What if ‘Food Noise’ Is Just … Hunger?

Before 2022, there was barely a whisper about it. Now the concept of “food noise” is ubiquitous on social media; a quick TikTok search, for instance, finds that videos related to “food noise explained” attracted 1.8 billion views as of this summer. Coined to name the experience of thinking about food, longing for food, planning our next meal and so on, “food noise” is a slick rebrand of some of the most basic human drives: hunger, appetite, craving. But now these are being framed as bugs, rather than features. We should resist this reframing.

References to “food noise” invariably appear in connection with the new, much-hyped class of drugs that often induce weight loss, such as Ozempic and Wegovy. To be critical of the concept of food noise isn’t to doubt that some people have come to experience their former relationship with hunger this way while taking these drugs, with their powerful appetite-suppressive effects. But to call something noise is to go beyond describing it: It’s to invoke the normative claim that simply loving food, letting food occupy our thoughts and responding to our hunger is suspect. It isn’t.

It’s one thing to argue that the end of weight loss justifies the means of appetite suppression for some patients (alongside, of course, these drugs’ important role in treating type 2 diabetes), though there’s room to disagree with even that; as a critic of fatphobia and the relentless pressure to shrink yourself, I would stress the science showing that weight loss is not the magic bullet it’s made out to be. But regardless of how you come down on this issue, making the implicit argument — through the term “food noise” — that appetite itself is a problem to be solved should be a bridge too far for all of us.

The idea that we should not be ignoring our hunger cues is familiar from critiques of diet culture; the idea that we should not be silencing our hunger either is, to my mind, equally compelling. As someone with a long history of trying to tamp down my hunger with appetite suppressants — from over-the-counter “supplements” to prescription Adderall — what ultimately got to me was not just the side effects: It was the way trying to override my hunger was an exercise in self-alienation. When we are hungry, our bodies tell us to eat, almost literally, issuing cries and calls and pleas that constitute bodily imperatives. We silence or ignore that inner voice of need at the expense of accepting our animal nature — and with it, our humanness.

The pleasure we take from food is an important human good. Having recently enjoyed a food-centric holiday season, we should look back on its comforts and delights — the crisp, glistening latkes, the marzipan-studded stollen, the jam-bellied butter cookies — with fondness and relish, not guilt, shame, or self-hatred. Food connects us to ourselves, and with each other, and there are real harms in teaching people to reframe the pleasure they take from such fare as a problem to be treated with medication. Given that 81 percent of the people taking Wegovy in the United States last year were female, according to data from its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, we can see this trend as part of a perpetual devaluing of female pleasure and the shaming of women’s visceral appetites. A tweet from the famed — and famously sensuous — English food writer Nigella Lawson earlier this year lamented that she “couldn’t bear to live without the food noise.” One commenter responded in agreement: “I believe it is called ‘food music.’”

You don’t have to be a professional foodie to experience food music — or to rue its silence. A researcher whose work contributed to the development of what are called GLP-1 receptor agonists, like Ozempic, believes that the loss of food joy while on these drugs is not only a genuine loss but also a major reason patients tend to stop taking them. “What happens is that you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating,” and “there’s a price to be paid when you do that,” said Jens Juul Holst, a professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. For some people, “once you’ve been on this for a year or two,” he said, “life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life.” Or as a patient, Aishah Simone Smith, put it: “My life needs more pleasures, not fewer. Eating adds drama, fun, energy, to my otherwise listless and dysthymic experience. When I lost my longing for food, my life lost meaning.”

Information Security Analyst

American Nortel Communications Inc ARTM

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