The Agony and Ecstasy of On-Demand Eating
How our obsession with getting exactly what we want to eat, when we want it, reveals deep cultural anxiety.
Sometime over the past few years, I gained fifteen pounds. I couldn’t say exactly when it happened — betrayals of the body tending, as they do, toward secrecy — only that my dress shirts began to strain at their lower buttons, where a creeping softness had grown to bulge at the crest of my hips. I worried at this new flesh in store mirrors as I grudgingly resized my wardrobe. Through my teens and twenties I’d been naturally thin, and so the unexpected expansion of my waistband seemed, at its core, to be a personal failing. Somewhere along the culinary time line, I must have made a series of bad decisions.
Of course, these were the early years of my thirties, and it would be more accurate to say that my relationship with food had changed as I’d become increasingly entangled in the managerial responsibilities of adulthood. My father died late in 2015, leaving my mother and me to reckon with a house full of his stuff. As a freelancer, I had contracts to negotiate and late invoices to chase. I now managed chronic shoulder and neck pain from old sports injuries, rendering physical activity an exercise in avoiding further strain. And so inasmuch as I ate on a daily basis, I did so with a kind of secondary purpose: finding the exact balance of ingredients and calories and nutrients that might help me manage the accumulating complications of “living life.”
I’d come to pursue this behavior in an essentially on-demand fashion. Gone were the days when my weekly menus involved shopping lists and leftovers; rather, my meals appeared as needed via services like Caviar or GrubHub or Blue Apron (though after a time, even meal assembly seemed like an unreasonable inconvenience). Thanks to the tech industry’s relentless drive to eliminate the inefficiencies of 20th-century life, I could now move through my days Pacman-like, snapping up whatever food appeared in front of me, tailored to moment or mood. I wasn’t exactly binging on nachos; my diet tended toward an obsessive nutritional accounting. Yesterday was a green juice and grilled salmon, so today perhaps a burger was in order, provided I subbed a salad for fries. I prioritized whole grains over simple carbohydrates, kale over iceberg lettuce, superfruit smoothies over salty snacks.
Yet I couldn’t help but suspect that this technological renovation of my eating habits had done as much harm as good. For all the energy I lavished on the particulars of my food intake, I wasn’t sure I’d seen tangible benefits. I certainly hadn’t lost weight; I’d only managed to oscillate between the moral poles of good and bad, neither of which I could clearly define. And so, as with so many recent innovations, I began to wonder: How could I consume the thing I wanted, when I wanted it, and still end up feeling unsatisfied?
“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.”
Hearing Yarrow describe this phenomenon, it was difficult not to think of myself on any random weeknight, sending emails from my couch while waiting for a stranger to appear with a meal prepared by a chef I would never see and bagged up by a worker I would never thank. But at the same time, I remained skeptical. Weren’t choice and convenience ultimately good things? And what about the fact that I could assemble a diet to my exact specifications, healthy or otherwise?
That too was an exercise in replacing authentic human connection, Yarrow posited. Because was I really trying to control the nutritional content of my meals, or was I trying to exert control over my life and assert my individuality?
“In a state of heightened anxiety — which more and more people are experiencing — it’s easy to turn to food as a means of asserting your moral values,” she said. “Consider people who feel the need to control their diet through the dominance of their desires. That’s what they do to feel better — to say, ‘Yeah, this is how I believe we should live.’ It’s the exact same way gourmands feel they’ve mastered life by indulging in the sensuous aspects of food. Both groups are living in ways that they feel both connect them to and distinguish themselves from others.”
Yarrow’s point felt fitting, both in its general accuracy, and in the sense that I was, on some level, complaining of a class-bound affliction — that, thanks to my socioeconomic privilege as a professional living in a city replete with upscale food services, I could choose to obsess over the minutiae of food’s impact on my weight and health. All those delivery meals, those grain bowls and vegan protein shakes, were essentially a badge of status, a measure of belonging to a group that could afford to concern itself with GMO ingredients and lean muscle tone.
