Every day approximately around 2 pm until dinnertime, I get this insane urges. A hankering of, sorts. I sit at my desk working, and my gaze floats upwards to my shelve. Instead of the books, notebooks, piles of papers, and speakers, I see snacks. Tasty snacks. Consisting of candy. Then I imagine it filling my tongue—the sour ones burning it, the fruity ones filling my mouth with a satisfying squishiness, the sugar that perks me up.

But it’s not there.

You see, I have a sugar tooth. And for the longest time, nobody would ever call it a vice.

When I was 22 at an internship, the director of the agency asked me in casual conversation, “Do you have any vices?”

“Sugar!” I said, thinking of how I spent money on candy, ice cream, and desserts.

He laughed and said, “That’s not a vice.”

I laughed too, matching his tone, but I hid my embarrassment by changing the topic. Afterwards, I wondered why I didn’t have any vices, desperate to be like everyone else. Drinking wasn’t my thing. Nor was smoking. I was too prudish to do much. I wanted to be as wicked. But instead, I slipped back into my perfect controlled role.

With the increasing awareness of the importance of health, almost anything we eat is a “vice”. The glutenful pasta. The bread. The lack of veggies. The dessert. During lunch at a writing event, a woman looked at her plate of food from the buffet and declared, “I wish that I didn’t get too much.”

The Asian woman next to me jumped in and asked, “Why do you think that you got too much?”

It was a good question. We think that we eat too much because society says that big portions are bad, too much meat is bad, too much sugar is bad, and too much of anything is bad. It’s not just “not good”, it’s “bad”. Like the big bad.

But instead, I jumped in, saying “Is it because you’re afraid of feeling bloated?”

We chatted more while I ate my very full plate with a touch of salad, turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, beef, mashed potatoes, and crumbled boiled eggs.