Love at the Table: Eating Disorders, Veganism, Carnivore, and the Drama of Relationships
When two people sit down to eat together, more than food is on the table. Meals are rituals of intimacy, belonging, and recognition. They can also be battlegrounds. For those struggling with eating disorders, dietary ideologies like veganism or carnivorism can intensify the silent negotiations of love and power that take place across the dinner plate.
Eating Disorders as Relationship Disorders
From a psychoanalytic perspective, eating disorders are never just about food or body image. They are about relationships: to the self, to the body, and to others. To refuse food may unconsciously mean to refuse dependency. To binge may be an attempt to fill an inner emptiness. To purge may express both the wish to take in and the wish to expel, oscillating between longing and rejection.
Food, then, becomes a language in which unspoken conflicts about intimacy, control, and love are expressed. The table becomes a stage where unconscious dramas play out.
Carnivore vs. Vegan: Symbolic Positions
Now add ideology to the mix. Veganism, often linked with ideals of purity, compassion, and renunciation, can unconsciously symbolize a wish to avoid aggression or destructiveness: “I will not kill to live.” The carnivore diet, by contrast, can symbolize potency, mastery, and a refusal of guilt: “I will take strength directly from the animal.”
In relationships, these symbolic positions may clash. A vegan partner may feel disturbed by their carnivore partner’s embrace of flesh; a carnivore may feel judged or emasculated by the vegan’s abstinence. What is really at stake is not only nutrition but how aggression, guilt, and desire are handled within the couple.
Conflict and Collusion
For someone with an eating disorder, these dietary polarities can become amplifiers of relational tension. If one partner’s veganism unconsciously represents purity and moral superiority, the other may feel contaminated, guilty, or defensive. If carnivorism stands for strength and primal vitality, the vegan may feel diminished, shamed, or excluded.
Often, couples unconsciously collude in these dynamics. One embodies renunciation, the other indulgence; one becomes the “angel,” the other the “beast.” The eating disorder may thrive in such a split, feeding off the very tension that destabilizes intimacy.
What Lies Beneath
Behind these conflicts lie deeper anxieties. Eating is always about dependency—on the other for food, for love, for recognition. It is also about aggression: to live is to consume, to take, to destroy. Veganism and carnivorism dramatize these polarities. For the person with an eating disorder, choosing sides may be a way to manage unbearable ambivalence: Am I good or bad? Pure or destructive? Worthy of love or deserving of punishment?
In relationships, these questions echo loudly. Couples may find themselves fighting about dinner but really arguing about intimacy, autonomy, or aggression.
Toward Tolerance of Ambivalence
The psychoanalytic task is not to declare one diet right and the other wrong but to illuminate the unconscious meanings beneath. Eating disorders narrow life to rigid polarities—control vs. loss, purity vs. excess, vegan vs. carnivore. Healing means learning to tolerate ambivalence: that love contains aggression, that nourishment involves destruction, that dependency is not weakness but part of being human.
When couples can see their food conflicts as metaphors for deeper emotional struggles, the dinner table can transform—from a battlefield of purity and power into a place where ambivalence, appetite, and relationship can coexist.
References
Freud, S. (1905/1953). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, Vol. 7. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. Standard Edition, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1946/1975). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press.
Bruch, H. (1973). Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. New York: Basic Books.
Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton.