Hunger feels like the most honest thing about us. The body wants something, and we go looking for it. Except even hunger has a complicated relationship with what we feed it.
Our bodies are ecosystems. The microorganisms living in our gut participate in a biological conversation that can influence digestion, metabolism, and signals associated with appetite.
Culture has its own way of getting under our skin. We acquire tastes, develop aversions, learn what looks beautiful, what feels satisfying, what is worth craving.
Nobody has to convince you to want something once wanting it feels good. You don't need an ideology lecture before ordering the expensive dessert. You just need to look at the menu.
What do we actually inherit when we inherit an appetite? Not simply a list of things to consume, but a way of experiencing some things as nourishing, others as repulsive, and still others as irresistible.
Perhaps freedom is also the difficult possibility of questioning what has taught us to hunger.
Hunger feels like the most honest thing about us. The body wants something, and we go looking for it. Except even hunger has a complicated relationship with what we feed it.
Our bodies are ecosystems. The microorganisms living in our gut participate in a biological conversation that can influence digestion, metabolism, and signals associated with appetite.
Culture has its own way of getting under our skin. We acquire tastes, develop aversions, learn what looks beautiful, what feels satisfying, what is worth craving.
Nobody has to convince you to want something once wanting it feels good. You don't need an ideology lecture before ordering the expensive dessert. You just need to look at the menu.
What do we actually inherit when we inherit an appetite? Not simply a list of things to consume, but a way of experiencing some things as nourishing, others as repulsive, and still others as irresistible.
Perhaps freedom is also the difficult possibility of questioning what has taught us to hunger.
