Safe for Whom? Food, Control, and Quiet Judgments

I. The Illusion of Neutrality

Food is often spoken about as though it were neutral, an ordinary necessity governed by taste, habit, and availability. Yet for many people, eating is anything but uncomplicated. The concept of “safe foods” has emerged as a shorthand for this reality, typically invoked to describe foods that feel tolerable, predictable, or manageable amid sensory sensitivities, trauma, disability, or psychological distress. On the surface, the term appears compassionate, even affirming. It suggests an understanding that survival sometimes requires accommodation rather than optimization.

And yet, this language is rarely allowed to exist without qualification.

“Safe foods” are widely accepted in theory but quietly scrutinized in practice. They are validated when they align with socially sanctioned ideas of health, restraint, and productivity, and dismissed when they do not. A carefully curated meal that signals discipline is praised as mindful. A repetitive or convenience-based choice is framed as failure, laziness, or lack of effort. In this way, food becomes not merely sustenance but a moral performance, one that some bodies are permitted to fail only temporarily, while others are never afforded grace at all.

II. Quiet Judgments and Moral Performance

This contradiction reveals something deeper than dietary preference. It exposes a system of judgment that is less concerned with nourishment than with control. Eating is evaluated not by whether it allows a person to function, regulate, or remain present in the world, but by how closely it adheres to unspoken standards of acceptability. The question is no longer whether a food is safe for the person consuming it, but whether it is safe for the observer’s comfort; safe for their assumptions, their ideals, and their need for coherence.

For disabled and neurodivergent individuals in particular, this scrutiny is not incidental; it is structural. The demand to explain one’s eating habits mirrors a broader expectation to justify one’s body, needs, and existence. Safe foods are tolerated only so long as they remain discreet, temporary, or aspirationally overcome. The moment they become stable, necessary, or visibly “unimproved,” they are reinterpreted as evidence of personal deficiency rather than adaptive survival.

My relationship with food has been shaped not by indulgence, but by negotiation between what my body can tolerate and what the world expects me to justify. Over time, it has become clear that the discomfort others express is rarely about nutrition itself. It is about deviation. About the unease that arises when survival does not conform to an approved narrative of progress, discipline, or self-mastery.

III. Concern, Control, and the Myth of Improvement

This discomfort is often disguised as concern. Questions are framed as curiosity. Advice is offered as care. But beneath these gestures lies an assumption that eating must be correctable, improvable, or eventually normalized. The possibility that someone may have already arrived at what works for them, that safety itself might be the endpoint, is rarely entertained. Instead, accommodation is treated as a temporary allowance, granted only until the individual can be reshaped into something more palatable.

Such thinking reflects a broader cultural fixation on optimization. We are encouraged not merely to live but to improve, to refine our bodies, habits, and desires into ever more efficient forms. Within this framework, survival is insufficient if it does not signal aspiration. Eating to function is acceptable only when it gestures toward transformation; eating to remain stable is framed as stagnation. The body, in this logic, becomes a project rather than a home.

IV. Beyond Disability: The Universal Mirror

This mindset extends well beyond the disabled community. It shapes how society views poverty, grief, mental illness, cultural food practices, and aging. Certain eating patterns are romanticized as authentic or resilient, while others are pathologized as evidence of failure. A grieving person who loses their appetite is granted sympathy; one who relies on simple, repetitive foods months later is questioned. A wealthy individual’s restrictive diet is praised as disciplined; a poor person’s reliance on inexpensive staples is framed as neglectful. The line between care and control is thin, and it is drawn unevenly.

What unites these judgments is not a commitment to health but an attachment to hierarchy. Food becomes a proxy through which worth is measured. The more closely one’s eating aligns with dominant ideals of variety, freshness, balance, and moderation, the more moral legitimacy one is afforded. Deviation invites scrutiny, explanation, and correction. In this way, eating becomes public, even when performed in private.

V. Autonomy and Survival in Disabled Bodies

For disabled people, this scrutiny is particularly invasive. Many live in bodies that are already subject to surveillance by medical systems, educational institutions, workplaces, and social services. Food becomes yet another site where autonomy is negotiated rather than assumed. Sensory needs are dismissed as preferences. Trauma responses are reframed as stubbornness. Executive functioning challenges are moralized into questions of effort. The language of “help” is often deployed to justify intrusion.

Yet safe foods are not a failure of imagination or will. They are evidence of adaptation. They reflect an intimate knowledge of one’s own body, of what calms, what sustains, and what prevents harm. To dismiss them is to privilege abstract ideals over lived reality. It is to suggest that comfort must be earned, that stability must be justified, and that nourishment is only legitimate when it looks aspirational.

VI. Ethics, Dignity, and the Politics of Eating

This raises a fundamental ethical question: why is survival so often required to perform virtue? Why must people demonstrate that their coping mechanisms are respectable before they are allowed to keep them? The insistence on improvement, even when improvement threatens regulation or well-being, reveals an intolerance for bodies that resist standardization. It suggests that what is most unsettling is not difference itself, but permanence.

Reframing the conversation around food requires more than expanding definitions of health. It demands a shift in values, from control to dignity, from optimization to sufficiency. It asks us to consider whether eating can be understood not as a moral act, but as a relational one: a dialogue between body, environment, history, and need. Such a framework leaves room for variation without requiring explanation.

To approach food ethically is not to eliminate judgment but to interrogate whose comfort it serves. It is to recognize that autonomy does not require approval and that nourishment does not need to justify itself through aesthetics or aspiration. It is to believe people when they say, “This keeps me alive,” without demanding that they prove it.

VII. Safe Foods as Resistance

Safe foods are not a retreat from living. For many, they are what make living possible. They allow energy to be conserved, anxiety to be managed, and attention to be directed toward relationships, work, and meaning. They are quiet acts of self-preservation in a world that often confuses endurance with worth.

To eat safely, then, is not to opt out of responsibility but to claim it: responsibility to one’s own body, limits, and needs. In a culture that equates virtue with struggle, choosing ease where possible can itself be a form of resistance. It challenges the assumption that suffering is instructive, that difficulty is ennobling, and that care must always be earned.

The question, ultimately, is not whether certain foods are safe. It is whether we are willing to let people define safety for themselves, without judgment, without surveillance, and without the expectation that survival must someday look like something else.

VIII. A Note of Thanks

Thank you for taking the time to read, reflect, and sit with these ideas. Conversations about food, survival, and autonomy can be quietly personal, and I appreciate your willingness to consider perspectives that may challenge assumptions or reveal unseen struggles. If nothing else, I hope this essay encourages us to approach one another, and ourselves, with a measure of curiosity, patience, and respect. Safe eating is, after all, not just about nourishment; it is about dignity, agency, and the quiet work of living fully.

Ian Allan

Self-Advocate for The Arc of Northern Virginia

Ian Allan is a self-advocate with a deep commitment to policy literacy, systems change, and disability justice. Through The Arc of Northern Virginia, he works to ensure that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not merely served by systems, but are actively shaping them.