Junk Food Reflections

Yesterday, based on a conversation over signal, I set myself the challenge to write about junk food. I don’t really eat it any more, cutting out sugar in particular has changed the way food tastes to me and the kind of food I enjoy eating. Along with tidying up how I use technology, I also dedicate time to physical self betterment. But here, I will specifically be reflecting on junk food.

I’ve always had a theory that certain subcultures are informed by media and political signalling. One prominent example is the ‘Hollywood Nazi’, no doubt actual nazi skinheads exist (mostly in prison gangs), but how many dumb consumers see trash films like American History X and feel inspired to emulate what they have witnessed on screen? Their entire existence is then inauthentic. The movie establishes the model, the foundation and basis from which the real world subculture then begins to manifest. By inspiring the unthinking to copy what they see on screen, they create a manageable opposition.

Stoner culture never struck me as an organic or authentic phenomena. Whilst worlds apart in behaviour from the Hollywood Nazi, the Hollywood Stoner is just as false and contrived an archetype. The Hollywood Stoner is unkempt, slobbish, lazy and inclined towards processed, high sugar, high fat junk food. The Hollywood Stoner is vacant, dazed and always hungry. He may be quirky and likeable, and is also presented as occupying the fringes of society, making him sort of aspirational despite his shortcomings. The stoner subculture lends a great deal from the aesthetics and behaviour of the Hollywood Stoner, much to its detriment.

When I started smoking cannabis, I was a leftist, I was still a teenager. I consumed Hollywood propaganda unthinking for the most part, but still felt alienated by some of the things I’d hear other cannabis smokers say. In particular, claims that their lives would be better, that their mental wellbeing would improve and they’d be able to find that elusive entry level job, that their financial circumstances would be massively improved were it not for cannabis. I always thought these people fell short of certain standards and opted to blame a plant rather than themselves.

The Hollywood Stoner sets a standard from which the real world smoker then binds himself. In the movies he is lazy and irresponsible, the real world smoker takes what he sees at face value and pursues that model, or at least comes to associate he laziness and failings with cannabis.

The Hollywood Stoner loves junk food. It follows that the stoner, inspired what he sees on screen does too.

One of the most hideous, morally repulsive movies, representative of elite attitudes through and though, is Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Any European character in this movie is either villainous, grotesque or buffoonish. The directors are careful to portray one deformed, boil covered redneck as Christian. Little touches like that make it uniquely Hollywood. The two main Asian characters, flawed but loveable stoners are left to navigate through a series of badwhites, in pursuit of a burger, which the films narrative exalts to divine status.

You’ve got racist cop bad white, redneck buffoon badwhite, inbred hick Christian badwhite. They’re all in their somewhere, and our stoner heroes are pitted against them all.

Over decades, the Hollywood Stoner has created an almost inseparable connection between junk food and cannabis. It is part of a wider junk culture, but I’m going to focus specifically on the food aspect here. The junk food trope is at the heart of The Harold and Kumar film, and so many similar ‘comedies’.

I was young once, ill informed, naive and prone to be misled. And I do have some affectionate recollections of junk food. It is strange to think back to wandering the city at 3am, looking for cheap pizza in a haze of cannabis smoke. It ruins my day now to some extent if I wake up any later than 6am. It feels surreal thinking back to a version of myself eating sharing bags of doritos, playing Chrono Trigger until the sun comes up, passing joints and bowls back and forth the entire time.

It’s comfy and fun. I used to enjoy that kind of thing so much. On the flipside however, I used to enjoy cooking, and walking in nature when I smoked. The junk food side of things felt like some mandatory aspect of the full cannabis experience. It was the foundation that was laid down on screen. Nothing could be further from the truth, cannabis is entirely compatible with good health and clean living. We binged on junk food when we smoked because our appetites were increased, and all that sugar and fat was like a finishing touch, the icing on the cake to the existing high. We never thought to address our increased appetite in a constructive way. We had never seen anybody do that.

The cannabis high is a massively sensory experience. It improves everything. Touch, smell and taste, all of these things are intensified by the cannabis high. Healthy food is rich with colour, fragrance and flavour. It is entirely compatible with the cannabis experience. I sort of made that connection in the past, but I never really saw it through. I’d not long left home and had just started learning how to cook. Cooking and cannabis go massively well together.

I was also going through a time in my life when I seemed to be able to eat pizza every night and not gain any kind of weight. Pizza, cola, beer, cake, potato chips, subway cookies...ungodly amounts every night. Stocking up on junk food as time went on became part of the cannabis ritual. We connected these things together in our minds and came to love that connection.

Admittedly, the part of me that was learning to cook, the vegetarian who spent a lot of time outdoors would prevail from time to time. But junk food could still draw me in and would often seem preferable to real food.

I remember ordering pizza one night, and it was late. Like by an hour or something. This was before you could track orders online, before we were confined to boxes and closely monitored lest we violate guidelines. In the end we’d decided to get pizza elsewhere and chase up a refund when we were less high. We headed out at around midnight and found another pizza place which was still open. We took our order home and moments after our return our initial delivery arrived.

In our minds everything had worked out pretty well. The circumstances had left us with enough pizza to gorge on and get high for the rest of the night, in the morning we’d microwave the rest, cover it in chilli sauce and watch ‘Clerks’ or ‘Office Space’.

They were decent films.

From the moment I left home I was a stoner, but my attitudes towards food have changed a lot since then. My focus on nutrient rich whole foods is removed from my former ‘vegetarian diet. Whilst I don’t eat animals, I don’t view vegetarian as by default healthy the way I used to. Now I enjoy packing in as many brightly coloured and fragrant vegetables to lunch as I can. My once beloved Doritos and soda, Subway cookies and take away pizza have lost their hold over me. No matter how high I get, the cravings I once never even knew I had have diminished.

That being said, I can get nostalgic for junk food and Hollywood Stoner culture in general. Being twenty something, your sense of responsibility is different. You can be a blank slate, waiting to come to life, confident that life will simply work out for you. You can be unconscious towards what you eat, believing your body will just get around to repairing itself.

To me, junk food has become almost romantically associated with the recklessness and the lower sense of accountability that comes with being young. The ability to consume sugary, calorific processed garbage without a second thought and any sense of it impacting on my body, because my body seemed to have forever ahead of it. All the time in the world to get in shape. For as much as I avoid junk food, and for as much as I love real food now, I am wholly acceptant of the happiness it bought me at a less disciplined time in my life.

I was influenced by fake images and a manufactured culture, no doubt. I adopted some of the traits of the lazy Hollywood Stoner and ate accordingly. I fortunately never allowed myself to blame any problem in my life on a plant, as so many others I discovered tended to do.

Take what you will from this and eat some spinach.

Iskalla: 25/01/2021