When I spoke to Steven Bratman, M.D., Ph.D., he was less sparing in his analysis. According to him, the recent trend in on-demand food in cities like New York and San Francisco is more a symptom of culturally disordered eating, rather than a cause. Because, while the notion of on-demand food delivery was not particularly remarkable, it spoke in part to a deeper anxiety: the fear of death.
In 1997, Bratman famously coined the term orthorexia, a disordered eating diagnosis for individuals who had become unhealthily obsessed with eating “properly,” eschewing, say, heated foods for a raw-vegetable diet, or eliminating wheat-based products altogether. “People have been trying to control their health with food endlessly throughout history,” Bratman told me. “Their theories have been wildly different, but their goal has been a universal fact” — cheating the hangman. He pointed to so-called biohackers among the Silicon Valley startup community believe they can determine the optimal combination of foods, supplements, and herbs — Soylent or adaptogenic mushroom powders, for example — to extract maximum efficiency and longevity from their bodies — a sort of anorexic’s approach toward living longer. “[They] eat toward their health as a way of coping with their own mortality. And until mortality is conquered, people are going to continue to do so.”
But the truth is, Bratman argues, our contemporary concept of healthy eating is largely false, because people’s desire to control their health far exceeds what’s actually out there: “Huge amounts of advice about how to make yourself healthy is wrong, except the really basic stuff — don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t get overweight, exercise, and avoid trans-fats. You’ve just done 95% of your health stuff there. The rest is just obsessive fiddling over stuff that doesn’t matter. But people are not willing to accept that science and medicine simply may not know how to make you healthier.”
What happens when an act of nourishment becomes a panacea for modern living? It’s not like American food culture has suffered, exactly: healthy chains like Lyfe Kitchen and Sweetgreen are now nipping at the heels of the fast food industry; gone are the days of the 1970s meatloaf and Jello mold; farmers’ markets have been growing steadily over the past two decades; grocery stores are full of healthy children’s’ snacks, and even obesity rates in the aggregate have begun to slow. Yet something fundamental has changed, and not for the better — although only in affluent pockets of affluent cities thus far. As Yarrow pointed out, “We’re only talking about a third of the population in these conversations, but they’re the third that spends the money and creates the trends.”
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 (whether truly healthful or, as Bratman believes, pure charlatanism), 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.
In 2015, in the aftermath of my father’s death, my mother found herself unable to cook. Being of a certain generation of Jewish women, she regards her relationship with cooking as central to her sense of self. She has sautéed her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and maintains a collection of handwritten recipes passed down to her by her mother-in-law. She knows the small perfections of roasts and chocolate chip cookies alike. Yet for months, she couldn’t cook. It brought her, she said, too close to my father’s ghost. It wasn’t until well into 2016 that she even attempted a meal — having become a regular fixture at the nearby diner. The day it happened, she called to tell me that she’d been to the grocery store for items other than milk and breakfast cereal, and she spoke in the apprehensive tones of someone applying for a bank loan. I believe she made herself salmon steaks with lemon and butter and a cucumber salad that night.
A few weeks later, I hosted my first Passover dinner, now living in an apartment large enough to accommodate a full-size dining table. I invited a few friends, my brother, my girlfriend, and of course, my mother, who wasted no time inquiring whether she could bring matzo ball soup and brisket — which I knew was not really a question at all. That evening she arrived carrying a cartoonish tower of Tupperware, shapeless foil-wrapped ingredients, and a casserole dish containing the brisket I’d eaten once yearly since before I could remember. And so it was with a peculiar feeling that I served my mother’s brisket back to her, even as she watched me assume the head-of-the-table seat that my father had for so many years occupied. I couldn’t say what was in the dish — whether it was organic, or high in saturated fat, or healthy by anyone’s definition of the word. In all likelihood, it would clog my arteries and expand my waistline. But that hardly mattered. Because, for the first time in quite a while, I knew what it meant to eat.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
