Jack

Hello, this is my first post here. I was told by a friend that I should post here. This is from a series of works that I wrote with strict structural requirements. I have performed minor edits to make the essay more palatable for human consumption. This work is an empirical essay on a cycle of hunger to satiatiation to hyperpalatability that I have seen manifested in multiple domains ranging from food to human connection. My hope is that you will gain some measure of appreciation for how we have shifted from a society geared towards sufficent production to one based on significant curation. Hyperpalatable Food For the majority of human history we lived in a production market for food. We searched for that which tasted well but there was never enough to fill the void. Only the truly elite could afford to import enough food to reach the point of excess. This has changed drastically, to the point where gastronomical indulgence, once a marker of a well-to-do family, has become a symbol of American poverty. Only those with "discerning palettes" who consume nutritious and exotic meals are considered exempt. The effect on our physicalities is striking, at first we were merely well fed but through the wonders of technology we suddenly could feed orders of magnitude more! One can easily trace the history of meeting our dietary needs using height as a marker; by the 1800s we began our take off and finally levelled off globally around the 1980s. Interestingly this can then be compared to rates of obesity which spiked in the 1990s, right after we had finished meeting our needs. Thus the invisible hand of the market spoon feeds consumers by engineering hyperpalatable foods and making them more accessible. Companies need to make money, and historically food is a notoriously low margin industry meaning that scale is the best way to make money. After the 1980's they needed to get consumers to eat more, enter hyperpalatable food which is capable of hacking the brains reward