Between Flesh and Leaf: Why Our Diets Speak the Language of the Unconscious
When people argue about food—whether plants or meat should rule the plate—it often sounds like a clash of facts: health, environment, ethics. But beneath the recipes and nutrition blogs, there is another story being told. Psychoanalysis reminds us that eating is never just about calories or nutrients. Every bite carries with it fantasy, memory, and unconscious meaning.
The Mouth as Our First Language
Freud once wrote that the mouth is the first site of both pleasure and relationship. Long before we speak, we are fed. Milk, warmth, the mother’s presence—all these are bound up in that earliest act of nourishment. To eat or to refuse is to reenact, in miniature, our first negotiations of love, dependence, and rejection.
Through this lens, veganism and carnivorism begin to look like symbolic dramas rather than mere diets. Veganism often carries the wish to cleanse: to eat without killing, to separate oneself from aggression, to live “without blood on one’s hands.” It echoes a longing for innocence. The carnivore path, by contrast, leans into appetite and strength. To devour flesh is to imagine absorbing vitality, to take in the raw force of life itself.
Guilt and Rebellion at the Dinner Table
Our superego—the inner voice of conscience—also sits at the table. For many, veganism resonates with guilt transformed into an ethic: “I will not harm the animal; I will renounce destruction.” This renunciation, Freud suggested in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), is part of how societies form themselves.
But the carnivore movement often frames itself as rebellion against exactly this guilt. It presents itself as a return to something primal, an insistence that to eat meat is to affirm life, power, and even freedom. One might hear in it a protest against vulnerability: if I consume the strong animal, perhaps I will not feel so fragile myself.
The Body as a Modern Idol
Both sides, in our time, often slide into a narcissistic register. The body becomes a project of perfection: purified through plants or hardened through flesh. As Christopher Lasch argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), modern people frequently invest their identities in the body as a way of defending against inner emptiness. Vegan purity and carnivore power may be opposite ideals, but they serve a similar fantasy: that the right diet can shield us from decay, loss, and death.
Living With Ambivalence
From a psychoanalytic point of view, neither leaf nor flesh offers salvation. Every act of nourishment involves loss, transformation, even destruction. Plants, too, are living beings. The fantasy of a “clean” diet—without death, without ambivalence—may protect us from anxiety, but it also covers over the reality that life is always bound up with death.
Perhaps the psychic task is not to find the perfect food ideology but to tolerate this ambivalence. To accept that in every meal, something is given up so that we might live. To eat, in other words, is to acknowledge our dependence, our aggression, and our belonging to the cycles of nature.
In this sense, the clash between veganism and carnivorism is less about what’s on the plate and more about how we live with the truths that no diet can fully digest.
References
Freud, S. (1930/1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. Standard Edition, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1905/1953). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, Vol. 7. London: Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (1946/1975). Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press.
Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton.