Food, Glorious Food

I’m hoping you all have seen the movie Ice Age 2, otherwise my title will not make sense. It wasn’t the best movie ever, but that’s beside the point. I’m not here to write a movie review, I’d actually rather talk about the essay “XXXL,” which was Taylor’s choice essay. I loved the title and the sub-title; they were just plain funny, but the rest of the essay really wasn’t. Granted, it was written with a somewhat funny tone at times, but the content was no laughing matter.

Our addiction to food has reached colossal proportions (literally). We just seem to NEVER stop eating. It’s more of a habit than anything else, really. We just tend to keep doing it without thinking at all. That’s probably our biggest mistake. We eat and eat and eat but don’t always keep track of how much we are consuming or what’s in the foods. It would be so easy to completely ruin your health without even fully knowing what’s happening. I’m guilty of being a nervous eater, and a bored eater. It’s sometimes more of an activity than a necessity. That’s not how we were designed to live. My mom once said that there are two kinds of people, “those who eat to live, and those who live to eat.” More and more, we are becoming the second type of person.

There are lots of kids’ movies where they talk about our obsession with food. (I know because for some reason, my dad loves for animated movies, thus I watch a few more than I care to.) There is Ice Age, like mentioned above. The song those irritating little vultures sing is actually quite true of humans today. We just love food and can’t stop thinking about it. Another movie I think was called Over the Hedge. When one of the little critters was showing the other little critters around “Suburbia,” all of his descriptions centered on food. He described front doors and “the portal for the passing of the food,” and tables were, “the altar where they worship food.” Of course, it was simply a scene with a pizza delivery guy and one with a family praying, but the whole thing packed a punch. To those on the outside watching us, it does seem like our lives revolve solely around food. We may think our lives are centered around sports, or facebook, or even homework, but is that really the case? Maybe we should all examine what we spend our time doing and thinking about.