Consumption Kaleidoscope

Over the last couple of days, the Stranger has been bringing my attention to two different faces of consumption. First, on Slog someone re-posted a pair of articles out of the New York Times and New York Post about American Fat Culture. The literature on the subject tends to be redundant (Americans are fat, we don't entirely know what to do about it, some people say accept it and move on, others want to hem and haw about the epidemic and its causes in the industrialization of the food supply, blah blah blah). Then, this week, there's an article in the Stranger about the overabundance of sweets shops in Seattle. I'm inclined to agree with Seling about the overabundance and overwhelmingness of it all.

I'm going to ignore the food matters brought up in these articles to focus on something else instead. Collectively, these articles raise questions about how we Americans choose to live our lives. Do we devote time and money and energy to obsessing over our weight and physical appearance? Do we go over the top in search of more and more sophisticated foods to titillate our minds and palates? To what degree do these places speak to a good aesthetic sensibility?

These sorts of questions came up sharply for me when we went to eat cupcakes at Cupcake Royale in Seattle. I'd been hearing about the Strawberry 66 cupcake for weeks on KEXP (sixty-six percent local ingredients! Fresh, local strawberries!), and wanted to see what it was like for myself. A man was standing out in front of Cupcake Royale, selling the paper Real Change (one of those papers for the homeless/unemployed, to help get them back on their feet). I did not buy a copy. I bought a cupcake instead.