Opinion | What if ‘Food Noise’ Is Just … Hunger?

The pleasure we take from food is an important human good. Having recently enjoyed a food-centric holiday season, we should look back on its comforts and delights — the crisp, glistening latkes, the marzipan-studded stollen, the jam-bellied butter cookies — with fondness and relish, not guilt, shame, or self-hatred. Food connects us to ourselves, and with each other, and there are real harms in teaching people to reframe the pleasure they take from such fare as a problem to be treated with medication. Given that 81 percent of the people taking Wegovy in the United States last year were female, according to data from its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, we can see this trend as part of a perpetual devaluing of female pleasure and the shaming of women’s visceral appetites. A tweet from the famed — and famously sensuous — English food writer Nigella Lawson earlier this year lamented that she “couldn’t bear to live without the food noise.” One commenter responded in agreement: “I believe it is called ‘food music.’”

You don’t have to be a professional foodie to experience food music — or to rue its silence. A researcher whose work contributed to the development of what are called GLP-1 receptor agonists, like Ozempic, believes that the loss of food joy while on these drugs is not only a genuine loss but also a major reason patients tend to stop taking them. “What happens is that you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating,” and “there’s a price to be paid when you do that,” said Jens Juul Holst, a professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. For some people, “once you’ve been on this for a year or two,” he said, “life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life.” Or as a patient, Aishah Simone Smith, put it: “My life needs more pleasures, not fewer. Eating adds drama, fun, energy, to my otherwise listless and dysthymic experience. When I lost my longing for food, my life lost meaning.”

To be sure, some people who identify with the term “food noise” experience genuinely obsessive food thoughts, as well as engage in harmful behaviors such as bingeing. But according to experts such as nutritionists and psychologists, these problems are often rooted in restriction. In other words, food noise is what may happen when you’re not eating enough to satisfy your appetite, often under the pressures of diet culture — a culture to which drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy contribute, by normalizing restrictive eating and pathologizing hunger. (Of course, we can recognize the cultural pressures and practices as problematic while sympathizing with the individuals in the grip of them.)

There are implications for the wider culture in derogating our appetites. We are effectively telling people — again, especially women — not to trust their bodies in ways that smack of gaslighting. Imagine a world where we could override our need to sleep with a medication far more powerful and long-lasting than caffeine: a new class of amphetamines, say, that could suppress the need to sleep for days if not weeks. And so we come to pronounce ourselves afflicted with “sleep noise,” rather than simple human tiredness — thereby depicting normal bodily need as weakness and the drugs to treat such weariness as a solution to this non-problem. The idea of billing our body’s pleas for rest as mere noise — and hence as something that ought not be listened to — borders on dystopian. The case of hunger is no different.