Anthony Bourdain and the Cult to Wellness

I am not sure that we want to make Anthony Bourdain the human argument against the cult of wellness, but Jenai Engelhard chooses him… and who are we to argue.

In truth, Engelhard has written an excellent essay on our cult-like obsession with wellness. She argues, cogently and correctly, that we no longer make eating a social ritual, involving other people in a convivial atmosphere. We have transformed the act of eating into a spiritual experience, one in which our body is a temple. Bourdain rejected the “temple” metaphor and declared the body to be an amusement park.

When it’s you and other people eating together, the experience is social. If it’s you and your food, involved in a sacred purification ritual, the experience is religious. We have come to dread contaminating our sacred bodies, to the point where we no longer care about whether or not anyone else is involved in the experience of eating. Or better, whether we are eating alone or in company. In truth, the cult to wellness makes eating with other people nearly impossible.

As I said, Engelhard offers a fine analysis:

The cult of wellness commands: Thou shalt not contaminate the sacred body. We are told to avoid what is ‘toxic’ and ingest only what is ‘clean,’ even as definitions of ‘clean’ continue to shift and vary. To stave off disease and aging, we must learn not only what to eat, but also how and when. We must eat at appropriate times of day, and in the right combinations and ratios, to ensure optimal circadian rhythms and the proper balance of gut bacteria, among other things. To regularly consider each of these factors is a full-time job, and one that is nearly incompatible with eating with other people. This is because eating is now less of a social bonding ritual than a solitary religious rite. In this current framework, food has the power to cleanse, purify, and redeem—and with that power comes an enormous capacity for error and a crushing accountability.

Surely, there’s a kernel of truth in the cult to wellness. What we eat matters. It does have an effect on health. The cult to wellness is merely too much of a good thing… an extreme position that turns the act of eating into a religious rite. Dare we ask how many wellness cult followers count themselves as true believing atheists. We dare not.

Engelhard continues:

Although evidence is clear that nutrition is inherently medicinal, the current thinking has taken it a step further to suggest that diet represents a way to control for every possibility of disease, or even general unease.

The wellness cult has a goal in mind: to live to 100. Now, that’s something we all want to do. I recall my psychoanalyst, on one of his better days, explaining in a lecture that most of us would really rather not live forever. Think about it.

Anyway, now we want to live to be 100, filled up with superfoods, practicing positive thinking:

Another manifestation of the crass pursuit of health is the ‘Live to 100’ movement, in which the body is a battleground on which we fight disease with antioxidants, superfoods, positive thinking, and the like. If we consume the ‘right’ things and avoid the ‘wrong’ things (and it is never self-evident which is more crucial), then we can postpone death, or at the very least, die peacefully in a state of relative vibrancy. Centenarians and super-centenarians around the world are scrutinized in an attempt to identify their secrets. In this modern mythology, the hero is the person who manages to live to a hundred with all mental faculties intact and the ability to run a decent marathon, prolonging her own mortality by skirting the infinite number of things that can go awry.

To Engelhard, it has all the trappings of a religious mania. About that she is certainly correct. One recalls that during the Middle Ages a number of young woman, in search of corporeal purity and spiritual ecstasy, undertook to starve themselves. Their experience is recounted in Rudolph Bell’s book: Holy Anorexia.

Yet, despite these reasonable objections, something within me rebels against a health culture that has developed its own mythological structure bordering on religious mania. Wellness culture says: pursue health and wholeness and you will be long-lived upon the earth; but it eliminates a fundamental question: to what end? Indeed, there will still be one.

She continues, quoting Bourdain, to note that we should refocus, away from the morsels of kale and toward the people who are sitting around the table.

Bourdain would say: focus on the people around the table, wherever on the planet that table is, and eat what you are damn well served. Savor the company of people whose lives and backgrounds are unimaginably different from yours. In short, prefer people to the pursuit of that otherworldly glow, the attempt to lengthen your telomeres, and the dubious ‘achievement’ of living to be 110.

Naturally, the other question that immediately comes to mind is this: are the followers of the wellness cult quite as fastidious with sexual practices? Does their worship of the human body include sexual purification? We can only wonder.