Food Hackers and Foodies

I remember when the first McDonalds opened in my hometown. There wasn’t any seating, just a walk-up window. The burgers cost 15 cents, which was a bargain even in the 1960s. More McDonalds opened, and they eventually had seating and a more extensive menu. Burger King, Arbys, and Wendys soon followed. Fast-food culture has been criticized both for the quality of the food and the hurried lifestyle it represents. At least fast-food restaurants served meals, though. We used to sit down three times a day to eat, but many of us don’t manage that any more. We eat on the run, and often what we are eating are snacks rather than meals.

A recent Associated Press article by Candice Choi documents the decline of meals. Food industry experts reportedly state that “Snacks now account for half of all eating occasions, with breakfast and lunch in particular becoming ‘snackified’…”  According to Marcel Nahm, an executive with Hershey, “People are snacking more and more, sometimes instead of meals, sometimes with meals, and sometimes in between meals.”  Hershey and other purveyors of packaged, processed foods are seeking to take advantage of this trend. Hershey offers snack mixes, Tyson offers packs of cut-up chicken, and Kellogg’s offers To Go shakes and cereal pouches.

These products and others marketed as snacks are designed for convenience. Too much trouble to get out meat, mustard, lettuce, and bread to make a sandwich? Just open a meat pouch and snack away. The AP article doesn’t mention it, but the move to greater snacking seems a form of “life hack.” According to Wikipedia, a life hack is “any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.” The less time spent on meal preparation or consumption, the more time available to get things done.

Of course, wanting to hack food in particular or hack life in general is based on a singular view of what life is about. Giving up the pleasures and benefits of eating regular meals only makes sense if productivity is more important than those pleasures and benefits. Is getting as much done as we possibly can really what life is about? The gains that shortcuts like snacking provide are costly to our health and our emotional well-being. They also are costly to our relationships, since food is about relationships, starting the parent-infant bond at feeding time and including the family meal, formal dinners, and lunch with friends.

Of course, social trends that reach extremes are usually met with some sort of backlash. Snackers/food hackers are counterbalanced by foodies who devote considerable time and effort to rituals of food selection, preparation, and consumption. Snackers devote little thought to what they eat; foodies think about it all the time. Snackers satisfy momentary cravings; foodies plan far in advance where and what they’ll eat. Snackers eat in private; foodies dine with others or use social media to share their food choices.

But foodies, too, have a singular view of what human life is about. Foodies aren’t just trying to eat healthily and save the planet; they are also interested in food as experience and see life as a venue for maximizing sensory and emotional pleasures. As such, at their worse they are prone to the vices of the gourmet–snobbery, waste, and priggishness.

Rather than hacking food or making it the focus of life, I try to take a middle way. I’ll occasionally snack on nuts or a piece of fruit to tide me over, but always manage to eat three meals a day. I learn enough about food that I can eat healthily, but don’t spent a lot of time on food or nutrition sites. I eat alone sometimes, and sometimes with others. I’ve never posted a picture of a meal on social media. I think there are lots of people like me. We don’t go by a catchy name like food hackers or foodies, but I’d like to think that we have a more sensible attitude toward food than either of those groups. So snackers, give up your unhealthy ways, and foodies, give up your obsessions! Join us in the broad and anonymous center! Up with gastronomical moderation!

 

The Eudiamonic Staircase

I previously discussed Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, the happiness which accompanies the good life and is different from pleasure (hedonia).  A psychologist who has paid considerable attention to the distinction between the two is Alan S. Waterman, who is on the faculty of the College of New Jersey.  I ran across a comment by him in the September, 2007 American Psychologist (pages 612-613).  His comment is in response to an article on the hedonic treadmill, which is the theory that we humans have a set point of happiness to which we revert.  Per the theory, our happiness isn’t permanently enhanced if a winning lottery ticket suddenly makes us rich or the girl (or guy) of our dreams consents to marry us.  Similarly, we don’t experience lasting sadness from having our house burn down or being diagnosed with malaria.  After a blip up or down in our degree of personal satisfaction, we will soon revert to our set point and be no more or less happy than we were to start out.

