthy food choices and the guilt or shame we’re supposed to feel when eating something that’s been labelled “bad.” As she says, it’s not the cake that’s going to hurt us at all, it’s all the stuff surrounding us to make us feel miserable and keep us from enjoying life and being glad for what we have. She writes:

Good foods, bad foods

The amount of psychological programming we have is really astounding, when you come to realize it, especially in regards to labeling some foods as good and others as bad. Even though a piece of chocolate cake is not going to poison you, making you ill or dead, we are programmed to think of it as a deadly poison, and those who partake of it are fools, gambling with their very lives for enjoying a delicious treat.

Chocolate cake contains butter, eggs, flour, cocoa powder or baking chocolate, baking soda or powder, and possibly milk or water. Not exactly terrifying, when broken down, and yet these ingredients, properly blended and baked, create an item that can create guilt and fear in its consumers, and contempt and nastiness in those watching the consumption.

I can eat a slice of chocolate cake. I am not going to die from it, nor will it make me ill....