Of all the strange sights on the internet, the Instagram videos that people upload of themselves eating enormous quantities of unhealthy food are among the most disturbing. In the videos I’ve seen, it’s always a lot of food, all of it overloaded with sugar or fat—or both. So it’s what they eat—but also how they do it. The people are making a display not so much of pleasure as of conquest, and there is nothing subtle about it. It’s gluttony. It’s a rout.
Bad enough that these people were motivated to record themselves for all to see, but making it even worse was the influencer or commenter culling these videos from the internet and bundling them together with commentary about the eating habits on display. To be fair, the commenter never used overtly pejorative terms. But he didn’t need to: His ringside seat—watching the videos while his viewers watched him watching—made clear what kind of spectacle it was. That, and the calorie counts he supplied as a form of analysis.
To rebroadcast content with commentary is a moneymaking project. But so must be these videos that people upload—enough views and you get royalties. I can think of no other reason for subjecting yourself to the ridicule of strangers. After four or five videos, I’d seen enough. I asked my son, who had showed me the videos, “Is that even legal?” If I were to hang out at a local eatery, and I posted videos of strangers gorging themselves, I’m sure I’d be picked up. Or beaten up.
My son explained that the commenter was taking people’s content and rebroadcasting it for an entirely different purpose. “What about copyright?” I wondered. He told me that as long as the original content is repurposed, it’s fair use, so you get away with it. Get away with, his phrase, shows he agrees there is something underhanded about using people’s own weaknesses, bad judgment, or cravings—for attention or otherwise—against them. What could be more damning than the video of a man digging with glee into a whopping 10,000-calorie vat of crumbled Oreos and milk in lieu of his breakfast cereal? One should look away.
No one I saw topped the Oreo man in terms of calories in a single sitting, but one image struck me even more. Of a pretty girl of about 20 making a doughnut sandwich. This was not like a croissant sandwich such as my stepmother sometimes serves—a croissant cut in half lengthwise and filled with white bean spread and lettuce. Instead, the girl took a doughnut from a box, proclaimed it to be “the bread,” then slapped it onto her open palm. Then she took another, called it the mayo, another the cheese, another the meat, another the tomato, and so on, until she had a doughnut tower, 13 doughnuts high. It looked solid, stacked on her hand. Then she slapped her other hand over the top. Whap. And pressed down. Each doughnut folded into the doughnut below in full-stack collapse. Within seconds, the 13-doughnut high-rise was three inches tall.
What she did next was to eat it—which was astonishing too, the way each bite tore into the structure like Godzilla entering New York City, advancing not with any particular malice but with a heedless appetite for whatever lay before it, each step destroying something that had, a moment before, seemed integral.
These broken, squashed doughnuts were rendered mush, and unbelievably, 13 of them disappeared down the woman’s throat in four bites. It was carnage without death. It was obliteration.
The image has stayed with me. She was smug with the success of her attack on decorum and restraint, concluding the debacle by folding and twisting and pushing the last quarter of the compressed doughnut wedge into her mouth. Thirteen doughnuts balanced on her palm, then beaten down with one blow, reduced, then destroyed, obliterated, no resistance. It is not the gluttony that I keep coming back to. It is how substantial those 13 layers had appeared and how diaphanous they soon proved to have been. One strong thwack, and they imploded.
Isn’t that what is so unsettling about life, too? All the layers of experience and education, effort and work, built up, one stratum at a time, polished, presented. But time pours like a thick sauce over the whole of your life, burying the bottom layers. It was supposed to be so substantial, so meaningful. Yet under the accumulated weight, the bottom layers turn to sand and disintegrate. The middle layers are mush. The top, the accomplishment of your life, the crown of the towering assemblage—what is that? It is slipping and sliding and rolling and falling. Nothing to hold it up, nothing solid. Sugar doughnuts we were, and sugar doughnuts we are.
Thirteen doughnuts. Thirteen? Okay—when I checked I found it was only six. The girl was not, in fact, pretty. We all exaggerate.
So the carnage was not carnage—it was not even worth noting, not worth filming, not worth commenting on, and possibly not worth writing about. But then, what else to do if you can’t find a thing that is worth the effort? Eat a doughnut while you ponder? You could do worse—like eating a dozen.
