Alan Levinovitz: How We Got Hooked on Junk Food Information

I think that's one of the weirdest things about today, right? Is that we are faced with these unparalleled crises where we really, we don't have anything to go off of. We don't have a similar situation that happened, you know, in 1985. Where we are today with the coronavirus and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy where everyone's terrified and then you have the George Floyd murder and then you have the looting and the riots and the chaos and the protests and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again and our leaders look impotent. And we can't look to want, I mean, when you have a guy like Donald Trump in office, already you have a situation like, Jesus, I hope the cabinet can keep this thing together. I hope the Senate can hold this, this is madness. We got a reality show host who's the fucking president. But then all the mayors are fucking up, all the governor, no one, it's not even that they're fucking up, is that no one is equipped to handle this. So you see unprecedented anger, particularly online, where, you know, you're dealing with people and this is one of the things that drew me to you, is one of the tweets that you made about processed information, that online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with like social media versus like actual communication like you and I are having right now, which is what resonates with people. I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts. It's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person. It's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person. Whereas this viewing of text, white on black, you know, white letters, in my case, I use the night mode on a black screen, it's so weird. Like you have to interpret intent, you have to try to get, and then you're not getting any social cues from the person. You're not, there's not a back and forth, it's just you spit something out. They spit something back and it's, you're trying to approximate what it's like to actually talk to a person. It's very processed. I thought that the way you described it was really the perfect definition of what ails us where so many people today are communicating in this way and it's very similar to people surviving off of processed food and becoming sick. So if you think about how processed food was created, basically, and I mean modern ultra processed food, because these terms are all really slippery, right? Just like the term natural. So this is on a spectrum, right? The history of cooking is a history of processing food, right? You like to cook, I like to cook. That's processing food. Dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable. So it's not about processing being intrinsically evil, but with ultra processed foods, which you've got is you got a bunch of companies that are like, all right, what can we exploit about human appetites to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible? Right? It's terrifying. You've got, I think Coca-Cola, I think it was, said something like, we have to conquer stomach share. This is a term they use. What? Yeah. So like there's a, yeah. So you think, right, you have a hundred, think of the stomach, right? Like, okay. So we got a hundred percent of the stomach. How can Coca-Cola fill the maximum amount of stomach share in the humans of the world? Wow. What a bizarre way of looking at people. It's terrifying, right? And so then, and they did it because they got the smartest people, you know, they've got great chemists and biologists working, you know, day and night to figure out how to conquer stomach share. And they did it, right? And one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible. There's vending machines in every school. I mean, think for a second how crazy that is, that there are vending machines with just Coca-Cola and candy bars and stuff in every single school we have, you know, it's that, but it happened, right? And so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap, highly palatable and very accessible food is everywhere. No wonder we have a problem with our diets. And that's exactly what's happening with information right now. So as I understand it, the way in which Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back. So like slot machines, right? They consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out, okay, what keeps people pulling the lever, right? So they could just have it refresh. You just have your tweets at the top, but instead there's a little alert button, right? You pull down, there's a little noise, like, or whatever the noise is when you pull down on it, you know? And so they've made it compulsive. They've made it highly palatable, right? You want to keep coming back. And the thing is the difference between ultra-processed information and ultra-processed food is that I think we're the companies now. And that really freaks me out. We're the consumers. We're also the manufacturers. And we're also the distributors. We make the meme. Everyone is going to take some cut of this show and turn it into a sound bite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palatable. It's going to be oversimplified. It's going to have heroes and villains. It's going to demonize someone. And it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging. Those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable. We want a hit of information that's easy to understand, that demonizes someone, and that gives us a sense of belonging. And that's just like exploiting what humans want, right? You're saying, you know, we're creatures that want to love each other. We want to belong, right? It's just the same way we want to taste salt, sugar, and fat. We want to feel these things. And the information that we have around us now, it's the same thing as a Snickers bar, except the difference is we're Snickers. We're making it. And we're behaving like junkies, like rabid junkies. If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other, but it seems like it's half at least. I mean, it's just there's so much rabid discourse. There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other. And it's so unlike anywhere else in the world, unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other. People talked to each other in real life, the way they talked on Twitter. The emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and shattered eye sockets. It'd be chaos. Well, it's like road, it's road rage. It's how you treat people. It's how you treat the person in the other car that's cut you off because they're not, they've been dehumanized. They're isolated, right? It's like Twitter just allows you to, and social media in certain ways facilitates being angry in the way that you get angry at other cars. You're like, honk. You're like, fuck you, man. But you know what also crosses that? The reason why people do that in road rage? It's because your sensors are heightened, because you're moving so fast. Because you're aware that split second decision making is important to survival. So when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody and this guy gets a free motherfucker, like you're already at seven or eight. And I think this is also a part of the problem today online, because of the coronavirus and because of the lockdown and economic instability. And we were at unprecedented joblessness right now. I mean, people are really hopeless. There's a lot of people that we got one $1,200 check from the government and then that's it. And then you hear that Kanye West got this giant loan and Judd Apatow got this giant loan. These really wealthy people are getting all this money. But meanwhile salon owners, small business owners didn't. A lot of people are just furious at everything because it's like driving a car. You're already heightened. So this information that comes at you, maybe it wouldn't have pissed you off under normal circumstances, but now you're furious. It's like stress eating. So we have this. I hadn't really thought about that with road rage, but it does make sense. So when you're already at that level, then you're going to be even more likely to need that kind of information, want to participate in that kind of dialogue. It's not dialogue, but