The Agony and Ecstasy of On-Demand Eating

Read of the day:

“I don’t know you that well, but you sound like you have a lot of anxiety around food,” Kit Yarrow, Ph.D., laughed when I explained my dilemma to her. Yarrow is a consumer psychologist and the author of Decoding the New Consumer Mind, an exploration of the ways in which major social shifts are reshaping people’s consumption habits. “That’s totally normal these days, by the way,” she added.

In her opinion, our emotional relationship with food has lately become a casualty of our broader relationship with technology. Food and eating, she explained, are deeply complex concepts, fundamentally inseparable from our human need to connect with others. But as technology bombards us with information, challenges our trust in traditional authorities, and indulges our base desire for instant gratification, it erodes our capacity for human connection.

Food has this amazing ability to make us feel like we belong — in the same way that a religion helps us feel that we share something in common with others,” Yarrow told me. “Ironically, the less connected we feel, the more we regard food as a series of hassles and inconveniences to be solved, rather than a facilitator of emotional nourishment.”Treating food as a kind of ride-hailing app for one’s physiological and emotional needs has a unique distorting effect: It makes it possible to focus, with ever more scrutiny, on the perceived benefits of a meal, while simultaneously eliminating the need to think about food at all. Call it a dysfunction of plenty — I’m not so much eating food as I’m consuming its aspirational value. That it’s a physical object requiring consideration, preparation, and digestion is increasingly secondary. Sure, I can eat whatever I want, but the myopia of consumer choice means I’m doing so in the way that one might choose between brands: as a series of lofty promises with an ever-increasing threshold for satisfaction."

- John Fischer