Ozempic has reduced the American dream

Indeed. A “feeling called hunger.”

Thus, the American mania for food collided with a new disorder: dieting. At the height of the American literary renaissance, when Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were furiously scribbling out curriculum content for American literature courses in the next century, neither Walden neither Moby Dick could boast sales close to Sylvester Graham’s edition Discourses on a sober and temperate life. “Few things are more deceptive to children or adults than bland, lazy dishes,” Graham declared. “This is a universal rule.”

In 1838, the famous vegetarian (and author of over 100 books) Dr William Andrus Alcott criticized ginger, fennel, cardamom, nutmeg and coriander, declaring molasses and sauces to be indecent “drugs”. He adored “pure, plain, unperverted pudding.” And it inspired the terror of the mince pie, which could actually consist of a dozen ingredients and would therefore “astonish our immortal souls”.

Meanwhile, the founder of Seventh-day Adventism, “America’s health prophetess,” Ellen Harmon White, sought God through her plant-based diet. In its wake, America’s diet culture has continued the tradition of eating as a way of pursuing both spiritual and capitalist perfection, since Joran Rubin’s recent publication. The manufacturer’s diet (who implores the disciples to eat what Jesus ate) in the latest from Park Avenue “diet doctor” Jana Klauer: How the rich get thinner. Not to mention the long history of American cookbooks that lured audiences by proclaiming themselves as quasi-spiritual tomes: The salsa bible, The Bible of Smoothies, The Bread Biblei The Bible of Cakes and Pastries. Linking holiness and thinness had long been a feature of the American psyche, demonstrated most recently by participants in a recent survey of 260 Latter Day Saint BYU students who judged that “smaller-bodied women ” were, as a general rule, “more moral than larger-bodied females”.

America’s desire to discipline the dysfunctional stomach would soon become another instantly recognizable tradition: the fad diet. Evangelist John Wesley advised those suffering from scurvy to “live on turnips for a month.” Dr. Alcott’s partner, Samuel Larned, decided to subsist for a year on nothing but biscuits. The next year, he ate nothing but apples. America introduced the milk diet, the turtle diet, the grapefruit diet, the bone broth diet, the famous cabbage soup diet of the 1950s, and the classic 12-step nutritional recovery program, ” The Love-Powered Diet.”

But the American stomach would not be so easily deterred from its voracious rounds, characterized by what would prove to be a pivotal year in the history of food. In 1997, when George and Richard Shea founded the International Federation of Competitive Eating (since renamed Major League Eating), which over the past quarter-century has sponsored hundreds of eating contests with gorgers from all over , from jalapeños to buffalo wings, oysters and fritters, pancakes to sushi, bologna to straight mayo not to mention the greatest triumph of American consumption, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest. The professional gurgitator would be the ultimate embodiment of the digestive imperialists, the grotesque and stunted descendants of industrialists, frontiersmen and founders.

“American identity, no longer bounded by the twin poles of feast and famine, could seize the moment to redefine itself.”

The dream of consuming it all might have been disciplined into a 12-minute eating contest, but it wouldn’t die. As the dimensions of American ambition shrunk from the mountains and valleys to the virtual horizons of the smartphone, it was perhaps inevitable that the fate of American food would finally become another triumph of technology, the unsexy, unpleasant kind of glucagon. agonist and thus where we find ourselves today, caught between the glories of Ozempic and the horrors of Ozempic’s face.

Novo, Lilly and Amgen come to the end of a long line in the history of the American diet, whose gurus might have been surprised to learn of the side effects of not eating, as monthly doses of Nordisk peptides are known to cause nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, flatulence, constipation, fatigue, not to mention an increased risk of vision changes, kidney problems, gallbladder disease, hypoglycemia, and pancreatitis. These are minor inconveniences in light of the true American dream: the nirvana of bodily perfection. An injection of pure venom is a small price to pay for a gleaming mirage of health and wealth on Facebook, even if the droopy, emaciated, fat-starved face has now joined Ozempic’s ass and breasts.

No more Hot Food Contest on the 4th of July? No more avocado shortages on Super Bowl Sunday? No more gastroporn on Reelz? Can we finally foresee the tragic death of gastronomy? Will there be no more food fads, food taboos, food fetishes and paranoia about what would or wouldn’t cross the sacred threshold of our lips? There is much to cry about.

And, perhaps, something to celebrate. Ozempic may mark the death of America’s age-old mania to fit everything into our imperial systems, an illusion that dates back to our starving origins, when from the howling desert appeared the dark shadows of the natives who carried the works of the first Thanksgiving. American identity, no longer bounded by the twin poles of feast and famine, could seize the moment to redefine itself.