Indefensible Appetites

I read this twice and laughed out loud both times, which almost never happens for me with essays. The Doritos-in-the-car scene — "I lick my fingers with a focus I have never applied to prayer" — is perfect. But what makes it more than just funny is that it's also quietly sad, and it never announces the sadness. The brother Kevin section destroyed me. "Better at what?" is two words and it undoes the entire essay's premise. And that ending, with the Easy Cheese in the fridge and Laura's transparent excuse about the dog — I closed my laptop and just sat with it. This is the kind of essay I'd press into a stranger's hands at the shop.

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An essay about American consumer guilt written from a position of such comfort that the guilt itself becomes another form of consumption. The narrator agonizes over spray cheese and Doritos while acknowledging that someone engineered the bliss point to override their prefrontal cortex — and then moves on. The structural critique is right there, in the paragraph about the $3.49 bag and the lab, but the essay prefers the personal to the political because the personal is funnier. That is a choice, and it is the wrong one. The mother who couldn't afford a $38 candle appears as a punchline rather than a class position. Entertaining, but it mistakes self-awareness for analysis.

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Reading this from Dublin, I'm struck by how specifically American the shame architecture is — not the pleasures themselves, but the elaborate performance of knowing better. The ortolan passage is the essay's spine, and it's brilliant: the napkin hiding you from God, repurposed as the windshield of a Honda Civic. The family portraits have a Chekhovian quality; Kevin at Olive Garden is a short story compressed into a paragraph, and "Better at what?" is the best line in the piece. The ending earns its quietness. My only reservation is that the essay occasionally over-explains what it's already shown — the "load-bearing" metaphor about the marriage, for instance, tells us what the almond scene has already made clear.

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Technically accomplished — the ortolan-to-Doritos pivot is genuinely sharp, and the sentence about the cheese board becoming "evidence" lands. But the essay trades on a very comfortable mode of confession. The narrator's guilty pleasures are spray cheese and reality TV, not anything that costs them anything. The family portraits are deft, particularly the father's National Enquirer denial, but they serve the narrator's charm more than they interrogate it. I kept waiting for the essay to turn on itself, to find the thing the narrator actually cannot defend rather than the things that make good material. The closing image with the Easy Cheese is witty. It is also safe.

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Look, the writing is good. The voice has real timing — the spray cheese opening, the Doritos car scene, the brother at Olive Garden. Those land. But this is an essay about a very particular kind of white middle-class guilt that knows exactly how charming it is. The narrator's worst confession is eating Cheetos in his underwear in Cleveland. That's not a reckoning, that's a dinner party anecdote. The bliss point section almost goes somewhere real — who engineers these cravings and who they're sold to — but the essay swerves back to the personal because the personal is safer and funnier. Fine for what it is. I just kept wondering who this is for beyond people who also feel bad about their snacks.

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A very American essay, in ways that are both its strength and its limitation. The guilty pleasures cataloged here — spray cheese, Olive Garden, gas station hot dogs — are so culturally specific that they function almost as anthropology, which is interesting. The ortolan passage translates well, offering a universal frame. But the essay's central insight — that we consume things that contradict our values — is presented as revelation when it might be more honestly presented as common knowledge. The first-person voice is relentless; nearly every sentence begins with or returns to "I." The family members provide necessary oxygen, but even they exist primarily as mirrors for the narrator's self-examination.

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The section breaks do some work here — the white space between the ortolan and the Cheetle is doing more than the prose around it. But formally this is a pretty conventional list essay with a confessional frame, and the voice, while sharp, never really risks anything structurally. I wanted the essay to fracture where the narrator fractures. The inventory section gestures toward fragmentation but then explains each item thoroughly. The line about the cheese board becoming evidence is good, but it's good in the way a well-crafted tweet is good. Give me the version of this essay that's just the gaps between the pleasures, the silence where the wanting dissolves into the schedule.

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The sentence mechanics here are very good. "The kale goes bad. The kale always goes bad. I buy it with the best version of myself and throw it away with the real one" — that's a rhythm you can't teach. The ortolan paragraph earns its length. I'd cut about fifteen percent of the inventory section, which starts to list where it should accumulate, but the essay knows when to shift register. The mother's microwaved peach is a small masterpiece of domestic observation. One quibble: "fundamentally American in the way that only something invented in a lab and sold in a pressurized can can be fundamentally American" is one clause too many.

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There's an unexamined class narrative running beneath this essay that the humor keeps at bay. The narrator owns a home, subscribes to a CSA, has a wife, travels for work, stays in hotels — the guilty pleasures are performed against a backdrop of security that makes the guilt itself a luxury. The observation that "the pleasure is private, but the guilt is inherited" is the essay's most interesting claim, but it's abandoned in favor of another comic set piece. The Frito-Lay trademark detail and the bliss point passage hint at a more rigorous essay about engineered desire and who it targets. Instead we get a charming narrator eating Cheetos. Charm is not critique.

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