I'm Broken for Not Liking Food

As someone who follows a few Tumblr microblogs, there is a specific sentence I’ve seen pop up multiple times. In the encouraging style users of the website usually bring the message, the sentence is “Asexual people aren’t broken.“ After all, this is an anguish many asexual people feel: if you grow up in a society that greatly values traditional relationships, certain inter-gender behaviors, and reproduction, you may feel like there’s something “wrong with you” if you don’t experience any of that. However, existing somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum myself, I’ve (luckily) never really felt this way. I feel myself being envious, wanting to be in a kind of relationship I’ll probably never end up in, but I’ve rarely felt like there was something wrong with me when it comes to my sexual identity.

When it comes to consuming media, I have a weird relationship with, ahem, relationships. Love Actually quickly became one of my personal favorite all-time films, as its various love stories can really bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I watch romantic stories in the same way as other people do, however. To me, a romance is not very different from a common fantasy trope. Romance is like magic: it’s fascinating and beautiful, something worth indulging in.

I am perhaps lucky in how much I can enjoy a good romance, as not everyone can, but I bring this all up because there is another theme I just can’t muster the same feeling towards. That theme is food. I don’t care about food as its own topic, and I have difficulty understanding or even imagining why so many people put so much value on food. In everyday life, this has created some weird social interactions with people who care strongly about what they eat every evening, but more interestingly to me is how it affects how I consume media.

When Digibro described why he found Log Horizon such an amazing anime, he talked for three minutes about how its use of food was “the most true-to-life thing [he] could image,” and here I realized something was going on. In the first episodes of Log Horizon, all the characters in story are transported into a world where all food tastes the same. This was presented in a very over-the-top manner inbetween the more serious scenes, as though it was a gag. Eventually, however, the cast came across a character who had discovered how to give food taste, which was followed by the characters truly ecstatic to eat something with taste again for the first time in days. Digibro said the following about the scene: “So when [the characters] first bit into [tasty] food and literally cried, I felt a well of emotion knowing that I too would have cried my eyes out.” This line, and the ones around it, really stuck with me… because I can’t relate to them at all. When a character in Log Horizon bit into a burger and said “this is going to change the world,” I felt nothing but a bit of amusement. I would have been happy in this world, because the sound of eating wet rice crackers every day doesn’t sound bad at all. I just thought Touno Mamare, the author of Log Horizon, was some kind of food geek when I first watched the show. but when I watched Digibro’s video, I felt like there was something wrong with me…

This is not to say that I don’t like good food! I am actually very picky about my food, in that I really don’t want to eat something I dislike. I have found that simple food, ranging from simple chicken to noodles to literal crackers, are my favorite kinds of food. I would never make something out of a cook book, or order something I don’t fully trust in a restaurant. I will probably never spend the effort of cooking something complex when a simpler meal can suffice. Why bake a cake when you can buy something similar in stores? The way I experience food is fairly mathematical, where I can grade all food on a scale from 1 to 10 and I don’t need to worry of anything ever getting rated higher than the things I’ve set at 10. Sure, you can get bored of certain types of food if you eat too much of it (which is more likely for some foods than for others), but those are pretty much all the variables I need. In fact, allow me to draw up a chart.

Yes, I could live forever on noodles or even crackers (though I don’t think my body would like me much if I tried). I already eat three slices of bread, two of chocolate paste and one with peanut butter, every afternoon for the past ten years. I see no reason to step away from that, because it works. I don't like trying new kinds of food, because I run the risk of getting something I won't like, and there's no value in finding something new I do like because I already like plenty of food.

When I see a scene in which food is the major focus, I try to imagine that what is being enjoyed is music instead. There’s a scene in the first Scott Pilgrim book in which the character Knives Chau experiences rock music for the first time. Watching Knives get entirely overwhelmed by the sound of probably pretty shitty music was infinitely more relatable than the scenes Digibro spoke so highly of above and though it didn't have the same kind of build up as the food scene in Log Horizon, it had way more impact on me because it is something I care about. There’s a scene in episode 1 of K-On! in which one of the characters is deeply inspired by watching a concert on television, and though it was largely played off as a gag, I can’t say I didn’t feel for her.

So what I’m really getting at here is: less food, more music. More importantly, this has been an issue I’ve really been struggling with for a long time now. You cannot believe how much value people put in food in our world. Anime in particular has a heavy emphasis on food, and though I find a show like Shokugeki no Soma positively ridiculous and Amaama to Inazuma is adorable because of its gorgeous facial animations and because social interactions is where the heart of the show lies, these still make me feel… broken.