 

Waterman thinks that the hedonic treadmill doesn’t apply well to eudaimonia.  He claims that there is a separate eudaimonic treadmill, which can become a eudaimonic staircase, whereas the hedonic treadmill always stays a treadmill.  I’ll explain what he means after I discuss his definition of eudaimonia.

 

Waterman claims that the good life that eudaimonia accompanies is “excellence in the pursuit of fulfillment of personal potentials in ways that further an individual’s purposes in living.”  That’s not the same as Aristotle’s concept, because the element of virtue is lacking.  Would I experience eudaimonia if I managed to fulfill my potential to dominate and humiliate others whenever I had the chance?   If that was my goal in life and I got really good at it, I’ve met Waterman’s criterion, but I sure haven’t satisfied Aristotle’s.

 

Despite the problem with his definition, Waterman’s argument about the treadmill is interesting.  He relates the achievements of eudiamonia to psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow. Flow occurs when the challenges of an activity are closely matched to one’s level of ability.  Thus, when I started studying Biblical Greek last fall, I found the first set of translation exercises were somewhat beyond my capacity, but after a little practice my ability matched the exercises and I experienced flow.  According to Waterman, at that point I was also experiencing an enhanced sense of eudaimonia.  The state didn’t last, though, because eventually my skill level exceeded the demands made by that set of exercises, and what once was challenging became boring.  That’s the eudaimonic treadmill; I reverted to my previous level of well-being. 

 

However, I didn’t have to stay in a eudaimonic fixed state.  I could and did increase the level of challenge by going to a harder set of exercises.  I thus restored a sense of flow and again enhanced my sense of eudaimonia.  The process can be ongoing; the person always seeks new challenges and thereby achieves more and more of his or her potential.  This, says Waterman, is the eudaimonic staircase.

 

 

Eudiamonic? Hedonic? Or just wooden?

 

Though I’m fascinated by the argument, I have some questions.  First, returning to the difference between Waterman and Aristotle, do all forms of flow qualify?  If I continually enhance my personal potential to be a superior auto thief or street fighter, am I just as likely to experience eudaimonia as if I’m enhancing my potential for generosity or compassion?  Some ways of fulfilling my potential don’t seem advisable to pursue, even if they make me happy.  Second, why can’t someone use the same procedure with hedonia as Waterman does with eudaimonia, that is, seek ever greater pleasures and thus turn the hedonic treadmill into a hedonic staircase?  Waterman seems to think that this procedure works only for eudiamonia, but he doesn’t give any reason why it would work in the one case but not in the other.   The article to which he was responding (and which I previously discussed here) actually argues that the hedonic treadmill isn’t universal and there are ways to increase one’s hedonia.  Even if Waterman is wrong and always raising the bar works just as well with hedonia as with eudaimonia, the prospect of living in a society in which everyone is constantly seeking more pleasure doesn’t seem nearly as appealing as does a society in which everyone is seeking eudaimonia via striving for excellence.  Faced with two staircases to happiness, society may be better off if people head up the eudiamonic one.        

 

Pleasure, Happiness, and Snow

Is pleasure the same thing as happiness?   Though quite a few philosophers have considered happiness as the goal of human existence, relatively few thought that maximizing happiness is the same thing as maximizing pleasure.  Epicurus and his followers did try to achieve happiness through pleasure, but, as I’ve discussed earlier, to him pleasure meant not the satisfactions of eating, drinking, and sex, but an absence of pain and disturbance (call it the ‘peace and quiet’ view of happiness).   Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham tried to quantify the amount of pleasure that people experience, and proposed that society seek to bring about the maximum amount of pleasure for all people considered together.  His formulation has been widely criticized for regarding all pleasures as equal.  Even if the respective amounts of pleasure could be shown to be equivalent, does that mean that a weekend spent watching football and eating junk food is just as good as a weekend reading The Brothers Karamazov, serving soup to the homeless, and attending religious services?  (Some, of course, would say it’s better, but still pleasure and goodness aren’t being considered as equals.)

