Comment by carbadtraingood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carbadtraingood | Hacker News Reader

carbadtraingood

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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...

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