Despite Your Objections, It’s Literally Impossible to Both Have and Eat Your Cake

Why do so many people object to this common, often misunderstood expression?

Over the years, I’ve observed people puzzling over the idiom, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

“I never got that expression,” I overheard a woman saying. “If I have a cake, I eat it. So I have the cake, and I eat it too.”

I see and hear variations of this confusion semi-regularly, both on social media and in person. Folks seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the expression.

They think it’s a pessimistic philosophical statement, an assertion that you cannot achieve the things you want in life, rather than a statement of simple fact that some outcomes are in opposition to each other, and cannot simultaneously exist. They insist that there are, in fact, ways to both have and eat your cake.

Except, no. You aren’t. It’s literally impossible.

Once you eat a cake, you no longer have it. It’s gone. It’s been eaten. You don’t have it anymore.

You wouldn’t say you had a box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints at home if you’d already eaten them. You’d say, “Thank goodness I don’t have those Thin Mints anymore, I can finish off a whole box in two sittings.”

It’s not a deep philosophical statement. It’s a tautology. By its very format, it’s always true. You cannot both have something and not have it. Either you leave it uneaten and keep it forever, or you eat it and no longer have it.

It applies to everything, not just cake. You can’t have your favorite shirt and donate it to Goodwill too. You can’t save the money that you spend. You can’t remain single and also get married.

Think “Keep” Instead of “Have”

Some of the confusion is purely semantic. What sinister expression-coiner picked the word “have” instead of “keep” when they were inventing these things?

Perhaps if it had been “You can’t keep your cake and eat it too,” significantly fewer people would be confused. For some reason, with the word “have” in there, some folks’ heads go automatically to the less common meaning of the word, “to eat,” instead of the correct one here, “to possess.”

Yet, for many, even when they learn what the expression is supposed to mean, they simply don’t like it. They rebel against it. They try to find ways to both keep and eat their cake.

If I eat the cake, they say, I will have the memory of it forever. I can take a photo of it and admire it anytime. In a way, I still have it.

Sure, true. As humans, we always weigh our choices like that: how can I mitigate the tragedy of having to pick one option over another? Is there a choice I can live with more easily, by mollifying myself with photographs or memories?

But those mental monkey bars don’t, in fact, make the cake any less gone from this earth after you’ve eaten it. It only makes us feel as if the loss has been reduced, enough that we can deal with it.

My Suggestion? Eat the Cake.

I suspect that the root of a lot of the objection to the expression is a deep-seeded understanding that, chances are, you should choose to eat the cake, and not have it anymore.

We create even the most impressive layer cakes, ultimately, to enjoy eating them. They are intended to be ephemeral, a temporary pleasure for both eyes and tongue.

Plus, cakes are food. They’re meant to be eaten. They’ll literally go bad and start attracting rodents.

If you really want to turn the expression into something positive, you could take it as a suggestion to live your life to the fullest. Might as well eat the cake! You didn’t actually want to keep it.

The only ones who ever kept their cake instead of eating it were Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and probably some people in Pompeii. I wouldn’t recommend modeling your life off either of their outcomes. You’d really rather live a life where you’ve eaten your cake and gone back for seconds.

So, enjoy the cake. But make no mistake, once you’ve eaten it, you no longer have it.

And that’s probably for the best.

Melissa Balick likes words. You can navigate all her writing here: