I've been cooking a lot more recently and it's one of the most enjoyable parts of my day. There's nothing more satisfying than grilling a steak to the perfect amount of doneness, or tossing a bunch of aromatic spices into a pasta sauce whose scent fills the room. At the end of it I feel like I accomplished something productive and I get to eat something delicious that I crafted to my own taste. I've also had way more energy since I've stopped eating processed junk and take-out food.
Against Food
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Against Food
#12Wait until this person learns about where children come from.
Re: Against Food
#13This reads like a person who has yet to come to a full understanding of what it means to be human. I was with them years ago, food is a chemical input to power the machine that is my body.
As I've grown older, however, I've changed my thoughts on it.
Food is a mechanism by which we express ourselves. It's fundamentally creative. It's a means to share our culture, and it connects us to our history. Pizza is as unique a story as bubble tea, maafe is as unique as mafongo.
A bowl of white rice is a story as rich and complex as any novel if you know how to read it. What kind of rice? Why white and not brown? Where was it cultivated? Why was it cultivated? Who? When? How?
And food is more than that. It's sense pleasure. Furthermore it's sense pleasure we can experience as a community. Food gathers us, allows us the time to connect with one another. Cooking for others is fundamentally an act of community.
To try and reduce eating to something we have to do misses the immense emotional, cultural, community, and individual value we derive from it.
Re: Against Food
#14I just read the first few paragraphs of this article before I stopped, but my very first instinct reading this is that it feels a lot like old me. Disdain for basic human things is not a great sign. Eating food and enjoying food is not primitive, it's human, it's good. We do not need to be better than human. We need to be human, we need to excel and enjoy and enhance all of the things that make us who we are. We are…
Yeah, the article also reminds me of my previous self. In particular, it reminds me of my need at the time to feel superior to other people, because of some inadequacies in my own character, and my habit of believing other people were less “enlightened” than me to achieve that end.
Obviously this is just one article and it’s impossible to get a proper idea of someone’s character from something so short. But nonetheless, it brought these thoughts into my mind.
Re: Against Food
#15“Day after day, I swipe the Hinge profiles of girls endowed with the greatest gifts known in the universe, only to find that their hobbies are sleeping and eating. The last million years of evolution has been wasted on them; they might as well live with orangutans.” Oh, buddy. You’re definitely going to be a hit in the dating scene when your first instinct is to call women boring and basic.
There are so many things to unpack in this paragraph. Any lament should be spent on the disposition of the author.
Re: Against Food
#16I understand the point and have a little bit of sympathy for it, but a similar rant targeted at rampant consumerism or tribalism would be more productive.
Our appetites might get in the way of a purer, intellectual life, but at least food brings people together.
Re: Against Food
#17Spoken like someone with very little experience of the diversity of human cultures.
Re: Against Food
#18At a Buddhist monastery we chanted before lunch (our one meal):
“Wisely reflecting, I use alms food. Not for fun. Not for pleasure. Not for beautification. Not for fattening. Only for the maintenance of this body. For keeping it healthy. For helping with the holy life. Thinking thus: I will allay hunger without overeating, so that I may continue to live blamelessly and at ease.”
Re: Against Food
#19To be logical is illogical if you are a human. Obsessive adherence to high ideals without the basic recognition that we inhabit bodies with needs desires and limitations is not logical or superior behavior: It ignores reality and causes psychological trauma, with real consequences to health and happiness.
I think the article is about how frustrating those needs and limitations can be, not about denying their reality. It is rather exactly the realization that you can’t escape those needs and limitations, but that you have to continuously accomodate them, that can be depressing.
It's myopic, though. Or perhaps not yet fully formed or juvenile. Food is so essential to how we as a species express ourselves. Does this person hate music too? What about works of fiction? Surely food is just as much a creative cultural touchstone as those are?
Re: Against Food
#20Can't tell if this is satire.