Appetite-suppressing drugs like Ozempic have now been used by about seven per cent of people in Britain. GLP-1s are taking off in a way that calls into question the sincerity of society’s claims to be body-positive.

Society still tends to judge people living with obesity as, among other things, emotional eaters. But are we not all emotional eaters?

A few years ago, an Australian psychologist led a study investigating a collision between our desire and our ethics. 

Rationality

Omnivorous students sat down at a desk to consider this question: do animals have minds? People’s answers were influenced by whether they expected to eat meat in the coming minutes. 

Those whose next beef burger was a more distant prospect were more willing to allow that animals are not automata.

But whether or not an animal has a mind can’t depend on the precise timing of one’s next sausage roll. 

What was doing the work for these participants was guilt suppression: their actions conflicted with their beliefs, so they were ready to alter their beliefs just so that their actions prompted less discomfort. 

Their emotions, not their rationality, were in the driving seat.

Emotional

They are not the only ones to fall prey to this. Indeed, those who judge people with obesity as “emotional eaters” can be accused of essentially the same thing. 

There is a clash between our desire for meat and the values and principles we hold. Many of us think animals shouldn’t be killed so that we may have a wider choice of foods. 

Even more of us agree that, at the very least, our dinners shouldn’t drive unnecessary suffering. And yet today’s meat systems commodify animals, failing to adhere to these principles.

What actually drives our dietary choices is, it seems, largely the comfort of the known, the pull of our desires, the warmth of our memories: dad’s bacon butties, mum’s beef lasagne. 

We often feel unable to stop eating meat, or our usual foods, for these emotional reasons.

Harm

This turns the tables on the ardent pro-meat lobby, who have long sought to portray vegetarians as sentimental. The shoe may be on the other foot.

But in the modern world we can have our cake and eat it: honouring our principles and still enjoying basically all the foods we crave in plant-based form.

But this takes a touch of effort, or at least preparation, so of course emotion often rears its head again, in the form of procrastination or catastrophic thinking: ‘I’ll fail and hate myself.’

A critic might say: “This can’t be right! Emotional eating is where you eat to make yourself feel better. Most meat-eaters don’t eat to feel better. They eat because they need to.”

But it seems that emotional eating can be defined more broadly as eating based on emotion in a way that can cause harm. 

Horrors

Refusing to give up meat can still be a case of emotionally driven eating, even if one never strays from the perfect calorie intake. The type of foods one eats can still be settled by emotion, even if the quantity one consumes is not.

Most of us have a choice between eating rationally - yet with gusto! - and eating emotionally, even if many of us have lives that are so unjustly complicated that they have been deprived of this agency.

Before I say “the choice is ours”, I feel the need to acknowledge the risk that I’m publicly saying something annoying, possibly counterproductive, maybe even therefore unethical. 

But given the mess the world is in, and the horrors facing animals, I think it’s worth a punt.

This Author 

William Gildea is a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and the Centre for Research in Ethics. His podcast, Surprising Ethics, offers an intriguing idea drawn from philosophy in each episode.