Getting to Know My Hunger

The Hedonic Highway to Hell

The waft of grease and smoke hits like that first sip of beer used to—a thunderclap of euphoria. I’m standing on the floor of a comic convention when it strikes—with beer it was a radiating warmth emanating from the tip of my tongue to the back of my head. It would crawl down my esophagus—leaving a trail of joy in its wake. Once inside me there’s no turning back. Sometimes I’d hold off on that first sip, knowing that when I finally broke, I’d soon be broken.

Photo by Connor Gan on Unsplash

The grease and smoke are inside me now too, right? Unusual ingress—drawn up through my nose, imagined particles entering my bloodstream. I inhale long and deep, holding it inside—I want to believe no action of mine led to this, but the result is the same. Some part of someone else’s burger is now within me—mingling with everything else that forms whatever it is I am. It awakens something, a distant slumbering voice calls out in my head, identifying ingredients. I smell charred meat, cheese, a mayonnaise based sauce, and finally something sharp to cut through everything, the bite of onion and pickle playing to the harmony of elation vibrating throughout me.

The madness of trade surrounding us. Costumed amateurs and underdressed professionals showing off their wares. I’d been talking to someone, I was actually interested in what they were saying too. We were considering who was the bigger influence on modern cinema—D.W. Griffith or Cecil B DeMille. I was leaning towards DeMille until my soul was ripped from cognitive thought and sent spinning into a vortex of sensory ecstasy.

The small fine hairs in my nostrils brighten up as though I’ve been jolted by a delicate surge of electricity, and that same eruption of warmth spreads out along the back of my head and neck. I am lost in a sea of memories. Like cinema, flipping through images, my mind flashes a brief burst of every cheeseburger I’ve ever consumed.

BANG—1982 California—back seat of my mom’s car—Big Mac, McDonalds.

BANG—1996 New Jersey—drive thru—Dave’s Triple, Wendy’s.

BANG—2001 California—drive thru—Double Double, In-N-Out.

BANG—2014 New York—indoors—Bacon Cheeseburger, JG Melon.

On and on, a kaleidoscope of cheeseburgers—of smoke and fat and grease.

A moment before I’d been just fine. My faculties wrenched from me—like a drunken sailor on leave. Where my thoughts and processes had been focused on high brow art, they were now entirely consumed with charred meat and cheese.

So much joy can come from simple alterations to toppings and spreads. The absurdity. The audacity. Such treacherous versatility. The cheeseburger reigns supreme.

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And so I am lost. The memories have stolen my attention. The need to posit future cheeseburgers is almost all consuming.

I’m not truly insane. Not completely. I can phone in the social graces of conversing, but my mind is lost. I’ve become a narrow-minded automaton—programmed with fast food jingles.

“Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun…”

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

The majority of my life was spent standing in the crowded room of my mind—overtaken by the noise. I wallowed in my own perceived moral shortcomings, desperate for any other thought or voice to shine through. The madness within me—whether conjured in youth or biological, it turns out to be something simpler than I’d ever imagined.

The Hedonic Pathway

I spent so long trampling on my body’s hunger cues, I couldn’t even recognize what they were. Stomach growling, low energy, that hollow feeling in my gut—but I was hungry all the time. My eyes lingered on billboards—monuments to food in cartoonish glory. My nose sniffed out distant scents, blown intentionally in my direction. My ears perked for the crackle and pop of hot grease. And my mind? Always planning my next meal.

Food was never used to fuel my body—it was dopamine to soothe my brain. Hunger, as a mechanism for life, makes perfect sense. The body breaks down food and sends it where it must. When it requires more, it sends signals. Simple. Logical.

So then—why a system to overeat?

The way I’ve come to understand it—when food was scarce, overeating wasn’t dysfunction. It was survival. If starvation was a looming threat, the body needed a secondary system—one that could override fullness and push us to consume more when food was available.

Enter the reward pathway to hunger.

Find food and eat—even when not hungry or in need of more energy—receive bolus of dopamine. Pleasure, excitement, motivation, euphoria, and finally happiness. What an incredibly useful system for Africa circa 200,000BCE. I applaud the ingenuity of the human body.

But when I leave my front door today, food is omnipresent. The gas station, the office supply store, banal retail and service—every point of commerce offers me cheap calories.

I think about what we must’ve gone through as a species to develop this system that necessitates overeating. The famines that nearly wiped us out. Perhaps the very first man had this system in place at his inception, perhaps this is simply a design feature meant to test us? Way back when, it was a benefit and now it is a test.

Can I be greater than my mechanical parts?

I get a similar boost of brain juice from drugs and alcohol: pleasure, excitement, euphoria and the rest. I can manage those cravings through strict abstinence. Food is trickier.

The ubiquitous billboards, commercials, intentionally and directionally vented fry scent. Fourteen billion dollars—every year—just to induce hunger. It’s an uphill battle.

When I perceived that the fight existed only within my head, I lost. I was a quiet voice in a sea of raving lunatics, all crying out in hunger. But grasping this knowledge—understanding of the mechanisms at play—has made me stronger. More resolved.

When the scent hits my nose, or the billboard catches my eye—when the raving lunatics in my head get riled up—I cling to the truth: chasing that rush of dopamine is no longer my game. And they seem to quiet down.

Just addressing them, calling them by their true names—like in a vampire movie—gives me some dominance over the chaos that once ruled me. When I see a billboard now, I react with a knowing nod to the millions spent trying to trap me.

Chapeau fellas, but you can’t get me anymore.

It’s like peeking behind Oz’s curtain, or knowing how a magician does his trick. Understanding the mechanism dilutes its power.

When the feeling strikes you—when you’ve got burgers on the brain, or pizza, doughnuts, ice cream—I challenge you to trace the roots of these conjured images. See if, by doing so, it doesn’t give you the edge you might be in search of.

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