APPETITES: MORAL DIMENSIONS
By Riley Orange
Our modern diet’s artificial additives reveal a deeper moral tension between industrial convenience and a meaningful, intentional relationship with food.
High-fructose corn syrup, sucralose, sorbitol, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, butylated hydroxyanisole, monosodium glutamate, Red 40, Yellow 5, Brilliant Blue, Sunset Yellow. These artificial sweeteners, preservatives, synthetic antioxidants, petroleum-derived dyes, and synthetic flavours form an obscure chemical litany found on everyday supermarket products. This is not the language of food, but of formulation.
As our diets have become increasingly artificial, so too has our relationship with food—moving from ritual and meaning to habit and overstimulation. In response, a movement back toward natural, seasonal, and local eating not only nourishes the body but also acts as a form of resistance to the industrialisation of our diets.
Within Melbourne, certain restaurants are both promoting and responding to a public interest in returning to natural diets. Farmer’s Daughter and Attica are proponents of the farm-to-table movement—focusing on seasonal and local produce. The menu at Farmer’s Daughter reads more like a regional map than a shopping list: Noojee alpine trout, Wattlebank farm Mushrooms, and Tambo Valley honey—ingredients described by their locality. Locally sourced ingredients are more often harvested at peak ripeness, preserving nutrients and flavours that degrade over time if shipped over long distances. Indeed, long-distance shipping often requires early harvesting and artificial ripening which reduces flavour and nutritional value.
Eating locally also encourages eating seasonally— another important factor weighing in on the restaurant’s menu. Seasonal diets are more in sync with our body’s natural rhythms and nutritional needs throughout the year. For example, citrus fruits, which naturally ripen in winter provide immune boosting vitamin C—an important nutrient during the cooler months where colds and flus are more common.
The farm-to-table movement which began as a culinary trend has evolved into something much broader. Today, restaurants like Barragunda located in Cape Schank, rooted not just in fresh and local food but based on working farms outside the city’s limit, are becoming more common. Restaurants like Barragunda represent more than a desire for fresh, local food—they embody a moral stance on the ethics of modern eating.
Like many industries, the food system has been shaped by capitalist imperatives—efficiency, profit, and mass appeal—leaving consumers overstimulated, desensitised and unhealthy. If our diet reflects our ‘being in the world’, then a wholistic and healthier diet reflects not just a better sense of connection between food and nature, but of separation from the capitalist industry. Thus, disdain for artifice in our diets reflects a growing sentiment of mistrust in ‘the system’.
Indeed, dieting has long been intertwined with moral values. Across religious traditions, food has served as a tool for spiritual discipline and personal refinement. In Christianity, particularly during Lent, fasting was seen as a way to purify the soul, resist temptation, and demonstrate piety—gluttony, after all, being one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Similarly, in Islam, Ramadan involves fasting from dawn to sunset as an act of spiritual cleansing, self-discipline, and empathy for the poor. In Buddhism, fasting reflects non-attachment and inner purification; for monks, renouncing food symbolizes detachment from earthly desires and alignment with spiritual truth. Even as Western societies became more secular, the moral language around food endured. In the Victorian era, temperance and dietary restraint were regarded as signs of civility and moral character. Throughout history, food has never been merely sustenance—it is symbolic, inherently tied to our immersion and engagement with the world.
‘As our diets have become increasingly artificial, so too has our relationship with food’
Yet, the idealisation of dieting can become perilous. In a culture obsessed with bodily optimization and moral purity through food, the line between healthy restraint and pathological control can get blurred. The moral pressure to avoid indulgence often fosters guilt, shame and anxiety around food. People may find themselves withdrawing from shared meals, anxious about judgment or just wanting to avoid the stress of it all. A more compassionate and inclusive approach to eating, one that prioritizes wellbeing over moral perfection, offers a healthier path.
Choosing restraint, embracing seasonality, and valuing simplicity are not acts of deprivation but of intention—ways to reclaim agency and resist the industrialisation of appetite. It is not about asceticism (we are, after all, in the twenty-first century), but returning indulgence to its place as occasional and meaningful. Allow indulgence its rightful place—not as an escape, but as a celebration.
