Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning

Synopsis

We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers. Why? What are we really hungry for? In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today’s global food and lifestyle culture. How are twenty-first-century innovations and pressures are redefining people’s needs and desires? How does “foodie” culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression? Weaving together evolutionary psychology and sociology with captivating investigative reporting from around the world, Turow-Paul reveals the modern hungers—physical, spiritual, and emotional—that are driving today’s top trends: The connection between the “death” of the cereal industry and access to work email on our smartphonesHow posting images of our dinners on social media both fulfills and feeds our hunger for human connection in an increasingly isolated worldThe ways “diet tribes” and boutique fitness gyms substitute for organized religionHow access to round-the-clock news relates to the blowback against GMO foodsWellness retreats, astrology, plant parenthood, and other methods of easing modern anxietyWhy “eating local” might be the key to solving not just climate change, but our current global sense of disconnection