That Poor Kid Still Lives in Your Stomach

01. The Dietary Underpinnings That Wealth Can’t Mask

I used to think that people nearing financial independence would be particularly refined about their eating habits. Even if they weren’t dining on abalone and lobster every meal, they would at least leave behind the crude indulgence of high carbs and heavy oil and salt.

But then I discovered that some very wealthy individuals remain wildly obsessed with heavy-flavored fats and carbs. This is very likely a hangover from growing up poor: in those days of scarcity, filling your stomach was synonymous with happiness.

02. The Childhood Trauma Ruled by Congee

I grew up in the countryside with my grandparents. My three daily meals as a child were basically congee, noodles, and rice.

Breakfast was always congee — especially sweet potato congee, which left an indelible mark of childhood trauma. Thin, watery broth paired with pickled cowpeas — it made me gag! I wished every meal could be plain white rice — not for any reason other than that there’d always be meat to go with it.

I remember eating chili fried pork on a summer noon. I ran full speed under the scorching sun to the vegetable patch, grabbed a handful of crooked green chilies, and sprinted back. As a kid, I couldn’t handle spice — those chilies felt a hundred times hotter back then. But I didn’t care. I dug through the chili pile, found the thickest, glistening piece of pork, shoved it in my mouth, and frantically shoveled rice. Veins bulging, snot running, sweat pouring.

That was the pinnacle of enjoyment in a life of deprivation. It felt absolutely incredible!

03. The “Compensation Psychology” in a Carbohydrate Paradise

Unfortunately, those happiness-overloaded moments were not the norm. Fantasizing about eating white rice every day was a luxury. But as long as it wasn’t congee, even eating noodles twice a day was fine. A few vegetable leaves in the noodles, seasoned with salt, soy sauce, chili oil, and scallions — this kind of heavy-flavored stimulation was enough to mask the blandness of life. There were better noodle dishes too: my grandmother sometimes made dough drop soup, dumplings, steamed buns, and cured-meat pies. But these were less frequent — no refrigerator, no running to the store anytime you wanted. Everything had to be made from scratch, which took time and effort.

This dietary habit was stamped into my genes like a brand. Even after my living conditions improved, I remained almost obsessively passionate about meat and wheat-based foods.

When I went to Xi’an, the “carbohydrate capital,” and saw the dazzling array of noodle dishes — oil-splashed noodles, saozi noodles, roujiamo — it was like falling into a dopamine vortex. In that moment, I was still that boy sprinting under the blazing sun, chasing nothing more than a piece of fatty pork. This raw pleasure, born from the combination of carbs and fat, precisely hit the switch labeled “scarcity” in my cerebral cortex.

04. Awakening: The Body’s Invoice and a Cognitive Revolution

But the adult body is honest.

When the arrows on my health checkup report started nervously jumping around, I suddenly woke up: I thought I was enjoying freedom, but I was actually being enslaved by past hunger. Those preferences for high sugar, high oil, and high carbs are essentially “survival energy packs” left over from agricultural civilization for physical laborers. But placed in today’s world of infinite supply, they’ve become invisible killers of health.

Given the choice between steaming, boiling, or light stewing — why always choose fiery stir-frying? Already finished one bowl of rice, why add another? Already full, why can’t you put down your chopsticks? We’re not just eating food — we’re eating a “habit” inherited from our elders, eating a sense of “security.” If we don’t stuff ourselves to the brim, if our faces aren’t glistening with oil, there seems to be a deep-seated feeling that we haven’t yet escaped hardship.

05. Passing It On: Breaking That Chain of Scarcity

Dietary habits are a family’s most profound invisible inheritance. Often, we think we’re choosing food, but we’re actually obeying the inertia in our genes. That compulsion to eat until your face is shiny with oil before you feel you’ve “lived well” is the most secretive legacy our elders left us — and also the sharpest chain. Our generation took decades to walk out of the shadow of “not having enough to eat.” The next generation’s challenge is learning restraint in a world of “too many temptations.”

As a father, I know how stubborn these habits are. But I want my child to eat less rice and more quality protein and vegetables. I try to instill in her a light philosophy of “the true taste of food” — less heavy sugar and salt. I teach her to read ingredient labels and recognize the maze of additives hidden behind delicious flavors. If I don’t cut this off at the dinner table, my child might still be searching for so-called happiness in a fog of high sugar and high oil. A person’s life is not only about wealth — it also requires a healthy diet to improve the quality of life. Starting from every bite of light, clean food, completely sever that chain of “scarcity” that has stretched across decades.