no, it's not. Yeah. Yeah. And there's ways we can stop it. I really think we can stop it by focusing on problems with the system and problems with ourselves. It's both of us because we're the ones manufacturing it and we're the ones consuming it. So we can do things about it. And it ranges from, I mean, I don't have, I still don't have a smartphone. You don't? You have flip phones? I have a flip phone. Wow. On purpose? Yeah. I mean, in part, not because you tweet a lot. I do. So when I'm not good, well, I know it's compulsive. I think the reason I don't have it is because if I had a smartphone man, it'd be all over. I'd be on it all the time. I mean, when I'm at home, because I, you know, because I work from home sometimes, my wife has, my wife has a smartphone. And so I'll always be like using her phone. What are you doing? Like, if you don't have a phone, you can't just go use my phone, right? And then I'm installing things on my computer, like freedom, which is this app that blocks you from, I mean, it's literally like, you know, with food. Right? People have those locks that only open. So I have an app that like locks me out of these sites. I have a folder on my desktop or on my, I guess, yeah, my desktop of my phone that says junkie and that's all of my Instagram and Twitter and all that stuff. I was going to show it to you, but it's important. That's that kind of things. So we need, I think we all need to collectively take steps in that way, but also we need to realize and this is really important, right? It's not just about natural unnatural. It's not just about technology. We've had this kind of junk food information around forever. And this is where I think for me is a, is a scholar of religious studies, right? If you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales, and if you look at the structure of religions, there are ways to tell stories to get people heightened. There are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging. There are ways to tell stories to demonize people, right? These tropes have been a lot, you know, they've been around forever, right? What do you do? You create a villain. You tell a story about redemption. You tell a story about a fall. You tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story just by hearing it become heroes, right? These are, these are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2000 years, if you were super rich and had access to lots of delicious, salty, sugary, fatty food, you could get fat. It was just a lot harder back then. And in the same way, now we facilitated the manufacture of this kind of these, these junk narratives that in small doses I think are fine. But if it's all we're consuming, it's a, it's a disaster. And we're going to end up, I think with some kind of, with some problems that are analogous to the health problems that we're seeing because of what we eat, except there are going to be problems in our soul, right? People are going to give mental diabetes. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it's a, I mean, I'm not, I'm not like a sort of organized religious, religion person myself, but I would say it's not just mental. It's like our souls. There's something deeply corrupting of our humanity. And I catch myself doing it. So like, so that tweet that you were talking about, I had, I had written a piece a week before that about Trump visiting, what's that, you know, visiting the church and holding up the Bible. It was this really angry piece. And I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to write about how terrible this is and, and put this out there, right? And do something. The way he set it up to tear gas and all the protesters to clear the area. I was like, what a horrible thing, right? I'm going to tell everybody how horrible this is. I'm going to get my anger out. And then I, and then when the article came out, I just realized that I was just sending it into the fucking machine, right? And it was going to get ground up and the people who already agreed with it were going to read it and be like, yeah, it's terrible. And the people that disagreed with it are either never going to read it, but they're going to see it and they're going to be like, see, people keep attacking Trump. Like they're all crazy. And it, it was sort of like a crisis. It was just like, I don't want to, I don't want to be doing, I don't want to be putting anything into this machine. If it's just going to get processed into junk information so that we can feed our habit. And this is a habit that we really don't know how to navigate. We've only been dealing with this habit for when did Twitter get invented 2007? Very recent. It's not enough time for us to figure out how to do it right. I mean, remember like during the, I'm 52. So when I was a kid watching television for kids all day was fairly new, right? It had only been like a generation or two that that was even possible to just watch TV all the time. And it was constantly thought of as the corrupting thing. Like get out, get away from the TV. All you do is watch TV, get up, get outside. And that was sort of the first indication that there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content, right? But I think Twitter is far more toxic than that because you're actually putting the content out yourself and then you're waiting to see how people respond and you shift the way you interact with people based on how they respond to your tweets. Right. It's the belonging thing. Your Facebook posts or what have you. It created, I mean, it's interesting you say that like thinking again about food because I'm obsessed with like the first book I wrote was about food and like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar. And thinking about it in this way, right? You need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed, right? So information that allows you to belong, right? For a long time, only certain people, I mean, for a while, right? It's only people who could read and write, right? So that's all you've got. Those are the only people who can produce it. And then now, it's so cheap to produce information that makes you a part of a community. It's free, right? We do it all the time. And like you said, we haven't figured out how to navigate it. And that's another confusion I think that people have with natural versus unnatural, which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings, right? Something new comes up. We still don't know how to navigate our food system. We still don't know how to stop people from eating too much. We don't know how to do it. Collectively, as a society, we clearly have not solved this problem. And yet, it's important to remember that for most of the world, the problem is still not having enough, right? So there was a time when the problem was people had no information. You just didn't know anything. You knew nothing. That sucked too, right? So it's great that we have the internet. That was far worse. Yeah, that was far worse. Or at least not. It was really bad, and it was bad in a profoundly different way. This goes back to the hunter-gatherer thing, right? Whether it was better in a state of nature. I often hear people, there's a great book called Against the Grain written by a guy who is at Yale, and he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the present in this book. And one of the things he points out is like, oh, people these days, like humans, modern humans, you and I, we go out and we don't know what a plant is, or we don't know what an animal is. And he's right, right? Most people don't have the knowledge of the natural world that hunter-gatherers do. But at the same time, they don't know about the germ theory of disease. They don't know about planetary cycles. And so it's always important for me, at least, as soon as I start to get sucked into one of these binaries, right? It was so bad. It's so bad now today to remember that it was also bad in different ways in the past. And we can't make the mistake of thinking that the problem with information and our consuming of it today, we can't make the mistake of thinking that the evil is in the form. We can make it good. We can make it better. We can learn how to deal with this, I think, I hope, as long as we're conscious of the problem.