I prefer the word glutton to foodie.
Foodie has become almost meaningless. Everyone is a foodie now. You can be a foodie because you bring your own handmade sandwich into the office, because you know where to get good Neapolitan pizza, because you have opinions on natural wine. It has become a catch-all for anyone who enjoys eating things that are slightly more interesting than a meal deal.
Glutton is different. Glutton admits something. It suggests that at some point you stopped eating because you were hungry and carried on because you wanted to. I like that. I am a glutton.
Not all the time. This is important. I am also disciplined. I can say no. I can decide that I don’t actually need dessert. I can have one glass of wine and stop there. I can spend an entire day eating perfectly sensibly and feel rather pleased with myself.
But then there are other days. Days when I want a slice of cake with my morning coffee, a battered sausage with my fish and chips, a family size bar of dairy milk after supper. Or opening a second bottle of wine despite knowing perfectly well the first was enough. Sometimes I want more because more is exactly what I want.
And I don’t particularly want to dress that up as anything else. There is a strange tendency to make excessive eating sound virtuous if we give it the right language. We “love food”. We “have a sweet tooth”. We’re “big eaters”. We’re “foodies. Perhaps we’re just greedy.
I don’t mean that as an accusation. I mean it almost fondly. Gluttony is an interesting word because it contains a degree of shame. It doesn’t pretend that appetite is always elegant, or that every additional bite is an act of appreciation. Sometimes the extra bite is simply extra.
Now more is not necessarily better. Eating the entire dessert doesn’t mean you enjoyed it more than the person who ate half. Finishing the bottle off doesn’t mean you appreciate wine more deeply. In fact, knowing when something is enough might be one of the great pleasures of eating. The perfect amount of butter on bread, the moment when you’re satisfied but not stuffed. The one glass of wine that makes dinner better rather than the three that make tomorrow worst. There is pleasure in restraint.
I just don’t think restraint should be the only pleasure we’re allowed to admit to. Because sometimes I want to go too far. I want the meal that leaves me thinking I’ll never eat again. I want to have that roided up sugar dish purely because I cannot stop thinking about it. And there is something oddly satisfying about knowingly crossing that line. Not because suffering makes the experience more authentic. It doesn’t. Food poisoning is not chic. Waking up bloated and with puffy eyes from polishing off a tub of ice-cream doesn't symbol culinary devotion or signal a life well lived.
But there is a pleasure in knowing you could have stopped and didn’t. That, to me, is the difference. A lack of control isn’t gluttony. Gluttony requires a degree of consciousness. You know you’ve had enough. You just want more anyway.
We need food. We don’t need cake. We need nourishment. We don’t need a bowl of Coco Pops at midnight. But the fact that we don’t need something is not, by itself, a reason not to have it. Occasionally, the most delicious thing you can do is stop. Sometimes it is to carry on. Perhaps that’s why I prefer glutton to foodie. Foodie says you love food. Glutton admits that sometimes you love it past the point of reason.