I was never a particularly good Catholic. Most of the times I have set foot in a church has been for a funeral or sightseeing. So why do I feel so much underlying guilt about everything I do? The horrors in the world I don’t speak out enough on. What I watch on TV. How much wine I drank the night before. My Western privilege. I especially feel guilty about the things I eat. 

Sometimes it’s when I am tired and haven’t gone to the market and there’s nothing in the pantry, and I put some frozen chicken tenders that were for my kids in the air fryer. Am I child? Why am I eating like that? And why does my body enjoy it so much? Or sometimes I’ll overindulge in something rich and fatty, like caviar on fried chicken skin.

The term guilty pleasure, in relation to the things we eat, often refers to a food that we appreciate but is bad, for one reason or another. A food that might be considered shameful because of what it represents. For what it does to our bodies. Or what it does to the planet or how it makes us look to others.

Few are total purists. Most of the world’s great chefs have their gustatory vices. David Chang often claims his love for Domino’s Pizza, while Dominique Creen prefers lamb merguez on a baguette. Anthony Bourdain is said to have loved Popeye’s fried chicken. Ferran Adrià has said his guilty pleasure is Bollycao, an industrial chocolate filled cake, so for all we know Alain Ducasse might sustain himself with gas station vol-au-vents.

When asked, many people will name some industrial food product that gives them comfort, like a bag of candy or McDonald’s French fries, as their guilty pleasure. Or it might be a one of kind family recipe that evokes nostalgia from a more innocent time in our lives, even though it is made from cheap, supermarket ingredients. Or maybe it’s just something weird, like a Canadian spaghetti sandwich or spam musubi in Hawaii.

Do we feel guilty because eating these things can hurt our social status? That it is something that is beneath us? Are we no longer cool if we enjoy sour gummy worms? 

I’ve certainly shamed people for their food and drink choices. You probably have too. I once witnessed someone order a Coca Cola at Noma because they felt it was the only way to soothe an upset stomach during the meal of a lifetime. I give them endless shit about it. I’ll probably never let that one go.

Do we feel guilty because eating these things can hurt our social status? 

Sometimes our guilty pleasure is something that breaks tradition. Like pineapple on pizza. Is that really so bad? Or opting for butter instead of olive oil in a classic Milanese dish. It’s also because of excess. Dabiz Muñoz might give you every rare, delicious flavor all at once on a single plate at DiverXo rather than spreading them throughout the meal. 

Guilt is lurking within every tasting menu and on every supermarket shelf. If we let it, it will take away all our joy.  

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures,” Foo Fighters guitarist Dave Grohl once said in an interview. “If you fucking like something, like it. That’s what’s wrong with our generation: that residual punk rock guilt, like, ‘You’re not supposed to like that. That’s not fucking cool.’ Don’t fucking think it’s not cool to like Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic.’ It is cool to like Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’! Why the fuck not? Fuck you! That’s who I am, goddamn it! “

“That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit.”

Dave Grohl

What Grohl is talking about, even if it’s not a direct parallel, makes some sense. Can we just enjoy food without worrying about what everyone thinks all the time? If it brings enjoyment, can’t we just let it be? Does the purity patrol have to appear every time we eat a piece of chocolate? 

If eating were only about sustenance, we would just eat steamed boiled chicken with steamed broccoli all the time. It’s OK to seek pleasure in what we eat. To find a combination of flavors and techniques that gets our hearts and brains to wake up a bit. We all need these little fragments of ecstasy in this world.

Still, there must be some limit. Eating whatever we want, whenever we want, regardless of how bad it is for us or how bad it is for the planet and ignoring all the consequences that come with it doesn’t quite make us pleasure seekers. It just makes us bastards. With nearly any food there’s some way you can abuse it. You can cook it in a way that diminishes it. You can waste it. You can eat too much of it. Maybe it’s not guilt that is the problem at all, but our limited view of pleasure. 

Don’t we get more pleasure by craving something? By understanding what life is like with it and without it? 

Shouldn’t a perfect heirloom tomato in the late summer, bred for flavor by a collection of farmers over decades, picked off the vine at just the right time, give us as much of not more pleasure as some combination of chemicals spliced together in a lab that tricks our brains into liking them? If that tomato was available every day of the year, we might not derive as much pleasure from it, but God damn, when the stars align, there are few better expressions of time and place.

What if we just restrain ourselves a little bit? A study has shown that 12% of Americans are responsible for eating half of all beef consumed in the country. Most of that’s not grass-fed beef either, but the worst kind, much of it from cattle raised on industrial feed lots or on land that used to be rainforest in Brazil. Are they still getting as much pleasure from the burgers, steaks, and barbecue they are eating when they eat it multiple times a day? Should those of us that might have oxtail a few times a year be allowed to enjoy it or should those pricks be allowed to have all the fun?

Whether you are guided by punk rock or Jesus Christ, pleasure should be derived by what nourishes us. Our bodies. Our souls. Ultimately, that’s not cheap thrills, but love.