I dont know if I would be diagnosed by a professional as an emotional eater but there's definitely something that goes beyond nourishment in my habits. I eat to 'cosy' (as a verb), to fill the spaces of a room in a house that's a home, allegedly. To fill space where I otherwise feel I am not enough without the literal 'filler', that hackneyed adage of filling inner emptiness; but it's more than that. I eat to substantiate the otherwise void-ish pock-marked streaming of time, a current which passes sometimes without that immaculate feeling of completion, passing without that feeling of being airtight. Like to be anxious, to have cloudy thoughts and the inevitable sinking of the stomach which comes with dire thinking; those things take chunks out of the passing of time, create vacancies which I need to retroactively fill by eating, in proportion to the negative-strength of the thought and the damage done (which I alone can intuit; there is no objective measure for this devastation, only the lingering sense of things not being right).
Having the television on while I eat isn't the purview of the lonely, because I live with flatmates AND a loving partner. No, it's definitely more than this. If there's anything it's resonant with it's David Cronenberg's gestures in his movie Videodrome, namely the idea of staging cultural repatriation of the homeless with shelters that specifically cater to each transient's lack of televisual access. In the movie there's something hammy about cathode rays specifically, the then current television technology; like this fed a neural function directly, an empirical hokey-science McGuffin to better persuade audiences of the outlandish mind-control possibilities the movie explores (still outlandish even now after CIA papers were declassified detailing every lurid and very real MK Ultra experiment, no longer explosive speculation of the paranoid but after careful disclosure somehow just banal fact; go figure).
Obviously we've come a ways since cathode rays, we have LED and whatever is coming after LED blah blah blah. There's 4K whatever that is and HD, and Ultra HD which I think is less cutting edge than 4K. Anyway, the point is that the connection between comprehension of culture and a phylogenetic assimilation of cultural tenets and credos is not reliant on the tech. It's the memes themselves, it's language itself which inseminates the mind, which then seeds physical responses in the nervous system, which persuades the body to facilitate new forms, to bloom discordancies like cancers.
Videodrome got it half right.
But what do I know; maybe there does exist a frequency or tech which can emit instant mind-shaping rays or emanations. Like in Joss Weldon's Doll House.
Everything comes back to media, to television shows or memes or movies, their mythos and pathos shaping my sense of self, allowing me to even negatively locate myself in this miasma of warring pre-existing territories both internal and external. And I find myself taking comfort in eating in front of the television because, like in Videodrome, the food gives me a literal prop for what the images are doing. I am nourishing and strengthening myself, I am eating products of a certain world, this one, which will bolster my presence in it. Memes and cultural artefacts are metabolised by that part of myself which is member to a network of precepts, which collectively generate this sense of reality, life, society; it's the wider consensus, the great Jungian mesh which is living, responsive, and yet tirelessly normative in that it takes vital shape by a sort of passive majority rule (unconscious is the word). The minority report is a surplus, an excess. An unthreatening speck.
That 'surplus speck' is reified in the canon of underground, liminal, Avantgarde, where it's either starved into non-existence or brought back later on once the whole can assimilate it's code (so long as the functionality of the majority-construct isn't too disrupted, which it never is).
This is what it means to eat the spirit, partake of the sacrament of the flesh and blood of the lamb. Eat the sign. That is why I eat in front of the television.
Because it is godly, Eucharistic in it's implications. Sign becoming matter, of word becoming flesh. Episodes of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (in my opinion superior to Riverdale which it shares a universe with) transcending it's commercial and even technological confines as I partake of ramen and corn-chips and bags of microwave popcorn. These things inhabiting the same sacred function as those little wafers and sour red wine at mass.
Whatever is on screen I take into the spoonful of ice cream or mouthful of pizza and then of course into myself, assimilating the mythos and pathos of an adolescent devil worshipper who just wants to straddle the mortal and immortal world equally, aspecting with Emily as she takes Paris, physically invoking the True North and the first scintillating signs that winter has finally come. All through otherwise plain foodstuffs made profoundly substantial through the magic of story (which as magics go apparently isn't strong enough to remedy acid reflux).
Mea Culpa.
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