We experience the contradiction of compulsive behavior, the crushing anti-climax of gratification every time we “succeed” in acting out lifeless pleasure.
We may feel we lack control over the rest of life and only in sensuality can we express our true wants. That is, setbacks in our other desires leads to a compensating and rather joyless indulgence in food or whatever it may be. When we choose pleasure over health we end up losing both in the long term.
That is our mental conflicts play out by using the body as a battlefield. We may be so alienated from our body and mind as to seek distraction constantly as a reflex. More generally we are poorly related, aware or at peace with our surroundings and can’t get away from the here and now fast enough.
Possessing the male libido has been amusingly described as like being chained to a madman but in fact all our tastes have the potential to be just as impulsively self-destructive.
The crude sensuality of much of popular culture expresses itself in our choices of entertainment which food is a form of. Our mind and body decay in lockstep like doomed dance partners. Our bodies become external markers of internal states, disordered minds made evident, tangible, mental chaos congealed.
The practice has become so widespread that we no longer think it strange to use food as a mood changer, the drug of choice easy to hand in the fridge, no prescription required. In the modern world food engineered to tickle our tastes has become the central source of sensuality.
The convulsions of pleasurizing food are later paid for by less satisfaction in more wholesome fare in a trade-off likely no better in net enjoyment and destructive into the bargain. In human activities we see this pattern of equalization of the senses repeat over and over.
The contradiction of the frantic search for pleasure is its overload coarsens and degrades the very senses it worships. Degraded sensibility leads to a shallow less complete experience that in compensation triggers even more compulsion and a downward spiral; more becomes less. We have traded quality for quantity, a dubious exchange indeed.
A further contradiction of our eating culture is we prefer to be distracted from it at the moment of consumption through reading, TV, conversation or whatever else is at hand. It’s another sign that eating is more about diversion from the here and now than real hunger and indeed studies have shown distracted eaters will consume more. It’s as if we bought tickets for an expensive concert and then when we got there turned the seats around looking away from the stage.
The entertainment “industry” which includes the industrial processing of food stands for a larger culture of dissipation, an entire philosophy of distraction from reality. At best it’s harmless diversion, at worst it distorts and infantilizes, regressing the individual to an oblivious and passive node of stimulation, a “consumer” indeed but who is actually being consumed?
A multiplex movie theater provides the sensation of your choice; stimulations such as fear, desire, sentimentality, group identity and many others, all in a safe play-pen setting. The humongous food portions – almost literally in buckets as if the customers were captive animals – go together with the gross indulgence up on the screen for a true full immersion experience.
However in honesty we can only place part of the blame on media and food corporations, governments or our genes – as if genes are different in the less obese societies around the globe or even of the recent past; these people are superhuman apparently. Blaming in this way is a form of resignation to our state, a way of making us feel better about the choices and tradeoffs we’ve freely entered into but feel uneasy about. Rather than waste energy like this we’ll need all of it to meet the daily challenge that reality provides us.