The tragicomedy of eating

Tom and Greg have a meal of ortolans on HBO's Succession.

Food.  It's what's for dinner.    

Sitting at my desk the other day engrossed in one of the many intractable problems put before me all day by my fellow sequestered colleagues, I became conscious of the unmistakeable cling-clang-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch of our dog, Argos, at his food dish in the kitchen.  The way in which the domestic now dwells within the workaday is one of the most salient aspects of this new life of remote work for me.  I could get used to being reminded throughout the day that life goes on beyond the glow of my laptop.  But nothing more poignantly breaks the work bubble for me than the sound effects of an animal eating.  The image formed in my mind was of him lowering his neck like a crane to get his face in the mixture of a paste of chicken parts and crunchy nuggets of which he clamps as much in his mouth as he can, then the retraction, and my favorite part of it, the scoping of the room as he pulverizes the mélange into a swallowable mush with his choppers.  The surroundings that he scans are his cereal box-- something to do with himself while his mouth is straightforwardly engaged in his survival.  If I'm in the surroundings, it's me he's vacantly reading.  If he could speak, I'm pretty sure what he'd say would be, "Ehhhh, what's up, Doc?"  

I can't seem to forget the utter dependence he has on me for food.  When I am hungry I get to browse the cupboards for a suitable snack.  When he is hungry, he has to wait for me to catch on.  I feel guilty about the imbalance, and confess I spoil him and his kitty brother and sister as well more than society deems proper.  But perhaps I am confusing empathy toward the survival plight of the domesticated critter with the projection of my own hangups about eating onto my pets' interest in food.

Pursuit of sustenance and the avoidance of famine is a perpetual human condition-- a driver of human technology and conquest-- but there is something perverse about it in American culture.  In a land of plenty, people still starve.  The wealthiest starve themselves on purpose as a demonstration of their fitness for their position on top.  Concern about food seems to be part of the American psyche.  As prevalent as asceticism is, it is no match for its counterpart -- indulgence. 

When George Carlin was good no one was better.  Because of this, there's a tendency of many to treat his words as oracular.  But as close as he comes to infallibility, it's not out of keeping with his talent for cutting through the shit of what passes as sacred that when he was bad, he was Sebastian Maniscalco bad.  He was never worse than when riffing about how fat and stupid Americans are (although he comes close with his dismissal of environmentalism on the basis of how obnoxious some environmentalists can be).  On the topic of obesity, it is evident: Americans are fat.  I am an example of it.  It is surely a sign of something about the American condition.  Carlin equates it with American greed and laziness and the hollowness of American mall culture.  For someone as sharply observant about the pathologies that truly make America exceptional, it's disappointing that Carlin milks easy laughs out of the topic by blaming fatness on the fat.  

I am fat ladies and gentlemen for the same reason that George Carlin was stoned so much of the time.  To dull the pain.  It's not just the pain of our culture's hostility to poverty and to the suffering of others.  There is genuine pain to be found in the slow torturous drip of American relentless intolerance of the unhomogenized.  It's the pressure to homogenize that screams at you in a monotone from your TV and out the windows of your car as you drive American streets. Many Americans succumb to it.  But I am convinced that the same drive that fills our grocery shelves with fattening junk and compels so many of us, wittingly or not, to obligingly pursue the comfort of the greasy, nutty, chocolaty, cheesy, spicy, velvety goodness of a mouthful of non-nutritious processed taste is on some level a reaction to the oppressive blandness that is required of American lifestyles in order to avoid hassle and shame and blame for the effect that your own slice of the massive American inequality will have on your psyche.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not exonerating anyone for the compulsion to choose little sips of delight over the austerity of good, lean health as if selective self-denial were a prerequisite for vacuous prosperity.  But who can blame us?