The Genesis of Craving: Why Dieting is so Goddamn Difficult

And the Lord said, “Guys, lay off the apples.” Then look what happened. Adam and Eve may be the first in recorded history to ever fail a diet plan. And while the Genesis myth fails to give credence to the benefits of carb cutting, it does illustrate two useful concepts: First, the act of eating holds special court in our collective psyche; second, we are a people cursed with the idea of giving in to our culinary desires.

From an individual and cultural perspective, I would like to explain why dieting seems so monumentally impossible. First, I call to the table The Divine Foods List. As defined by myself, a divine food is anything edible and so amazingly scrumptiously awesome looking — dripping with melted cheese, pumped with sweet apple filling, glazed with crunchy Korean Barbecue sauce — that when placed within arm’s reach will be shortly devoured. In other words, regardless of how hungry I am, what my current state of health happens to be, or which diet I am barely adhering to, that is going into my mouth.

Topping my list is the salami sandwich, an item that made the celestial cut (so to speak) due to a stout and generous grocer from my early childhood. This man would lean over the deli counter and dangle face-sized slices, sunlight illuminating their granules of meat and fat like organic stained glass. At the age of seven, I was overweight and my mother forbade all junk foods. Particularly sinful were processed meats, which she insisted would give me heart failure by age forty. (So far, so good.)

It occurs to me that if Adam and Eve were told, “Hey, listen: no pears, bananas or grapes either, OK?” that those items, like the apple, would also have become a problem for early mankind. Likewise, in my own garden, the tree of life bears many forbidden fruits. I cannot remember a day in my childhood when bear claws or doughnuts were brought into our home. I did not have my first milkshake until I was ten. Believe me when I tell you, eating pastries is now a sacred duty. Likewise, “Nectar of the gods” does not begin to describe the sweet, cold and magical experience of sucking up ice cream through a straw.

Adam and Eve ate the apple and knew each other and knew themselves. And like the myth of the sacred apple, a divine food affords me greater consciousness, a means to transcend my anxieties about work, my crumbling love life (the mere existence of which astonishes me) and my dwindling bank account (again, allow me to express mild shock). In short, when I am feeling down, when I must invoke the eternal sweetness of the moment, I need only make pilgrimage to my local deli. Or pastry shop. Or anywhere savvy enough to offer milkshakes on tap or simply by the gallon.

It is my contention that we each harbor our own Divine Foods List — fare that we crave overwhelmingly and often inexplicably: Maybe in your world salami is nothing special but bologna was christened after it appeared on the family hit list. (Does light pass through bologna?). Or did your heart’s desire sprang from the depths of that almost-out-of-reach jar in your mother’s kitchen? And should I bother mentioning what happens if you put me in a room with a bucket of chewy oatmeal raisin cookies? They say horses will eat themselves to death if permitted. (Note to the internet: If there are any ex-girlfriends out there hankering for my demise, you know where to send the care package.) Then again, perhaps your cravings do not spring from the coveted morsels of the past but an actual desire for health. Maybe asparagus has managed to capture your affections. By the way, I regard the revolting asparagus as lowly and cursed by the way, rather like the serpent of the veggie world. As a matter of fact, if any vegetable of any kind has made its way to your Devine Foods list, you really shouldn’t be reading this. Nor can you and I be friends.

So are we, as westerners, particularly prone to such righteous gastronomic struggles? Adam and Eve stole consciousness like a cookie from a jar, in secret and by the mouthful. This stands in stark contrast to the Eastern model of enlightenment, in which Buddha did his thing after maintaining a lotus position under a fig tree for forty-nine days (ouch). It is interesting that two sperate Trees of Life in two separate myths should yield consciousness in such divergent fashions. Firstly, the Buddha story lacks any sense of the forbidden. It isn’t as though a Do Not Meditate sign was posted beneath the Bodhi Tree. (Imagine Eve receiving a reprimand for sunbathing on the Eden lawn.)

Secondly, Buddha sat around for all that time and didn’t eat a single fig? Forty-nine days is some serious down to go without indulging in a canopy of low-hanging fruit. What confounds me here, is that something like fasting and food can both be present without mention of what can or cannot be devoured. In other words, it’s just really a weird story and I don’t relate to it. And I suspect maybe you don’t either. Or maybe you do. Especially if you are fan of asparagus.

In any event, if we are to accept the Genesis story as something we westerners (mostly) relate to, we must also contend with the idea that Eve’s dilemma is also our own. Eve’s craving for the divine apple is a craving for consciousness; likewise, our cravings are, in a way, a pursuit of a higher state of thought or emotional well-being: temporarily our anxieties lessen, our depression lifts.

