At the same time, though, her story is typical: people have come to use food to express and to define their sense of who they are. If you live and cook the same way your grandmother did, you’ll probably never open a cookbook. Cookbooks, and everything they symbolize, are for people who don’t live the way their grandparents did.
Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mìboom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly.
.. Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety.
Affective Labor – produce or modify emotional experiences
Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people.
.. A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker is adept at affective labor
.. His construction of affective labor is concerned with its role as an enabler for a larger capitalist superstructure, where the reduction of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.
Nathan Fielder’s Ingenious Dumb Humor
Fielder pretended to get a phone call. “Hello? Oh, yes, sir. Really? Oh, my God, I’ll let them know.” He hung up and addressed the kids again. “Sorry, guys. That was the governor, and he just told me that owning this toy is now the only proof you’re not a baby. I mean, I have one, so that’s good. I see you guys don’t have the toy. Are you babies?”
Two kids quickly grabbed Doinkits from the table. The third, a girl, briefly resisted before succumbing with evident unease.
“What do you feel inside right now?” Fielder asked her.
“I don’t feel anything,” she replied, holding her Doinkit despondently.
Fielder and Koman cracked up. The moment was funny, but sad too, and even though they were laughing at the coercive setup rather than at the little girl’s unhappiness, it was wincingly difficult to separate the two.
The joy of stress
I was completely unprepared for the best talk I ever gave – well, I had forgotten to write down the date and remembered at the very last minute. The subject was important to me but I had not yet talked about it in public. I had nothing prepared. I was quite sensibly nervous beforehand, which I am not usually, but as I stood up in front of the crowd, the nervousness turned into pure energy; I could feel it as greater-than-usual resourcefulness, as quickness on my feet.
Apparently this is normal. In 1908, Harvard psychologists invented a thing called the Yerkes Dodson Law, proving that a moderate level of stress can actually enhance one’s performance (too much is bad, but too little is also bad. You need stress to work well).
.. A Canadian psychologist, Robin Alter, who has done research on children and anxiety, observed that in anxious children, “the imaginative capacity is often more highly developed than that of calmer children”. It’s true that the child who is envisioning hundreds of red eyes in the darkness watching him or giant moving statues with teeth out of his bedroom window, is more dynamic and better company than, let’s face it, the one who is tranquilly moving a train around a track. And when you think about people who are interesting, who compel, whose conversation is beyond averagely mesmerising, they are usually highly strung. In T S Eliot’s well-known words, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”