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The flipside of emotional eating is that we now associate thinness with happiness. The logic is straightforward: happiness means freedom from regular pain and heartache, and everyone knows regular pain and heartache are to be cured by regularly consuming Haagen Daas, yet regularly consuming Haagen Daas isn’t really compatible with a Longoria (5’2”/ 24” W/ 32B) physique, so therefore happy and thin must be synonyms for the same condition of wellbeing, mustn’t they?  Yet, at the same time, we are obsessed with the highly artificial process by which stars achieve their size 00 physiques.   We watch celebrities surrounding themselves with a twenty-four hour, always-on-call entourage of personal chefs, personal trainers and personal stylists, a miniature army dedicated to providing their svelte, special bodies with an artificial injection of will power.  And such is the power of thinness that “the help” are becoming secondary celebrities in their own right, by virtue of their proximity to the star bodies they help to produce.  Rachel Zoe, stylist to Nicole Ritchie (5’1”/ 23”W/ 32A) and Lindsay Lohan (5’5” / 24” W/ 32C), is now famous, a lightning conductor for the extreme insecurity, hatred and envy inspired by the dress sizes of her charges.

Thorstein Veblen brought the term “conspicuous consumption” to prominence in his 1899 tract, The Theory of the Leisure Class.  The book describes the emergence of the upper middle class, made wealthy by industrial society, and their new habits of consumption, in particular their desire to gain cultural and social capital by purchasing status goods.  Nowadays, however, we’ve inverted this, inventing a new ‘conspicuous lack of consumption’.  With increasing standards of living placing designer goods within reach of the masses (and the emergence of economically wealthy, yet culturally deprived social groups like the British Burberry-clad “chavs”), it was perhaps inevitable that the mega-rich would find appeal in starvation chic.  Essentially, Nicole, Eva, Lindsay and Rachel have discovered a perverse, showy and devastatingly expensive way of achieving the look sported by the most desperately poor individuals on the planet.  Hunger has now retreated so far from our spoiled culture of abundance that the signs of the starving and deprivation are up for narcissistic appropriation.  “Size 00” notionally suggests self-effacement, the martyrdom of the flesh, its reduction to a spiritualized nullity, but in reality, the pursuit of this physique in the west represents a showy and egotistical absence of consumption, a hierarchical attempt to separate the body of the elite chosen one from the ever fatter swinish multitude.  Yet, as with all status goods, the separation is also a dependency.  Advertisers have already realized this: a half-admiring, half-envious chorus of Magnum-consuming pigs is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to Eva’s  5’2”/ 24” W/ 32”B claim to fame.

The more we transform food into an individual emotional experience, the more eating becomes bound up with issues of class.  We now associate the ordinary, the plebian, and the fat, pitting them against the special, the star, and the slender.  The more we insist on the private pleasures of food, the more we lose the sense of eating as a communal experience that binds us together as a collective whole.  Instead of meals as social events during which people talk and bond, we transform them into occasions where individuals sit atomized around a screen, in their own individual worlds of pain which can be softened only by the saccharine consolations of the commodity.  Even faith is losing ground to food.  The new TV spot for Mars revives the “work, rest and play” slogan, but removes it to the realm of fantasy.  Their ad now depicts an idyllic, CGI landscape: on top of a hill is a peaceful monastery, containing a group of monks whose “work” consists of bell ringing. After consuming a Mars Bar, they are filled with a sense of fun, and leap onto the bellropes to be carried high into the tower.  Spiritual elevation is replaced with literal elevation, with the comforting implication that even ascetics are vulnerable to the fleshly temptations of caramel (3).  But behind the anti-asceticism, the advert essentially pits the consolations of food against the consolations of religion, to the detriment of the latter.  When faith is pictured as less powerful than fudge, food can truly be said to have become our new religion.

(1)   Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1878064.stm
(2)   A great example is the “catabolic food” diet.  The diet alleges that a number of items (largely low calorie fruit and vegetables) actually take more energy to digest than they provide, with the implication that they can be eaten in limitless quantities.  Basic physics be damned!
(3)   In a similar move, Slimming World, one of the UK’s biggest weight loss clubs, recently announced that it was to abandon its use of the word “sin” to describe certain foods.

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