Crunchy or Puffy?

Aversions to certain foods can be inconvenient, especially when they carry a story behind them.

I was driving a group of high school students back from Gatlinburg, TN. A (mostly) empty jumbo bucket of off-brand cheese puffs sat between the driver and passenger seats. Two boys vowed to eat the whole bucket by the end of the weekend. They mostly succeeded. About an hour into the drive home, one of the senior girls started to get car sick on the winding roads. I was navigating switchbacks with no space on the side to pull over, so I passed the only item that could be of any use to the nauseous senior: a (mostly) empty jumbo bucket of off-brand cheese puffs. To this day, I cannot smell or look upon cheese puffs or puffy Cheetos without gagging. The smell of vomit and cheese puffs are unhappily married in my memory.

Candidly, I don't have many food aversions besides cheese puffs. So, when my sister suggested, "Crunchy or puffy Cheetos?," as an essay prompt, I approached the question tentatively. You now know why I carry an aversion to puffy Cheetos. Yet, there is something to the 'or' in between her question.

I remembered Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce. Here, Gladwell shared a paradigm shift in the food industry, the shift from the one perfect product to groups of related products based on preference. We can thank the 30+ kinds of spaghetti sauce to one innovator who saw through what Gladwell calls the 'Platonic' notion of food, the idea that there is one, perfect, ideal way to eat or prepare a certain food. We shouldn't look for the perfect Cheeto, but the perfect Cheetos. So, crunchy or puffy?

The consumer's choice between kinds of product within the same brand was, at one point, a revolution in commercial food production. If I have an aversion to puffy Cheetos, then I can choose crunchy Cheetos. But what happens when an important insight, like the one Malcolm Gladwell talked about, gets played to an illogical end? What happens when every company and brand tries to offer a myriad of products that satisfies every flavor of consumer? In other words, what happens when we develop an aversion to choice?

The series finale of The Good Place wrestled with this question from a different angle. I will not give away spoilers here, but the underlying questions beneath the final episodes asked, "Would you be satisfied if you could receive anything and everything you ever wanted? Would any choice remain compelling in that kind of reality?" To discover their answer, I suggest that you watch the show. But whether you are buying Cheetos or exploring ethics in the afterlife, we are obsessed with the problems created by choices.

It is worth reflecting that, in an era of unprecedented access to content, consumables, commodities, and community, it is far easier to feel bored and overwhelmed by the choices we make. Malcolm Gladwell certainly had the data to support his thesis against the 'Platonic' notion of food. Yet, perhaps the problem was not the Platonic notion, but rather the Platonic notion applied merely to food. It is the case that food aversions and preferences are, mostly, along a horizontal plane rather than conforming to a transcendent hierarchy. But it does not necessarily follow that moral aversions are similarly horizontal. Perhaps all the choices we face each day point towards both these realities: the plethora of preferences and the inability of these choices to align us to those goods which transcend preference.