Ozempic has shrunk the American Dream The US has gone off its imperial dinner

Despite the morass of scientific explainers, confessional essays and philosophical think pieces, all this food freak-out should be filed under “old news”. Americans have been gaining weight for as long as they have been trying to lose it. Indeed, a few hundred miles north of the turtle-gorging Dutch of Manhattan, the Puritans of Massachusetts were gauging their status as chosen people through their gastrointestinal tract, as Samuel Sewall’s noted in a diary entry from 1690: “Mr Torrey is for a fast or at least a fast first. Mr Willard for a Thanksgiving first. Mr Torrey fears lest a Thanksgiving should tend to harden people in their carnal confidence.”

Thus did binge-eating, spiked with self-induced starvation, find its earliest footholds in the land of milk and honey. The great Puritan divine Cotton Mather outlined the toxic paradox when he asked: “Has not my soul as much amiss in it as my stomach?” Mather’s unflinching investigations of depraved digestions came to all-too recognisable conclusions.

In the case of apoplexy, vomits do a deal of good.
In the case of vertigo, vomit.
In the case of hiccups, vomit.
In the case of nightmares, vomit.
In the case of a coma, more vomits …

Bulimarexia, like religious freedom, was native to these shores.

After the colonial period came America’s great expansion, in which the republic’s rampant eating mania — and subsequent dyspepsia — expressed itself in extraordinary feats of consumption. In 1789, the renowned Methodist John Wesley noted cases of “Canine Appetite”, and American frontier literature teems with stories of thunder-swallowing backwoodsmen who devoured buffalo, alligators and rattlesnakes. Davy Crocket’s penchant for eating bears was only matched by his passion for killing the natives. Today, the same sort of digestive blood lust can be observed across social media, which features endless streams depicting the carnivorous habits of modern day meat-eaters and paleo dieters, even though it’s growing ever more clear that the Neanderthals mostly ate roots and leaves.

Ozempic has opened the door to what every psychiatrist will recognise as the danger zone of behaviour: the return of the repressed. And what have we repressed? The fact that in the beginning, the boundaries of consumption had been smashed. The fact that, here, it was finally possible to eat anything. In 1609, Henry Hudson sat down with some upstate Wappingers for a solemn feast of fatted dog. A bit farther south, the Lenapes were kind enough to share their raccoon and lynx, which they gobbled raw. Food publicity filled the 19th-century press with outrageous accounts of primordial American foodstuffs: out in the sticks there were caribou and antelope, epic beets the size of cedar stumps and corn that grew so fast its percussion killed a hog. Markets in New York City, Cleveland and throughout Iowa offered black-bear steaks and panther chops as late as 1832, and bison, elk, reindeer and moose remained available far into the 19th century.

The story of westward expansion was a romance of superhuman ingestions and prodigious wastes. Davy Crockett’s threat to “eat any man opposed to Jackson” did not land him in jail for threatened manslaughter, but in Congress. And Crockett was not alone. Liver-Eating Johnson hunted down and consumed Crow Indians. Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsman ate “a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body”. The recipe for cowboy sonofabitch stew included everything from beef brains to beef liver, tongue, heart and bones. America in its 19th-century imperialist prime was an insatiable power that viewed the entire continent, if not the world, as its manifest dinner.

Then the frontier closed. The physical limits of continental expansion had been reached, so the stomach, given no other recourse, became a transcendent object of adoration. “The stomach-sac”, the American poet Walt Whitman proclaimed, “food, drink, pulse, digestion…”

“O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul,
O I say now these are the Soul!”

The end of the American stomach’s will to political power meant a number of other curtailments, too, most clearly articulated by the 19th-century American diet guru, Catherine Beecher, when she noted that “it is the opinion of most medical men, that intemperance in eating is one of the most fruitful of all causes of disease and death”. Followed by her profound observation that “it is possible to put much more into the stomach than can be digested. To guide and regulate in this matter, the sensation called hunger is provided.”

Indeed. A “sensation called hunger”.

Thus did American eating mania crash into a new derangement: the diet. At the height of America’s literary renaissance, when Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson and Whitman were furiously scribbling curricular content for the next century’s American Literature courses, neither Walden nor Moby Dick could boast sales anywhere near Sylvester Graham’s edition of Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life. “Few things are more deceptive to children or adults, than soft lazy dishes,” Graham declared. “This is a universal rule.”

