I think there are several healthy ways of looking at food consumption and a couple unhealthy ones. Most healthy relationships with food contain a lot of the following pieces:

Food is a means, not an end. Not every meal should be the most pleasurable experience you’ve ever had. Sometimes, it’s okay just to eat a meal bar or have a snack in place of a meal. This idea leads to the americanism of eating at fast food restaurants multiple times a day, I think, if every meal is an event then it needs to be celebrated. In short, food should not be a raison d’être .

There are ends served by food. In particular, health is an end to which health is a means. Also, socialization is also an end to which food is a possible means. I think socialization is where people get stuck eating more than they should — the idea of food as a fun experience drives people to eat like they were having fun in an attempt to recreate fun. I think that’s where I get stuck — I’m used to eating a lot of food with people.

Healthy relationships with food keep the ends in mind. Just like fucking people at work is a bad idea, forgetting why you’re in a particular place or undertaking a particular interaction can lead to trouble. With food, at least, you probably won’t be fired unless you make some spectacularly bad decisions. Therefore, for everyday meals, it’s probably more important to get the nutrition you need for your overall life than to have the most pleasant meal you can.

Both food and people that are full of shit are bad for you. If you look at what’s in common fast food, you see that you’re putting all sorts of appalling shit into your body. I have celiac, so I have great reason to read food labels attentively, and I often see all sorts of strange things on the label that I have to look up to make sure they aren’t wheat. So, there’s lots of strange things in food, and some of them aren’t great for you in ways that aren’t in the annoying hippy ass OMG WHAT HAVE THE QUEERS HAVE DONE TO THE SOIL sort of panic that natural food folks seem to be prone to.

Building relationships is hard. For a long time, I had stopped going to new restaurants because I was randomly getting ill from eating at them. I had a decent stock of places that I would go to, and tended to go out to one or another of them when possible. Some comments that Gluten-Free Girl made the other week helped a lot about my determination to go forth and go back to being experimental with food. I’m also going back and re-examining my relationship with food from more or less the beginning this week, building things up from scratch. I spent a lot of time thinking anyway.

So, I’ve been working hard on this, and I’ve been working on mentally recontextualizing the role of food in my life. Mostly, separating the goals of food as a social occasion and food as nutrition. I think my world needs more intense flavor and more experimentation, but it also needs more attention to nutrition and making the quotidian quotidian. This is also true of the external world. Also, more eating food with groups of people in everyday contexts needs to be done.

I do, think, though that a lot of problems with food are due to people’s relationships with food and not just due to tendencies to overeat or misjudge. If you aren’t getting pleasure other places, you’re going to get it through the mouth. My own problems are simple, I had a bad relationship with food that was pretty much abusive — random stimuli leading to pain response, low predictability of severity or type of response, and etc… — but I’m working on rebuilding it now.

However, to restore the sort of crappy tone of this blog, WTF is up with the outback steakhouse and their portion sizes? I went there because they have a gluten free menu the other day, and I left with about a goat’s weight in leftovers after having quite the meal. That’s just astounding to me.

1. People Are Stupid.
2. People Are Evil.
3. Where The Lines Meet.

I’m not really into consumer products in three particular ways. First, I’m not really interested in most of pop culture. Second, I value experiences and objects with personal meaning over possessing large amounts of stuff. Third, I value quality of items for those items I do own. Also, I find the physical experience of being at the mall among the teeming masses to be a physically sickening experience. I don’t have this same experience in urban cores or even at occasional forays into ‘upscale malls,’ and I think it’s more just the random stupidity combined with brightness combined with pervasive advertising.

First, pop culture. I could really give a crap, and I’ve never really been interested in most of pop culture with the exception of music aside from its potential to be remixed and punned upon. I don’t watch a lot of television, and therefore miss out on a lot of crap. I think, though, that if you don’t pay attention to pop culture tv to some extent, you become frozen in time and start making jokes about the cartoons you watched in childhood all the time, which is pathetic.

Second, I have become over the last several years fairly uninterested in owning things without personal meaning. I used to own a house which was full of stuff, but I’ve since downscaled a lot. Those things that I kept are mostly things linked to some sort of personal experience. People experience through narrative, and I’ve chosen to keep those things that remind me of parts of my personal narrative. Maybe I’ll post about some of them here eventually. Because of this, I’m willing to give away things or share things with my friends, because I’ve come to value friendship more than how much random crap I can pile up. This isn’t to say, of course, that my eventual plans don’t include another house and more crap, but this time I will have crap in line with my values.

Third, I want to own quality things. One of the variants of the poverty trap in this and other nations is that, for the most part, cheaper things wear out quickly. If you spend $50 on shoes that last a year because you didn’t want to spend $85 on shoes that would last three years, you are participating in false economy. Lack of wealth pressures people to participate in false economies because they need the extra, say, $35 for other things so they cannot afford to spend less money.

I am not interested in buying things that will wear out, it’s part of my upbringing. Unless I’m participating in a destructive environment like camping on an alkali flat for a week, I want my things to last. If I care enough about a thing to get it, I care about it enough to keep it. This tendency on my part is so extreme that I engage a friend who is ‘easily distracted by fashion and novelty’ to advise me on fashion and style, because otherwise I will buy things that appear of good quality, in the usual colors, and consider the matter closed

The mall, to me, is where people spend too much money (stupid) on large quantities of poorly manufactured goods (evil) where their expectation of value matches what they have to spend (where the lines meet.) Because of this tendency, I think that the mall, and ‘mall culture,’ brings out just about the worst in people; it fosters an unhealthy relation between people and their possessions, divorcing objects of meaning and encouraging raw purchase over experience.

This works really well towards increasing the net happiness of my life in non-work hours, even though I read email pretty regularly. I think it’s better for me than the other email management systems because I sit perched on a huge stream of incoming information by choice.

This doesn’t mean the converse, that if you haven’t gotten email from me until 9am that I consider you stupid or a waste of time, just that I’m using this as an overall metric.