Though psychologists have been writing quite a bit about happiness over the past several years, most of them don’t consider how it relates to pleasure.  One exception is Martin Seligman.  In his book Authentic Happiness, he considers pleasure under the chapter heading “Happiness in the Present.”  He suggests some ways of enhancing pleasurable experiences, but pleasure has only a limited role to play in his program for increasing happiness.  He writes as follows:

“Despite the delights they so reliably bring, however, it is not easy to build your life around the bodily pleasures, for they are all just momentary.  The fade very rapidly once the external stimulus disappears, and we become accustomed to them very readily (“habituation”), often requiring bigger doses to deliver the same kick as originally.  It is only the first taste of French vanilla ice cream, the first wisp of Shalimar, and the first few seconds of warmth form the blazing fire that gives you a buzz.  Unless you space these encounters out abstemiously, these pleasures are enormously diminished.”  pp 103-104.    

Seligman’s perspective seems balanced; pleasure doesn’t make one happy, but it can contribute to happiness.  As he mentions, spacing out pleasures does help us not habituate to them.  Take today, for example.  It snowed in Fayetteville starting sometime early this morning and continuing until early afternoon.  I’ve loved looking out on the fresh powdering of snow and walking outside as the flakes spun around my head.  I even enjoyed driving in it.  Earlier this winter, I spent the better part of a week with family in Michigan.  It had snowed virtually every day in December, and everyone was habituated to it (that is, they were sick to death of it).  Snow is so much better if it only visits just once or twice a year!

Beautiful But Unappreciated Michigan Snow

 

 

Hedonia

In earlier posts, I talked about the Greek concepts of eudiamonia and makarios as found in Aristotle.  Each refers to a form of happiness, with the first consisting of being fulfilled and virtuous and the second consisting of being fortunate and blessed.  Aristotle also talks about hedonia, or pleasure.  Aristotle took it as a given that humans (and other creatures) pursue pleasure.  After considering the views of other philosophers concerning pleasure, he concluded that it is good and that it serves to complete the activities that it accompanies (thus, for example, the experience of listening to music would be more complete if accompanied by pleasure than it would without pleasure).  However, pleasure can accompany either good or bad activities (with the good activities being those that are proper to man).  Pleasure accompanying good activities is good; pleasure accompanying bad activities is bad.   

As is only fitting for someone who thought virtue resided in the mean, Aristotle had a moderate view of pleasure.  He was favorably disposed to it for the most part.  He did not see it as the highest or only form of good, though, since, for the person lacking in virtue, pleasure often accompanies bad deeds, not good ones. 

 

 

In contrast to Aristotle’s moderate beliefs about pleasure, current cultural beliefs regarding pleasure seem rather immoderate.  The dominant view seems to be that pleasure as an unmitigated good to be sought at every opportunity.  This “if it feels good, do it” mentality (one of my college roommates endorsed this phrase as his guiding philosophy of life) has been a driving force in many works of popular culture, though some works exploring the theme make it clear that using pleasure as one’s compass is more likely to result in a shipwreck than a satisfying voyage (I’m thinking here of movies such as “Carnal Knowledge” and “Autofocus”).  A less prevalent element in society is a Puritanism consistent with the characterization of the original Puritans by Thomas B. Macaulay “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”  In some quarters, there certainly is suspicion of the pleasures that life has to offer.  I’ve probably run into the aversion to pleasure most when working with clients who feel guilty whenever they take time to do something enjoyable.  I certainly don’t encounter this view as much now as I did years ago, though.  I was raised in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a Dutch Calvinist denomination.  Up until at least the sixties, the denomination disapproved strongly of movies, dancing, and card playing.  The idea was that these were mere worldly amusements, not fit to occupy citizens of the kingdom of God.  There certainly was some Puritanism in that stance.  It’s probably been at least twenty years since anyone prominent in the CRC argued seriously against such entertainments, though. 

So, at present the danger for our society seems to be that we overemphasize pleasure and confuse it with happiness.  One question to consider is whether it’s useful to distinguish, like Aristotle did, between the pleasures that accompany good activities and the pleasures that accompany bad activities.  How can we tell which is which?