Myth 1: Food Equals Pleasure

There is no question that we can and do get pleasure from eating. We cannot eat without sensing, and our senses register pleasure in varying degrees. So it seems obvious, yes, food equals pleasure. We also believe, by extension, that more food equals more pleasure; and that, if we want to maintain a healthy body we must give up some of that pleasure for what our minds know is best. Our desire for food, we imagine, is a desire that always wants more.

There is some truth to this equation of food with pleasure, but not much. Some crucial variables are missing.

Scene 1. Imagine a room stuffed full with all the food you will eat over the course of your lifetime. Imagine gallons of your favorite ice cream; slabs of cheese; bags of pasta, fruit, and nuts ; mounds of cookies, crackers, chips, and candybars.

Now, imagine eating all of that food.

After an initial burst of delight, the thought is overwhelming. Pondered long enough, it may make you feel rather queasy. How could I possibly stomach all that?

This reaction is telling: pleasure we have in eating does not come from the food itself—not from the substance, its quality or quantity. Rather, the pleasure comes from a relationship to that substance that allows us to enjoy it and experience it as pleasurable. And in this case, what allows us to enjoy it is the rhythms of our lives day in and day out over long stretches of time. What allows us to enjoy food is not having it all at once.

Scene 2. A friend offers you a piece of chocolate cake. It looks delicious. Yet you are ill with fever and chills. Or perhaps you are uncomfortably full. Or you are angry with the friend and can’t pretend you are not. Or you are mourning the loss of something dear to you. Will the cake give you pleasure? Probably not.

Here again, the reaction is telling: it is not the sheer fact of food and ever more of it that gives us pleasure. In this case, what allows us to enjoy food is the health and well being—the sensory presence—that enables us to sense and receive it.

There is more. Not only is our pleasure from food dependent upon our relationship to it, that pleasure is more complex than our mind over body training leads us to believe.

Scene 3. Think back to advertisements you have seen for foods. You see a picture of a slender someone, lifting something delicious into his or her mouth—a piece of chocolate, a creamy drink—and basking in a sunlit smile. Invariably, the ad or image promises you pleasure. Put this in your mouth and you will be happy!

Is this pleasure? Most of the eating pleasure advertised to us is all about the mouth. It is all about taste. It is almost as if the mouth is the goal, the endpoint where the food stops. Is that all there is?

If you are someone trying to sell food, it makes sense to focus on the pleasure of the mouth. It if is all about taste, there is never a reason to stop, never a body or a self to consider. Only a mouth whose potential for pleasure is unlimited.

Given this logic, we find cases in our society where food companies make, promote, and market chips that taste good, while hoping and believing that you simply won’t pay attention to the burn, the gas, or the runs that occur further down the pike. The mouth is all that counts.

Yet our mouths are attached to bodies. They are gateways, not endpoints, and our taste buds are designed to help sense and censor what should and shouldn’t enter. It matters. Once it is in, we are generally stuck with it for a while. But when we eat food that tickles our taste buds so heartily that we cannot notice anything else, we lose the ability to want a wider, deeper, and longer-lived pleasure.

When we learn to equate food with pleasure, then, we not only drastically narrow the range of pleasure we expect, we prime ourselves to interpret every sense of discomfort as a cue to put something into our mouths. We make ourselves into people who consciously and unconsciously override the rhythms of our own desire. Result: a national oral fixation.

This scene, then, reveals a third important point about pleasure. Not only is our desire for it rhythmic and relational, our desire is also malleable. Teachable. Our desire for food evolves constantly over time in response to the images, experiences, and foods we consume. We have to learn what to eat. And this very same trait that has enabled human beings to adapt so readily to vastly different climates and diets renders us putty in the hands of advertisers who play a one note song about the pleasures of taste.

We can do otherwise. My movements are making me. We can cultivate a sensory awareness of our desire for food, using the cycle of breaths (or similar practices) to help us tune in to a fuller experience of eating. As we do, our desire for food aligns more and more with what will give us pleasure—not just mouthfuls of pleasure, but days and weeks and years of pleasure. The pleasure of a living a rhythmic, life-enabling relationship with food.

There is wisdom in our desire for food, a wisdom impelling us along an arc of pleasure to a sense of enough.

It is a different equation to try out and explore: food plus a tuned desire equals the pleasure of enough.

First however, we have a few more myths to debunk.

Next week: Diets don’t work—Or do they?