The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [80]
Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life is an afterlife movie about a love affair that takes place in Judgment City, where one briefly vacations while superior beings decide whether you should go back to Earth or graduate to some higher place. At Judgment City, all the food tastes extraordinary, and no matter how much you eat, you feel good and do not gain weight. Meryl Streep’s character, as the film’s representative of womanhood, is elated about this. In our modern abundant world, adults can have access to a “Land of Cockaigne” amount of food every day, so heaven cannot be drawn just as a banquet anymore. Thus, for the fantasy to work, the food now has to be offered without even the consequence of feeling full! And with an even better taste! Does anyone need eggs, pasta, or pie to taste better?! Brooks had to do it because heaven is supposed to be food paradise, and nowadays, Earth already is.
Food abundance is a flawed fantasy—you don’t get happy going from enough to too much—so it creates a lot of anxiety when it seems to be coming true and yet happiness is not increased. As much as the British are associated with the stiff upper lip, Americans are associated with “putting on a happy face.” The song that gave us the phrase dates from 1963 and is aggressive in its repetition of the command. “Slap on a happy grin!” The song, from the musical Bye Bye Birdie, offers only one suggestion for how:
And if you’re feeling cross and bitterish
Don’t sit and whine
Think of banana split and licorice
And you’ll feel fine…
Just put on a happy face.
Again, we are living in the fantasy come true, and it is hard to take. How long was it before we denizens of the land of milk and honey began skimming the river down to 1 percent milk fat and offering a choice of sorbitol as a sweetener? Within a generation or two, the pleasures of the cornucopia became associated with health dangers. I’m not sure that abundance is really at fault in our corpulent bodies and clogged arteries: there have always been poor and rich fat people, and it is not certain that our present-day obesity problem is a direct result of the quantity of food now available. There was as much food for the buying in the 1950s, but people didn’t eat as much. Maybe the abundance only slowly influenced us to eat more, but maybe it was something else that made us start eating more and moving around less, perhaps having to do with television, computers, and cars. In any case, the pleasure of the cornucopia became associated with health dangers, but amazingly, rather than reject the cornucopia, we devised a way to keep eating a lot by draining food of its contents. The same foods that were once limited because they were hard to get—foods rich in refined sugars and animal fats—now are available, but are to be limited as self-indulgent, erotic, and sinful. We are finally able to eat meat whenever we want. The meat beasts—cows and chickens—have been modified to loll around with great breasts, udders, and haunches, waiting for slaughter. We have got rid of most of the predators of livestock, macro and micro. Micro still presents big problems, but it used to be common for a whole population of a particular domestic animal to get sick and die, and humanity would have to do without. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Yet, having succeeded in chasing