I used to know a lot of places to get convenient, fast vegetarian foods in the city. That way, no matter where I was caught, I’d know where to find a quick bite.

Since choosing to avoid food with packaging and food whose fiber has been removed, I’ve found restaurant food disappointing, unhealthy, expensive, and trying to trick me into thinking I wanted rice or bread instead of fresh vegetables and fruit. The two words I associate with restaurants are disappointing and trickery. I’ve concluded tricking customers into thinking their food is healthy and worth the price is one of the main goals of restaurants.

I pack lunches when I can, but when I get caught all day without food, I’ve found I prefer to skip lunch in favor of a larger dinner when I get home than eating out, no matter how convenient the food.

Being hungry isn’t bad. For one thing, it peaks around my normal eating time but then passes, so a lot of what I call hunger seems more craving.

For another, I don’t get as hungry with my current diet. I think being full of all that fiber moderates the release of what my body absorbs. Whatever the reason, by dinner I feel hungry but I haven’t felt starved, ravenous, or craving for as long as I can remember. I don’t lose focus or concentration.

Is choosing to feel hungry unamerican?

I’m no sociologist, but I feel like today’s American culture of comfort says that you should eat when you’re hungry and not doing so implies a risk of an eating disorder. I can’t be the only one who sees this trend.

I see hunger as a sign to eat, but based on food we ate in our evolutionary past, which the modern American diet doesn’t resemble. It had nothing packaged or whose fiber had been removed. I suspect we evolved to function fine with half-days or even days without eating, then when our ancestors ate, they didn’t have the packaged trickery our restaurants and markets promote as healthy but isn’t.

Instead, if we eat packaged “food” and “food” whose fiber has been removed, we get hungrier faster and then eat more “food” whose fulfillment doesn’t last that long. Great for the profits of the factory owners that manufacture the product. Unhealthy for the consumer.

That unhealthy but profitable cycle is today’s American way, it seems. It wasn’t always that way and I think people wish the American way were different and healthier, but if you look at people’s behavior and not their wishes, it is this way.

Making my hunger unamerican today.

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