Everything went to hell on a Tuesday. 2:07 PM. I open my lunch box in the break room, pull out a ham and butter sandwich—classic, ancestral, certified by the nutritional patriarchy since 1902. Silence. Then… a scream. Long, shrill. Someone faints in a cloud of eucalyptus essential oil.
Another person calls HR, shrieking: “HE PULLED OUT PORK! RIGHT IN THE ANIMAL DEFENSE ZONE!“
They ripped my sandwich away. Confiscated it. I got hit with a carbon fine. And a QR code to sign up for mandatory training: “Rehabilitating Your Primal Instincts While Respecting the Plant Kingdom,” led by a former DJ turned flexitarian shaman after an enlightenment in a bowl of miso soup.
Today, it’s not enough to eat without killing. You have to eat without offending. A poorly washed salad is a micro-aggression. Fruit picked too early? Plant racism. Tofu? Only if it’s been fermented with bacterial consent. EVERYTHING is political. Your plate is a ballot. And if you vote wrong, you get banned from the general Slack and relegated to the “unrepentant carnivore” office, sandwiched between the smokers and the Google users.
At lunch, we don’t say “Bon appétit” anymore, but “May the chlorophyll elevate you.” And bread? Eliminated. Too white. Too gluey. Too “wheat-centric.” Instead, we eat smiling algae patties, cold-pressed in biodegradable bags knitted by reformed slaughterhouse workers.
Fortunately, there’s a solution coming: the Vegan Leadership Institute. A certification program to learn how to talk to your colleagues without ever mentioning the existence of butter. They teach phrases like “May I suggest an alternative based on textured empathy?” or “This dish seems intensely misaligned.” The training ends with a ritual: everyone hugs a tree while crying over the collective murder of yogurts.
But me? Deep down, I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of the accusatory stares when I bite into a four-cheese pizza. The weary sighs from a colleague who “feels” the suffering of over-grilled eggplants. From that coworker who explained to me, dead serious, that bananas have a karma of submission.
So I snapped. I ate a hard-boiled egg. In secret. In the bathroom. In the dark. Like a junkie. And that’s when I understood. This wasn’t a food revolution. It was theater of purity. A desperate quest to mask existential emptiness behind chia seeds.
Let’s stop playing the contest of who’s the most aligned. This grand masquerade where everyone proudly posts their salad like others once flaunted their muscles or their Rolex. Today, it’s virtue we wave around in our stories. “Look, I ate a bowl of recycled quinoa in a nutshell hand-picked by a militant hedgehog.” That’s nice, but do you sleep well at night? Because I can’t take waking up in a cold sweat anymore because I dreamed of a bleeding burger.
We’re not algorithms. We weren’t coded to execute a straight line toward Good. We sway, we skid, we doubt. We’re made of contradictions, absurd impulses, bizarre desires and appetites that obey no editorial line. We can go from gluten-free granola to raclette at 11 PM without necessarily tumbling into the axis of Evil.
We are beasts, yes. Tender beasts, with flaws, with traces of barbecue stuck deep in our souls, with 2 AM cravings that push us to eat chips at the bottom of the bed, shame in our bellies and smiles on our lips. And that’s okay. It’s even beautiful. It’s proof that we’re alive. That we’re not just Instagram avatars, calibrated, filtered, validated by the great vegano-cosmic inquisition.
Real freedom isn’t eating “clean.” It’s eating what makes you vibrate. What makes you salivate, dream, hiccup. What makes you say “damn, this is good,” even if it melts, even if it drips, even if it’s politically questionable and ethically dubious.
And maybe by trying so hard to eat like saints, we just forgot we were human. And that we have the right to have fat around our hearts.
And you know what? It feels good!