In 1838, the famous vegetarian (and author of more than 100 books) Dr William Andrus Alcott railed against ginger, fennel, cardamom, nutmeg and coriander, declaring that molasses and sauces were indecent “drugs”. He worshipped “pure, plain, unperverted pudding”. And he inspired a terror of mince pie, which might actually consist of a dozen or so ingredients, and thus would “stupify our immortal souls”.

Meanwhile, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, America’s “Prophetess of Health”, Ellen Harmon White, sought God through her plant-based diet. In her wake, America’s diet culture has continued the tradition of eating as a way to pursue both spiritual and capitalist perfection, from Joran Rubin’s recent The Maker’s Diet (that implores disciples to eat what Jesus ate) to the latest from Park Avenue’s “top diet doctor”, Jana Klauer: How the Rich Get Thin. Not to mention the long history of American cookbooks wooing audience by trumpeting themselves as quasi-spiritual tomes: The Sauce Bible, The Smoothies Bible, The Bread Bible, and The Pie and Pastry Bible. Linking sanctity and thinness had long been a fixture of the American psyche, most recently demonstrated by participants in a recent survey of 260 Latter Day Saint BYU students, who judged that “smaller-bodied females” were, as a rule, “more moral than larger-bodied females”.

The American desire to discipline the dysfunctional stomach would soon be subverted into another instantly recognisable tradition: the fad diet. The evangelist John Wesley advised those who suffered from scurvy to “live on turnips for a month”. Dr Alcott’s associate, Samuel Larned, decided to subsist for one year on nothing but crackers. The next year, he ate nothing but apples. America introduced the milk diet, the turtle diet, grapefruit, bone broth, the infamous cabbage soup diet of the Fifties and the Nineties classic 12-step eating recovery programme, “The Love-Powered Diet”.

But the American stomach would not be so easily deterred from its voracious rounds, typified by what would prove to be a pivotal year in the history of eating. In 1997, when George and Richard Shea founded the International Federation of Competitive Eating (since re-branded as Major League Eating), which over the past quarter century has sponsored hundreds of eating contests — featuring gorgers of everything from jalapeños to buffalo wings, oysters to doughnut, pancakes to sushi, bologna to straight mayonnaise — not to mention the greatest triumph of American consumption, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest. The professional gurgitator would be the final incarnation of the digestive imperialists, the grotesque and stunted descendants of industrialists, frontiersmen, and founders.

The dream of consuming everything might have been disciplined to a 12-minute eating contest, but it would not die. As the dimensions of American ambition contracted from mountains and valleys to the virtual horizons of the smartphone, it was, perhaps, inevitable that the fate of American eating would at long last devolve into yet another triumph of technology, the unsexy and unsavory glucagon-type agonist — and thus where we find ourselves today, stuck between the glories of Ozempic and the horrors of Ozempic face.

Novo and Lilly and Amgen come at the end of a long line of American diet history, whose gurus might have been surprised to learn the side effects of not eating, as monthly doses of Nordisk peptides have been known to cause nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, flatulence, constipation, fatigue, not to mention an increased risk of vision changes, kidney problems, gall bladder disease, hypoglycemia and pancreatitis. Such are minor inconveniences in light of the true American dream: the nirvana of bodily perfection. A shot of pure poison is a small price to pay for a glimmering mirage of health and wealth on Facebook, even if the sagging, haggard, fat-starved face has now been joined by Ozempic butt and boobs.

Will there be no more July 4th hot dog eating contest? No more avocado shortages on Super Bowl Sunday? No more gastroporn on Reelz? Can we finally foresee the tragic death of the foodie? Will there be no more food fads, food taboos, food fetishes and paranoias regarding what would or would not pass the holy threshold of our lips? There is much to mourn.

And, perhaps, something to celebrate. Ozempic may toll the death knell for America’s age-old mania of stuffing everything into our imperial systems, a delusion that dates back to our famished origins, when out of the howling wilderness appeared the grim shadows of natives bearing the makings of the first Thanksgiving. The American identity, no longer confined by the twin poles of feast and famine, might seize the moment to define itself anew.

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Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. He is the author of Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food.

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