I’m So Fucking Sick Of Food
Why aren’t you?
According to Bloomberg, it’s taking over my life:
All these stories are part of the same phenomenon. As my colleague Tyler Cowen recently wrote, food — and, I would add, the business of food — has become central to contemporary culture. Filling a primal physical need turns out to be a perfect match for the digital age. The question is why.
I don’t really care why, because it’s pretty obvious: food is a human universal, so basically everything that humans have come up with to focus their energies on as a distraction before death (entertainment, television, socialization, gossip, news, retail, business, technology, photography, health, fitness, etc.) has an application to food. I mean really, just look at this tweetstorm. Food touches everything, and everything touches food.
I have always loved food for its absurdity. Everyone talks about food like “food is ephemeral.” No, not really—food doesn’t go away when you eat it. Food goes through your gut, where it gets leeched for nutrients, and then turned into literal shit. We are not open enough about this: food is a fucking tragicomedy. You literally ruin food with your body. What a powerfully gross thought! Humans are just CRUSHING bacon and unicorn milkshakes left and right. We don’t talk enough about what a disgusting miracle food is. I love it.
But I’m also really fucking sick of it. When I worked at The New Yorker, I used to write restaurant reviews for the teeny tiny section at the front of the book called “Tables For Two.” It was a great gig because I got to dabble in “the food scene,” which in 2009 was HOPPIN’. My colleagues and I were constantly bantering about have-you-tried-this and you-should-go-here. (I understand that “restaurants” are a non-distinct spoke on the Great Wheel of Food, but bear with me here.) Our boss would always look at us like we were aliens for obsessing over this stuff. Shouldn’t young people be out doing drugs and having sex and going to rock ’n’ roll shows? No, we explained. THIS is our sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Chefs are our rockstars, bespoke cocktails our drugs, and gut-busting meals our sex.
But like all cultural obsessions, the novelty wears off. I don’t really care about chefs qua chefs beyond the fact of them being interesting or captivating people, and restaurants close for zillions of reasons that almost never have to do with whether the food is good. Every restaurant and TV chef has a cookbook, and every cult donut has an Instagram. It’s all so symbolic and notional. We’ve gone through so many taste and trend cycles and frankly I’m feeling a bit nauseated. If I had more time and energy I would make you a chart of all the phases, like bacon and bourbon, and tacos and banh mi, and so on. And yes, I know: it was ever thus—there have always been food trends. Short ribs were long over by the time I moved to New York. But isn’t there something a little hopeless and desperate about literally dyeing food in rainbow colors? Have we run out of possibilities and combinations that we now have to make our food seem technicolor and otherworldly? We’ve turned food into an economic consumption item, and food-as-product is developing at an exponential rate.
Trends like “clean eating” and “eating raw” and products like Soylent obviously come from a place of wanting to change how we eat, which unfortunately isn’t really all that hackable—the body wants what it wants and needs what it needs to survive. Humans evolved to like hot, cooked food, and animal proteins (arguably both things that made humans what they are today). But that doesn’t mean they have to or even should, because the path of evolution is neither a value judgment nor a proscription. Deciding how and what to eat has become a real fucking downer, and I guess I applaud people trying to come up with solutions for having any hope, but I’m not convinced there’s only one religion when it comes to food.
Ultimately food will always haunt us, now that we know enough about it to discuss it and analyze it and manipulate it to death. How do you get kids to eat X? How do you make sure you get enough Y? Why is organic Z so expensive? Food is the ultimate modern topic—it’s practically a divinity (also itself a food). It is humanity’s albatross. We are doomed to wonder about food as long as we shall live and this is what makes us human. I’m sick of food, which is not to say that I’ve lost my joy for it; it’s just that I’ve lost my joy for your joy for it.
