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Against Food

jayriverlong.substack.com

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21–30 of 42 posts

Re: Against Food

#21

Post by deeg »

bioemerl wrote: post #2

I 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…

Agreed. The author's next blog should be about eliminating his basic sensory need for sex.

Re: Against Food

#22

Post by hirundo »

clownworldclown wrote: post #6

In our age one is not allowed to talk about gluttony. It is the primary vehicle by which many sustain an otherwise meaningless existence

Gluttony is more about malnutrition than existentialism. When our food doesn't give us what our body demands it does the expected animal thing, it keeps eating. A purpose in life is nice, but the more immediate purpose is to find and eat the foods with the highest possible nutritional density for you. Do that and in most cases the gluttony goes away. Mine did.

Re: Against Food

#23

Post by steinuil »

If the goal of this post was to generate more traffic to the author's substack it absolutely succeeded. I stopped short of writing a multi-paragraph comment about how devoid of any meaningful content this post is. The argument is that food is bad because monkeys also eat food and you don't like american snacks? Try cooking some food with decent ingredients sometime and eat some carrots as a snack instead of a twinkie. Thanks for wasting 10 minutes I could've used to have an afternoon snack.

Re: Against Food

#24

Post by smitty1e »

> be some kind of marshmallow-test-failing monkey? Pathetic. You’d think that ultra-educated homo sapiens would rise above the tyrannical slavery of the gut, but nope.

---

To what end? The article seems to allude to some teleological point, without ever nailing any down.

Nothing about the tip of Maslow's Hierarchy [1] obviates the rest of the pyramid.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Re: Against Food

#25

Post by layer8 »

carbadtraingood wrote: post #19
layer8 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can choose to concern or not concern yourself with music, fiction, other forms of cultural expression, and how often. And people do that, according to their inclinations. But with food you do not have that choice, you have to eat, and you have to do it more or less daily. It’s an imposition rather than a free choice based on your interests.

Suppose you’d have to read (say) 50 pages of fiction each day or else you will die. Maybe that wouldn’t be so great, even if you do enjoy fiction from time to time?

Re: Against Food

#27

Post by 11235813213455 »

carbadtraingood wrote: post #13

This 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…

I appreciate so much eating alone in the calm, but I'm not asocial. To me it's more respectful for the food, because you can focus on it fully, chew and not talk, digest well, respect more your own rhythm and needs. Eating shouldn't be something recreative

Re: Against Food

#28

Post by 11235813213455 »

nynx wrote: post #3

Just eat fewer times a day. I usually eat one meal a day (though often not quickly, like the OP would like) and it works out great.

exactly, 1 meal/day works so well, the ketosis mode gets activated the rest of the day

Re: Against Food

#29

Post by riverlong »

deeg wrote: post #21
bioemerl wrote: post #2

I 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…

Agreed. The author's next blog should be about eliminating his basic sensory need for sex.

Been there, to some extent already: https://jayriverlong.github.io/2021/11/25/pornography.html

Re: Against Food

#30

Post by dazc »

carbadtraingood wrote: post #13

This 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…

> To try and reduce eating to something we have to do misses the immense emotional, cultural, community, and individual value we derive from it.

OK, but what about the people who's enjoyment of food leads to ill health, loneliness and misery?

It's great that you can derive such pleasure from a basic human need but the abundance of cheap and readily available food has a downside too.

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