The Wit's Guide to Appetite
Or, room to turn around in
Appetite is what you want for reasons your brain can’t explain. Food and sex are the obvious ones, demanded by the lower organs. But then there are appetites for novelty, for companionship, for gossip, for travel, for destruction. Appetites, as Dr. Johnson knew, are what makes life worth living:
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson
Which makes you wonder about the new wave of diet drugs designed to shrivel your appetite into oblivion. Ozempic: It Will Make You Tired of Life.
A.J. Liebling tried to warn us. The legendary New Yorker writer chronicled his visits to the great tables of Paris between the wars and he treated fine dining like prizefighting. Liebling wisely stuck close to Yves Mirande, “one of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France.” This was a man who lived to eat, so when M. Mirande’s favourite restauranteuse retired, he was toast. And not the kind piled high with raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs.
“My old friend’s appetite, insufficiently stimulated, started to loaf,” Liebling wrote. “What always happens happened. The damage was done, but it could so easily have been averted had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence.”
“A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in.”
— A.J. Liebling
Is there a more First World Problem than not having an appetite? I think of the iconic Onion op-ed from October 2001 with the headline “I wish I were hungry.” We used to have it stuck to the fridge, where it reminded us (a) don’t eat out of boredom and (b) that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Or really anything. “Damn me for a fool, why did I have to gorge on the whole giant gyro platter?” Decadence was just revving its engine, as an inability to enjoy food was truly worse than hunger.
“The size of a man’s paunch has little to do with the kind of appetite which fills it.”
— M.F.K. Fisher
Fisher, deemed the “poet of the appetites” by John Updike, wrote rapturously of craving caviar, potato chips, macadamia nuts, and Champagne, all foods worth upending your life to acquire — but that she somehow didn’t gorge herself on. “I know that even though I eat potato chips perhaps once every three years,” she wrote, “I can, whenever I wish to, tap an almost unlimited fountain of them not five hundred feet from my own door.”
What was her secret? Recalling both her favourite meals alongside the times she ruined her appetite, and firmly setting a goal of “a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.”
“There is no such thing as bad bread when you have a good appetite.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
There is a school of thought that eating less is the best way to eat more. Janan Ganesh, the best English-language newspaper columnist working today, is a true one-meal-a-dayer, a.k.a. an OMAD nomad. No breakfast or lunch but every night a big, serious dinner.
“I can sustain this diet because my job is no physical ordeal. But then neither is yours,” he wrote in 2016. “Modern working life makes a mockery of the old three-meal system.” His most recent treatise on the subject stresses the need to decline food even when it seems rude: “Lots of eating, like lots of marrying, is done less out of desire than social obligation.”
“Other people’s appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn’t share them.”
— André Gide
Liebling strenuously disagreed. “Each day brings only two Opportunities for field work,” he wrote, “and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol.”
Self-Obsessed Stamped Envelopes!
There’s a palpable excitement in the air at GWQ HQ this morning — can’t you just palp it?! — as it’s Mailing Day for the April Riposte Cards. My esteemed paid subscribers— there are now 18 of you, a good omen for the chosen people — will soon receive Chip Zdarsky’s Riposte Card No. 2 in the mail (along with Antony Hare’s Riposte Card No. 1 if they didn’t get it last month).
Do you have FOMO? It’s not too late to get on the list!
Quote Vote
“No sooner are we supplied with everything that nature can afford, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.”
— Samuel Johnson
This was the week that spring kicked down the door in Toronto, a veritable home invasion of sunshine and birdsong. So for next week, here are some opportunities to either revel or rebel, as per your personal weather report.
Rest in Crease, Al Jaffee
The inventor of the MAD Magazine Fold-In and one of my all-time heroes died this week at the age of 102. Were he to be resurrected, it would be the Snappiest Comeback.
Get Wit Quick No. 197 will keep its fork in case of pie. It’s scientifically proven that nothing suppresses appetite faster than seeing chewed-up food in someone else’s mouth, which reframes every communal meal as an astonishing balancing act. As the psychologist Paul Rozin explained in Barb Stuckey’s book Taste: “Adult eating involves an incredible virtuosity because you are sitting, facing another person, stuffing food into your mouth, making it disgusting in your mouth, and talking through the same hole — at the same time — while looking at the other person, yet you are not presenting them with this disgusting spectacle.” The same hole!! Speaking of incredible virtuosity, this newsletter grew out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. And speaking of disgusting spectacles, won’t you pleeeeeeease tap the❤️ below?
No way I'm in the minority for Rain...