One day at work, I believe it was a day or two before my fortieth birthday (which as we all know, marks the end of everything, everywhere, always) and so of course I was in a particularly horrible mood. At lunchtime, I recall protesting internally as my feet moved of their own accord towards the bright pink box left out by my kind, well-intentioned but naïve co-worker. Who we shall call Eva. After opening the box, my hand, which was also being uncooperative, closed around a large Apple Fritter: crunchy on the outside, doughy and oozy on the inside. As you may already know, the Apple Fritter is the essentially the boss doughnut, possessing more intrinsic come-hither power than any other object of culinary design on God’s green earth. Towards this end, the effect of eating this edible philosopher’s stone was immediate and intense. I swear I could feel the lump of juice apple sweetness slide down my throat, into my chest, and fill a literal hole in my heart. For a few minutes, I felt great. It didn’t matter that I was turning forty. Life would go on. Everything was alright. In those moments, I knew I could handle it, whatever it was.

Just as we are inexplicably drawn towards food, we are conversely weirdly preoccupied by a lack of food. In many eastern counties, an emptied plate at mealtime is a signal that you’re still hungry. However, in this godforsaken land, such a thing is seen as a sign of respect — waste not, want not. Even Thanksgiving is all about honoring the harvest and celebrating the bounty given to us by the land — the underlying idea is that we should be grateful that we are not starving to death.

In addition, the idea of going without also holds special significance. The story goes that after being baptized, Jesus proved his mettle by wandering into a nearby desert and starving himself for over a month. To read Matthew’s account, the guy stuck to his diet regime for forty days and forty nights. What a mensch! (Note Jesus’ herculean ability to refrain from snacking after 8 PM.) Like a diet, fasting is not only ritualized but bears the promise of a prize at the end — think “break-fast,” that daily ritual reserved for those of us who still listen to our mothers. On a more serious note, there is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, when the devout may abstain from work or eating for an entire day. For Lent, Christians have the option of giving up one thing for a month, and many choose to battle a sweet tooth.

In other words, there is just as much archetypal energy bound up in the act of eating as there is in the act of not eating. Which brings me back to the subject of weight loss and dieting. Surely, you are beginning to see how such notions may pose…a problem. Just think of the staggering collective forces at work against us as we attempt to lose that last (or first) twenty pounds, as we white-knuckle our way through a daily regimen of properly proportioned, healthy meals. Indeed, the very act of denying ourselves only serves to heighten the power and push-back of deeply imbedded, primal forces. The grass is greener, the doughnut is doughier; The higher up on the kitchen shelf we place the cookie jar, the greater our conviction that its contents contains the power to save our souls. In fact, I would argue that dieting itself is a form of food worship; as we parse and dilute- our meals, we unconsciously commit our stomach and soul to the dark designs of forces far greater than ourselves.

Talk to a thin person sometime (or avoid them completely, as I do) and ask them about the power of food and hunger in their lives. They may shrug — or worse, take a shot of wheat grass. Are they cultural mutants? Who eats half a salami sandwich, or has one bite of a bear claw? While I know of no reference to thin persons in any religious text, I am confident that their approach to food is anathema to the healthy progression of humankind. I mean, how would things have turned out if Eve had been satisfied snacking on kale chips? Am I saying that thinness is unnatural? Perhaps I am. I mean, there was a time in our history where being a thin person was arguably dangerous. If you depended on an agrarian lifestyle, absent a good store of body fat, one or two seasons of not-so-bumper crops could literally kill you.

So, what is the solution? If our struggle with craving is truly this fundamental, perhaps we owe it to craving to grant it a modicum of acceptance: I love salami sandwiches and will always eat them. I love pastries and will always eat them. Let me be clear: I do not advocate a wholesale raid of your local bakery (or your top, bottom and middle shelves), but rather that we work to loosen the archetypal power that food has over us.

For example, why not structure self-indulgence? Treat yourself to a pint of ice cream but on Sundays only (TV night?), pizza on Wednesdays (I am confident you can think of a reason), or make burgers and fries a cheat meal to follow your six-day regimen of exercise and white omelets.

Instead of devoting ourselves to what we can or cannot have, let us make a ritual of eating meals we actually enjoy. Personally, I have also that portion control works a lot better if I am eating something I truly enjoy. That is, I wonder if learning to savor holds the key to our salvation. Besides, if our enjoyment of food is truly connected to our unconscious projections, a kind of spiritual MSG, who are we to deny ourselves? It is my un-researched and self-serving contention that we Westerners, in our madness, enjoy food more than anyone else on earth — that our talent, as a civilization, is that we are closest to spirit when sitting at the dinner table. I admit it’s a funny angle on the path to enlightenment, but let’s not allow it to go to waste.