Enchanted Food

I remember reading something that C. S. Lewis wrote about perverted sexuality. He was making an analogy to food, saying that it would be strange for us to find a culture that put a hamburger on stage and slowly uncovered it, like a strip tease. I don’t mean to dismiss the point that he was making, but I would argue that American popular culture treats food in a way very similar to this. Television commercial producers make food and the eating of food look sensual. When people actually eat food it doesn’t look like it does in ads. Advertisements also make food look ideal. A hamburger purchased at a fast food chain never looks like the ad. It is not that the chain serves substandard food. It is that the ad is overly idealized. People have bought into this idea of what food should be. That is why all of the oddly shaped produce is filtered out of grocery stores.

In my opinion, these tricks that are used to sell food do the same thing that most, if not all, advertisements do. They make the consumer associate things like happiness, fulfillment, and sensual experience with the purchase and consumption of the product. Of course this is a lie. It can’t offer these things. It may deliver a form of them, but it is always fleeting and encourages more consumption.

I don’t want to believe the lie. I don’t want eat food with the intent of receiving an existence or experience that God wants to be giving me.