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Americans are addicted to sugar. And unsurprisingly — it’s added to nearly every normal, everyday processed food or drink you’ll come across at Cub Foods or Aldi, from marinara sauce to granola. As a result, the average American consumes nearly three times more sugar per day than what’s recommended.
Sugar releases opioids and dopamine, and some studies have linked its addictive properties to those found in cocaine. If you’ve ever tried to avoid added sugar in your diet, this probably won’t surprise you. Once you’re used to a high amount of added sugar, the cravings you experience when weaning yourself off of it can be intense.
But on the other side of kicking the sugar habit is a pleasant revelation: grapes, bell peppers and so many other normal fruits and vegetables are actually delightfully sweet, in a way that can be surprising if you’ve only just moved away from eating copious amounts of artificially sweetened food. It’s almost as if there exists some kind of fitting correspondence between the human person and the fruits that nature provides.
Perhaps that’s why the Catholic intellectual Simone Weil once observed that “the pure taste of the apple is as much contact with the beauty of the universe as the contemplation of a picture by Cezanne.” On this account, the simple experience of eating an unadorned piece of fruit can be a gateway into reflecting upon the gratuity of the cosmos, its ultimate origin and our place within it — but it can be hard to taste this natural sweetness and have that kind of experience when you’re used to consuming 17 teaspoons of sugar a day.
This suggests that our addiction to artificially sweetened food not only impairs our health, but it also distorts our connection to reality. The pleasure that sugar produces becomes not a gift to be received, but a reaction to be engineered.
Many other things in modern life act like added sugar, hooking us on artificial, adulterated sweetness while robbing us of a sort of sweet and sober contact with reality: social media, the hookup culture promoted by dating apps, even the ready supply of cheap and trendy clothing all qualify.
The Catholic spiritual writer Thomas Merton noted this problematic tendency in his “Seven Story Mountain,” writing that it is contemporary society’s “whole policy” to “excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension,” and “to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.”
When our desires are strained in this way and given a seemingly endless supply to act upon, our hands grasp for immediate satisfaction instead of opening up to receive a gift of more meaning and lasting permanence. One of the most evocative illustrations of this I’ve come across comes from Chance the Rapper’s track “Cocoa Butter Kisses”: “Cigarettes on cigarettes, my momma thinks I stank/I got burnholes in my hoodies all my homies think it’s dank/I miss my cocoa butter kisses.” Chance’s chain-smoking may make him look cool among his friends and satisfy a craving, but it closes him off to the deeper love he actually desires: his mother’s affection.
And that’s the problem. Our culture’s array of “artificial sweeteners” closes us off from the deep love that truly satisfies — not only prohibiting us from experiencing the natural correspondence between ourselves and reality that makes us realize “all is gift,” but also oversaturating our ontological taste buds to the point where we’re unable to recognize and reflect upon the fact that as good as this world is, it isn’t enough.
This was the basis of Blaise Pascal’s concern with our addiction to distraction, already apparent in his own day in 17th-century France. “You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice.” These multiple diversions — or the synthetic desires that Merton mentions — cut us off from the ultimate inadequacy of earthly life, thereby cutting us of from our need for God.
What’s the solution? It probably has something to do with what Annie Dillard described in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” as a “kind of seeing that involves a letting go.” Dillard illustrates this perspective by describing the difference between walking with and without a camera. “When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light of a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.”
An unscrupulous observer — or, to return to added sugar, an unscrupulous eater — eschews a posture of control over reality. They don’t need to find just the right shot or consume that item that will bring them to their next sugar high; they can simply eat and observe what nature provides, genuinely enjoying it, allowing it to lead them into a more accurate and fruitful relationship with reality.
Like Dillard, we should seek to walk more without our proverbial camera — be it by dialing down our Twitter usage so we stop viewing reality through the lens of “possible tweets,” or even taking a break from fantasy football so we can enjoy the big game on its own terms, instead of neurotically obsessing over which players are accruing what stats. More broadly, this probably means less screentime, more walks in nature. Less online shopping, more mending old clothes. And yes, less sugary, processed junk food, and more pure, unadulterated apples.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
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