Nutritional Determinism
A gold digger who happens to be vegan—vegan not for health, but for Buddhist identity—presents the appearance of wellness while embodying none of its substance. She carries the trope of health, yet lives in ways that are fundamentally unhealthy, measurable by any objective standard of body fat percentage relative to sex, age, and height.
Her husband, meanwhile, has fallen into a predictable loop. As an emotional outlet, he also snacks more, eats more potato chips, and slowly erodes his baseline. The consequences are exactly what you’d expect—he now lies in a hospital bed.
His daughters from a previous marriage want to intervene. They want him to regain strength, rebuild his health, and break out of the spiral. But their desire for his recovery collides directly with the only meaningful utility the gold digger provides: her cooking.
So any genuine health intervention—nutritional, medical, or psychological—will be quietly undermined by the husband or the gold digger.
Not through open resistance, but through incentives - one of her only ‘jobs’
Through the subtle economics of human nature.
Interestingly longer he remains weakened, the more advantageous it is for her.
He becomes more dependent - she becomes more secure.
And this is the real lesson:
People do not act according to what is ‘healthy’ or logical.
Small Fries: What the pho?!
Nutritional determinism isn’t fate — it’s simply the downstream effect of culture, and culture itself is downstream of ideas.
They act according to what preserves their advantage or identity—often at the expense of someone else’s life and well-being.
It becomes a loop he cannot escape, not because he lacks will, but because the incentives around him are misaligned:
Daughters who want his recovery.
A wife who indirectly or direly benefits from his decline.
A trope of “health” masking the absence of actual care.
This is not a story about nutrition or Buddhism.
It is a story about incentives, perception, and the brutal rationality of human nature.