Against Food | Hacker News Reader

Against Food

jayriverlong.substack.com

19 pointsriverlong41 comments

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 not robots, we're never going to be robots.

Enjoy your food, doesn't mean you're a monkey. It doesn't mean you're primitive. You're doing what all these wonderful marvelous tools we've built for ourselves are intended to do, make your life good and give you the things you need as a person. Smile, enjoy, be happy, and don't be afraid of who you are.

And talk to a therapist if need be, for me this fear of being human came from social experiences in my early life that led me to dislike other people and be afraid of other people.

True, what an absolutely depressing take, a borderline satirical representation of the body hacking/life optimization cult.

If a friend explained this to me I'd encourage them to seek out a therapy for depression or eating disorders.

The author talks about going and getting an award winning pastry but not enjoying it at all. Clearly they must at least have a preference for quality food or else they'd just drink Soylent all day.

Like it or not, the fact that we spend so much of our time and societal energy on feeding ourselves collectively instead of hunting and gathering is kind of the whole point of having a civilization. The alternative is every person for themself, and then we really wouldn't have time for any organized higher pursuits.

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.

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

To sum up the weird way that we all watch a ton of porn but don't talk about it, sex spreads disease and risks childbirth.

Reading doesn't.

Because it is so dangerous it becomes a taboo thing, it can't be public and widespread otherwise it would cause huge damage. So it's kept where it is safe, behind closed doors and between relatively small numbers of individuals that you don't end up with is massive web of connections that links all of society together.

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 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.

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

> Eating shouldn't be something recreative.

What. Recreation is anything you do for enjoyment, whether eating alone or with others.

But also, saying you shouldn't use food as recreation ignores millennia of human history, culture, and biology...

> 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.

Abundance sand availability of food isn't the problem so much as what we've done with that abundance. If we were producing cheap, plant based healthy meals with balanced nutrition at low cost, things would generally be fine.

Sure, food is a way of sharing cultures and connecting to some common history -- I agree with you that these are all means of self-expression and connection -- but I'm not really interested in this mode of expression.

And for most other parts of life, that's a legitimate position and you're allowed to opt out. Don't like musicals? Don't watch them. There are lots of things from which people derive emotional, cultural, community and individual value -- and where other people choose not to participate, and that's broadly seen as fine.

But food is in a different, much more oppressive position: I'm not allowed to opt out. I am forced to participate, to some extent by cultural forces, and more broadly by the primitive cravings of my body. And the fact that I don't have much choice about participation is a fact that I do not like.

Unfortunately, modern mass production and mass consumption has detached us from a lot of the nuances you would like to see in food.

We just chug down a cheeseburger, one of the millions of identical cheeseburgers consumed every day. We don't care what's in the patty. We don't care how the cheese was made. It all arrives at the local McD's in sterile packages wrapped in plastic. This is not the sandwich that grandma used to make, with a touch of her secret sauce. This isn't even the junk food that your parents allowed every once in a while if you ate your veggies. We feel no connection with the person across the restaurant who is chomping on the same cheeseburger. There's no community here, nor context, only consumption.

The less we get involved in preparing our own food, the more people will naturally feel like OP.

Alienation is a problem. But it's not a problem unique to food.

Yes, it's very obvious in food, but I think what you are describing is a symptom, not a cause.

Solve the causes of alienation, solve the food consumption problem.

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.

One could rewrite your comment and make it about how playing an instrument has become the most enjoyable part of your day, how it makes you feel productive and how it lets you play the music you like instead of listening to junk mainstream pop. The difference is that eating is an externally imposed necessity, not a hobby or an occupation one is free to choose and can stop at any time if one gets tired of it.

Thanks for this, you're one of the very few in this thread who get the point.

“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.

At 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.”

>There is no question that you are the pinnacle of evolution

trading one religion for another, huh? pinnacle of creation, pinnacle of fate, pinnacle of evolution...

maybe buddhists got it right centuries ago: shut up, eat your food and clean your bowl, that's life.

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water

After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water

To 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?

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?

You can elect to eat the same things every day if you want. There are inexpensive and really available foods that aren't incompatible with doing other stuff. You can make it pretty much automatic. Not quite as automatic as breathing, but pretty dang close.

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.

I 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.

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.

This is not going to be a popular opinion among any group of randomly selected humans, since the majority of them will necessarily be willing participants in those same activities. However, it's hard to argue against this point without resorting to emotionalism or submission to primal urges. Though I might suggest that the author also turn the same criticism against other basal compulsions, like his use of dating apps.

Regarding food specifically, I've had this same notion many times and was an early Soylent adopter as a result. I still purchase its powder and target a 25% diet of Soylent. However, I also increased food's overall influence on my life by starting a garden and trying to raise as much of my own food as possible. I'd say there's other benefits to that; far too numerous to list here. The dishes I make from garden veggies are mostly pretty boring though. One might think of this as trading experience for assurance of origin, and the various benefits thereof. Something one might want to consider if their living conditions permit.

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

Spoken like someone with very little experience of the diversity of human cultures.

A lot of what we call "human intelligence" and "consciousness" derives directly from the fact that we live in bodies made of meat which we have to constantly eat food to maintain. Our perception of time, the spectrum of colors we see with our eyes, the range of flavors and scents we can detect, our deepest yearnings and compulsions. All of these are optimized toward finding food and eating it. It is both one of our most basic functions and one of the highest joys.

What else does this guy have going on that's so important?

> 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.

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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

Wait until this person learns about where children come from.

As a Frenchman, this offends me greatly

Can't tell if this is satire.

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