The root of all evil

Jamelle and Grand Mute follow up on my obesity post, and point out that culture is important:

Because, for all the economic and technological factors that have gone into fueling the obesity epidemic, these factors have only been the “how.” The “why” of obesity stems from culture, and specifically the culture of food: what is food, when and how and with whom it should be eaten, and so forth. Basically, if people didn’t recognize fast-food french fries as food, it wouldn’t matter how cheap McDonald’s could sell french fries for, because the demand would just not be there. On a broader scale, people eat as they do because of a mix of old customs, new marketing, and timeless peer pressure – and, yes, because technological and economic developments have enabled them to eat so.

So what’s the point of this – if you will – sociological take on obesity? Even if we remove the enabling factors – cheap corn, “supersize” portions, urban “food deserts”, total ignorance of nutrition – we will still be left with the root cause of obesity: the desire for a certain (and incidentally unhealthy) diet. And that means, so long as a caloric surplus is available, people will continue to get fat(ter).

I’ve been thinking a bit about food lately, and this reminds me of an idea of C.S. Lewis’s, actually. The protagonist in one of his books is alone on a strange planet, passing his time by gathering alien fruit. He can find plenty of nourishing fruit, but once in a while he sees a brilliant red fruit, sweeter than all the rest. He’s tempted to focus only on gathering the sweet ones, but voluntarily holds himself back, thinking that would be too much sweetness. He reflects that perhaps the root of all evil is the human desire to only eat the red fruit, to taste only the most pleasurable experiences and have them over and over again. Perhaps, Lewis writes, that’s why money is said to be the root of all evil; buying things is how we ensure we can have pleasurable experiences whenever we want.

It’s possible to literally do this with food, of course. We can have every drink a soda, every meal a treat. (I don’t want to admit to what extent I actually do this — I think I actually drink more Diet Coke than water.) If an occasional red fruit is good, it would be best of all to have nothing but red fruit.

And interestingly enough, that’s exactly how Homo economicus behaves. All economic models have individuals consuming as much as they can of the things that make them happy. A model consumer will stop if he runs out of resources, or if his consumption has nasty side effects, but he won’t consume less than he could just for the sake of being moderate. There’s no self-restraint for its own sake.

I wonder, sometimes, in my grimmer moments, if we’ve become culturally worse at self-restraint for its own sake, if we behave too much like utility-maximizers and red-fruit-gatherers. Sure, food manufacturers and their calorific innovations are to blame for a lot of obesity, but maybe we’ve also lost an old-fashioned kind of asceticism. The automatic “No, thanks.” The embarrassment at putting too many lumps of sugar in your tea. A part of me, personally, is terrified by truly having limited resources — limited sweetener, limited electrical power for my laptop. I want all the goodies of life to be too cheap to meter. Maybe I’m like those conservatives who Jamelle says have an ethic of consumption, a commitment to the idea that a mighty country like America shouldn’t have to stint itself. We want to have all we want. It’s an idea that would be alien fifty or a hundred years ago.