Gluttony Gospels
Term Three: Food for Thought; Module 4
Thesis: We live in an era obsessed with minimalism. More than an aesthetic, it’s an ideology of deprivation, a doctrine of less that sanctifies discipline over desire. But what if excess is enlightenment? What if appetite is not a problem to be solved but a force that propels the human experience? The minimalist fixation attempts to strip the body, the mind, and art of its richness, but living demands appetite. This is a sermon for the famished.
The Call is Coming From Inside The Container Store
Everyone's obsessed with less. Clean-girl aesthetic rules beauty, quiet luxury has flattened fashion, heritage brands are rebranding for a sans serif. The trend for minimalism has stripped our lives to the bone. Hailey Bieber sells lip contour, not lipstick. Rupi Karr hired Marie Kondo to edit her last book. Not actually, but yeah.
And I’m so sick of it. Consider this a tirade to consider the opposite. A defense of more. What if this relentless pursuit of “less” isn’t refinement, but a denial of the human experience? The minimalist aesthetic has overcompensated into an ideology of deprivation–one that suppresses appetite, dulls creativity, and starves us of richness in many forms. “To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it.” (Rothfeld, 2) Consider appetite not as a weakness, but a compass. These days, wanting more is an act of resistance.
Appetite as a Compass
Discussions around hunger are often framed as a problem. We try to subdue it, solve it like some kind of affliction. subdue. If not controlled, we’re given ways to eliminate it entirely. (What is Ozempic if not an executioner of desire?). But what if desire, in all its unruly excess, is not a signal of lack, but a sign of life? In All Things are Too Small, Becca Rothfeld takes us through an examination of appetite, arguing that “desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites” (Rothefeld, 2). She goes on to discuss desire as a clarifier. While many frame appetite as something that distorts, she writes that hunger acts at the opposite. The things we want most clarify our understanding of the world, revealing our deepest values and ambitions. Yet contemporary minimalism seeks to replace this longing with denial. The ideal human in this ideology needs less, wants less.
There’s obviously something to be said about pushing the body’s limits. I mean, nobody really likes exercising–not in the pleasurable sense. The hurts-so-good part is forcing the body to do something it doesn’t want to do. It’s micro-masochism, an endurance test of pumping iron until the muscles burn. (Even this is a sort of pain that mimics satiation, but more on that later.) And of course, we’ve aestheticized this. The burn of exercise has been packaged in Bala weights that look like vibrators. We’ve turned this pain into an aspiration, an exercise in clarity, wisdom.
Even an old Norwegian guy explored this in a pre-Kafka novel–Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. The novel’s protagonist basically starves himself for fun. There’s never a real reason why he’s starving himself, which is kind of the point. Our guy lets starvation warp his mind and fracture his sense of self for our literary exploration. “Hunger had gone into my brain,” he says, “and I was beginning to feel light and airy. I was empty and free from pain; my hunger had become a kind of lofty exaltation.” (Hamsun, 21) What begins as deprivation soon turns to a delirium one might argue is transcendence. But our narrator never achieves wisdom, just loses his grasp on reality.
Nowhere in this novel does our narrator equate Hunger to aesthetic theory (I’ll do that for him.) Here, hunger isn’t a metaphor, it’s the experience: to want. The hunger, plainly, becomes him. This is all in artistic pursuit, obviously. He’s going for a sacrificial type thing with his art, submitting to total debasement and misery, but all this does is make it impossible for him to write. Hunger, first his subject, is soon his cage. His hunger becomes an art, an art of need, of desire, an art that begins with the knowledge that one can never be truly satiated. For once fed, he will one day hunger again. He finds that the hunger is not something else, but the self looking to accommodate its own mess. That is the task of the artist.
To crave is to be human. To chase is a fundamental act of self-definition. “Only someone who is not already everything reaches for more,” Rothfeld says of artistry (Rothfeld, 11). The act of wanting–more food, more love, more knowledge, is not a deficit but an ability to expand. Appetite, in this way, is not simply a bodily function but a way of engaging with the world. Appetite is literally the whole fucking point.
The Girl With the Sans Serif Tattoo
Norwegian guy starved his body to death, but Rothfeld critiques the same phenomenon happening to contemporary literature in what she calls Ikea-prose. The modern novel, in its desperate bid to be aesthetic, has been Marie-Kondo’d, trimmed down to a husk of what it could be. She describes the rise of the fragment novel, a form stripped of plot, depth, and character, where “there is only the thin, warbling voice of a placeless, hungerless narrator with few acquaintances and even fewer cravings” (Rothfeld, 25). I even have a Goodreads shelf titled no plot, just vibes.
