Better Living Through Sin
Stan, my future brother-in-law, surprises me with his complete disinterest in decent eating. My sister-in-law is dismayed by his “whatever you want” responses to her questions whether he would, for example, prefer pork chops or salmon croquettes for dinner. Worse, he’s just as likely to decide to eat an entire bag of goldfish crackers instead. (She does not exaggerate. I’ve seen his eating habits when she isn’t around.) Eileene and I are foodies—she more than I—and it just seems weird to want crackers more than actual food on a regular basis.
Which got me thinking about the prominence of foodies today. My perception may be slightly exaggerated by moving to the orbit NYC, ethnic food capital of the world, and by living in a relatively wealthy suburb that can support a couple of Whole Foods and several decent restaurants of its own, but I know the trend towards more interest in good eating is a national phenomenon. The Food Network is one of the most popular channels now (although, distressingly, one study holds that a large segment of its audience watches the programs instead of eating well, preferring the vicarious experience to actually duplicating the recipes or trying out the featured restaurants). Specialized food magazine like Gourmet, Cooking Light, and Cooks Illustrated have replacing the food sections of ladies’ magazines, and the recipes pay less attention to budgets and convenience, and more on how the results actually taste. Locally-grown produce is pushing itself, disingenuously, as environment-friendly, when in fact it does little for the environment, but tastes a lot better.
Food seems to be this decade’s form of hedonism. If the 70s were the peak of the sexual revolution, then the 80s health clubs were obsessed with beauty, and the 90s, with the eruption of internet file-sharing and homemade remixes, were about music. There seems to be a trend here, as each generation picks its vice. But really, how many more decades can we keep this up? The list of basic hedonistic topics is rather short, and cycling every forty or fifty years doesn’t seem very likely either. We live in an era where the past is made retro-fashionable before it’s properly gone out of style, so the generation-defining novelty of lifestyle defined by a single hedonistic pursuit won’t last.
My half-baked prediction: the 2010s will see a huge upsurge of interest in sleeping well. Like lust marketed as love, or vanity marketed as exercise, sloth can be marketed as healthful if it’s packaged as “getting the rest your body needs.” Products of dubious value will crowd the shelves: magazines devoted to mattress designs, new age self-help books on fighting insomnia, and individually-designed sleeping pharmaceuticals. And then…I’m out of ideas.
Wither the 2020s? Envy?