Do you eat to live or live to eat?

Answer 1

The terms, "eat to live" or "live to eat" are focused on quite the extremes in regards to life and food. Without understanding the context to which majority of us humans live and eat, it is easy to get into a debate as to whether humans eat to live or live to eat.

Today, food is something we take for granted on a daily basis, three times a day, often failing to acknowledge or understand where it comes from or the amount of work it takes to get it. As such, those who eat to live, as many wild animals in the animal kingdom do, know how much work and life goes into finding food to eat in order to live. Such animals are often the predatory animals of the Animal Kingdom, such as wolves, cougars, bears, eagles, hawks, owls, tigers, Spiders, whales, ants, and ladybugs.

Then you have the non-predatory animals that often find food almost everywhere they go. Herbivorous animals such as buffalo, deer, aphids, cattle, horses, sheep, rhinos, hippos, and antelope are such animals that fall into this category. One can say that such animals "live to eat," however when looking at elephants travelling across a land faced with a serious drought crisis and starvation such a saying would be tipped in the favor of "eating to live."

This question, however, is not dealing with such non-human animals as above, but rather the human animal. Pertaining such question to a single species with a highly diverse array of social hierarchies and living conditions which they are found in is almost impossible to answer without acknowledging such diversity. When acknowledging such diversity, such as from the rich to the poor, from those who live the most sustainably or "off the grid" to those who do not, and from those with severe eating disorders to those who are completely normal in terms of the food they consume, one can begin to see the gray area between "eating to live" and "living to eat." One could easily come to the conclusion that some humans eat to live, others live to eat, and many more are somewhere in between.

Eating is a ritual by many cultures, a three-times-a-day meal, one that, as mentioned above, is taken for granted on a daily basis. There are feasts, and fasts, and just a regular meal to buy or make. Some eat too much (which others call "gluttony"), while others eat too little. Some have more than enough money to buy food to last a lifetime, while others don't have enough to even buy a loaf of bread to feed a family of 10. Few are lucky enough to have the resources available to get their own food from the most primary resources they have available without even having to spend a dime; many others have to constantly and consistently rely on the money in their pockets to purchase what they want to eat.

So do we really eat to live or live to eat? That all depends on you, your lifestyle, how much money you make, your culture, your psychology as far as wanting to eat is concerned, and many, many others. No one answer is right, nor is one answer is wrong: each and every one of us has our own reasons as to which answer we feel is right for this question.