The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [104]
I think we may do well to notice how their hearts and their stomachs are connected. A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food’s contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied. (Then they go out and preach the new scarcity to the poor. Guess what? The poor resent the lecture.) Here was a young nation faced with a bounty that had never before been conjured. To their own eyes, they had conquered hunger, and they had conquered the brutal animal world. They were civilized now, no longer rutting, gorging beasts. It was time to stop wolfing down their food. Such efforts to separate ourselves from the rest of the kingdom have always backfired a little, accidentally calling attention to the fact that we are animals. Beating the wolf was a kind of patricide, or regicide. In the first decade of the twentieth century, humanity looked up and saw that it had mastered the wolf. People had to cope with having won. They could not swallow it. What you can’t swallow, you chew and chew.
History reveals how arbitrary and unstable the science of the body can be. Knowing this deeply can make it easier to dismiss its tyrannizing monomanias. Yet the culture of serial monomanias is itself quite stable. We like them. I want to show you how the mores and fads of people living a century ago were believed in the same way that we believe in the basic ideas behind our fads today, even though they were absurd. This suggests ours are absurd, too. What is important to happiness here is both the liberation from the particular obsessions of the culture, and the realization that we like invoking obsessions, we have fun with them, and they make us feel better for a while, until they make us feel worse. To see both of these points with a clarity worthy of their import, enjoy this short play of 1911, published in Munsey’s Magazine and called “The Bone-Crackers: A Dietetic Comedy in One Act.” It was written by the then well-known book and magazine writer Ellis Parker Butler.11 As you read it, consider the references to our animality, and how food regimes were supposed to separate us from our animal nature. Small cuts have been made for brevity, and are indicated by italicized comments in square brackets.
SCENE: The dining room of a refined modern home, the home of people who read and think, and who are abreast of the times. The table is set for dinner, with fine china and sparkling glass. Father and mother Jones, along with Edgar Jones (his eldest son), Frances Jones (his daughter), and Will Jones (a younger son), are gathered at the table, joined by pretty Amelia Brown, the fiancée of Edgar Jones. The only food on the table is a huge platter piled high with bones.
[There is some small chat, then:]
MR. JONES: I met a man today who had just got back [from Europe], and he says they have no idea of hygienic eating whatever. They eat all kinds of things—sauces and all that. The only thing he saw anywhere that resembled a modern diet was among the poor peasants of southern France. They are eating boiled chestnuts.
MRS. JONES (taking a large bone crunching it between her teeth): But, father, the nut diet is not hygienic. That idea had been exploded before Amelia went abroad, hadn’t it?
EDGAR (cracking a bone with his teeth): No, mother. We were eating raw vegetables when Amelia went away. It was the next year we ate nuts. Don’t you remember? I wrote Amelia, asking her about the nut diet in Europe, and she said no one ate them as a steady