These books are the Alo sets of literature. Perhaps the most famed trick is when these authors don’t give narrators names. Or when they get rid of quotation marks (you-know-who – say her name three times with the lights off and you’ll see her ghost in the mirror). It’s always about a girl doing nothing for like three years. Things are going to start looking like the lowercase uniform of Ariana Grande’s track lists.
Rothfeld argues that in eliminating the unnecessary, many authors also eliminate the elements that make art good. She waxes, “art cannot but defy the declutterer’s utilitarian edict: it is superbly needless, for which reason it is anathema to the tactics of capitalists and declutterers alike” (Rothfeld, 38). Basically: art, by its very nature, is obsessive. It’s so beyond survival. It luxuriates in beauty, in excess, in detail. Meanwhile, the clean-girl-novel reads like it’s nervous to get stuck in your teeth.
Creativity requires more. More words, more thoughts, more indulgence. The mind, like the body, cannot function on scarcity alone. It needs to feast.
Edward Cullen Explains Appetite to Me, an Intellectual
Minimalism is not just an aesthetic movement, but an ideology that seeks to discipline the body. The language of minimalism aligns with the language of purity, cleanliness, restraint. In its most extreme forms, minimalism wants a body that does not eat too much, sleep too much, or God forbid leak. “The declutterer dreams of a house without fucking or shitting, a house without breathing inhabitants.” (Rothfeld, 13) The fantasy of minimalism is the fantasy of a body that does not act like a body.
But the body refuses to comply. By nature, the body demands. It is excessive. It hungers. It sweats. It leaks. And it wants. Edward Cullen, my thirsty king, explained this to me when I was 11-years-old: “...there was a part of him–and I didn't know how dominant that part might be–that thirsted for my blood” (Meyer, 195). Desire, when suppressed, does not disappear–it mutates. Literally the climax of the novel. The body is a site of rebellion against minimalism’s fantasy for shutting up. Was your hunger silent, or was it silenced?
Lottie Hazell’s Piglet presents another version of hunger. In one scene, she loses herself in food, surrendering to its comforts in ways that would make Anthony Bourdain light a cigarette and applaud. “Bourguignon would not let you down like a lover. Confit garlic would not abandon you like a friend.” (Hazell, 256) Here, food isn’t just sustenance, but intimacy, security, and indulgence all at once. But indulgence is not without consequence. Women are supposed to chew like they have a secret. So when Piglet’s sister stares at her mid-bite, she snaps: “Never seen a woman eat before, Fran?” (Hazell, 257)
Rothfeld argues that the act of craving–whether for food, for touch, for experience–is a declaration of existence. Proof of life! “Only someone who is not already everything reaches for more.” (Rothfeld, 11) To be hungry is to be alive, obviously. It’s also to be inextricably bound to the world, spirit to body. You are a cathedral of yearning. Let your cup runneth over. What is indulgence if not self-assertion?
Because It Is My Heart
To have more, to want more, is fundamental to the human experience. Without excess, without indulgence, life becomes a sterile machination of blandness. It’s Helvetica every day. It’s a Goop-approved hotel that I’m definitely going to stay at for a few days but then after I’m excited to sleep in my own bed.
It’s also this weird Stephen Crane poem I love about a guy eating his own heart. “But I like it / Because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.” Because it is my heart!! Minimalism has convinced people that a life of less is a Dutch still life, but to me, the existence of hunger means that a life of suppression is no life at all.
Piglet, on the other hand, actually gets to the transcendent experience the Norwegian guy thought he was having. In one scene she eats a pastry with an abandon that would make Dionysus blush. An indulgence that would make Jean-Peaul Sartre reconsider pleasure. A gluttony that could drive Guy Fieri out of Flavortown. “She had no need to chew, her saliva dissolving the pastry, the créme slipping down her throat. It was incredible: what her body could do.” (Hazell, 204) Here, appetite is an affirmation of what it means to be embodied, to consume and therefore take form.
“It is only via accumulation–of friends, of fears, of phobias, and of the myriad paraphernalia that accompany any tie–that we graduate from schema to soul.” (Rothfeld, 39) Another effusive way of saying: to live fully is to embrace the body, the excess, the unnecessary. It is to recognize that what is “unnecessary” is often most vital. Having shit, wanting shit, experiencing shit is what makes someone the shit.
To indulge is to affirm the self. It is to demand more from the world. It is to refuse to just survive, but to revel in the vast, gluttonous feast that is your heart. Take, eat–this is my body. To hunger is human, but to feast? That’s holy.
Obsessed with this series on food and hunger and all the appetites! 😍
This was SO good