David Foster Wallace’s Super-Sized World
One of the most conventional observations about Americans in the last 50 years is how much we have filled out. There are reasons for this. Our bodies are wired to crave more energy-dense foods than we need. Portion sizes have increased and ingredients have changed. Yet, there may be an overlooked philosophical side to this national trend, something that speaks to our ways of being in the world.
Eating and consuming can be a human way of asserting our presence and status. From our earliest days as a species, our ability to secure food—especially meat—was an indicator of power, and we pursued the big game. Humans played a role in megafauna extinctions. We have overfished sturgeon. We even sometimes consumed each other, but more often for ritualistic reasons than survival.
When we stood chiefly in contrast to the natural world, we could assert ourselves literally or metaphorically by consuming or transforming that which threatened us or posed an obstacle. We could cut down a forest, eat and domesticate the aurochs, and, in time, blast a tunnel through a mountain. Now we stand opposed primarily to an unnatural world of our own creation. A man can clear an acre, but could someone clear a city block? If the college of your dreams rejects you, you cannot kill Humbaba to take their cedar. Even if you wanted to construct and not consume, we are smaller and weaker in comparison with our society than our ancestors were. You could build a cabin alone, but one person could never gather all the materials or manufacture all the parts needed to make an iPhone. The earliest airplanes were built by bicycle enthusiasts. Could any of us manufacture enough parts to make a modern car by hand?
Current American eating habits reflect the challenge we now have of asserting ourselves in our outsized human-made environment. Societally, we are like Norman Bombardini in David Foster Wallace’s novel, The Broom of the System. Spurned by his wife for his weight, Bombardini has an extreme negative reaction to the philosophy of Weight Watchers, which supposes the world contains Self and Other and “perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.” We need a “full-universe,” so Weight Watchers promotes skinniness to keep Others around and avoid loneliness. Bombardini has an opposite solution for the “full-universe problem”—he plans to eat as much as possible and expand infinitely. He wants “an autonomously full universe,” one in which “there will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all.” Nine steak dinners at one meal are only one step on that path.
Not only does Bombardini intend to fill the universe with himself to avoid a need for Others, he sees his increasing size as an indicator of power. In a restaurant, he tells a waiter how he could and would buy the Weight Watchers across the street and:
fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door under this scenario would be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through.
In Bombardini’s vision, smaller people lack the bulk to turn their will into action. Later in the book, the relationship between Bombardini’s bulk and his will is even more explicit. His therapist says, “I’m afraid he’s talking with some earnestness about…consuming people.” In the final pages, Bombardini’s fantasies of power seem to be approaching reality. An entire building rumbles with his displeasure, as if from an earthquake, and he attempts to batter down a wall with his belly.
We may not all be trying to cast a shadow over Cleveland and the universe like Bombardini, but an enlarged sense of self in the universe is in demand. Can a human square up against a skyscraper? No, but we can test our strength against the Big Gulp and the KFC Double Down. We can try to get our picture on the wall of a local eating establishment for eating more steak, french fries, or absurdly hot wings than most normal human beings…and not throwing up.
Even if we do not have aspirations of competitive eating, eating is great compensation for aspirations unmet. When someone really wants success, we say they “crave” it. When someone is doggedly pursuing something, they are “hungry” for it. Who wins between two competitors? We say it is the one who is hungrier. We have an insatiable desire for success and goods and experiences. It is little wonder that we turn to seemingly insatiable hunger once we face the disappointments of life. As we age, the metabolism slows and the horizon of possibilities shrinks. We get larger in a compensatory assertion of self.
Why are we so big? We want our stomach to keep up with our eyes. We want to stand out at scale. But we can never be big enough to pose a threat to our man-made environment. Our hunger for power and our fears of being powerless are reflected in our seemingly insatiable cravings.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed. She is editor-in-chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.