Scientists have invented a pill that that allows you to live without eating, drinking, or excreting. Unfortunately it not only eliminates your desire to eat, it also ensures that you take no pleasure when doing so.
Question: Would you take the pill?
FAQ:
- Taking the pill is a one-time event. Once you swallow it you are set on “no eating” for the rest of your life, no take-backs.
- Those who take the pill never again feel hunger, thirst, or any other food-related sensation.
- The pill produces a fixed # of calories a day, so your weight would depend entirely on your activity level.
- The pill doesn’t prevent you from ingesting substances. It guarantees that you feel no desire to do so, and that you will derive no enjoyment from the actual act of consumption (e.g., nothing would taste “good” to you), but you could still, say, consume intoxicants for their effects.
- Yes, you get to keep all the money you would have otherwise spent on food.
- There are no impending apocalypsii or food shortages on the horizon (i.e., survival shouldn’t factor into your decision).
I put a considerable amount of thought into this question the other day, and finally decided (a) I would take the pill, and (b) within six months I would probably regard eating as an almost unendurable burden.
Been reading A Wrinkle In Time again, eh?
Hell, no. Eating fantastic food is one of my favorite things ever. I would miss flavor and tastiness and the joy of cooking way too much!
Though it would be nice to save all that money I spend ordering out all the time.
Yep. I would take that pill.
I weighed the time required to prepare and ingest and clean up after food against the value of that experience. Basically eating is something I don’t enjoy as much as the stuff I could be doing if I wasn’t eating.
One thing you didn’t mention that would factor into my decision, is that you didn’t mention the other “end” of the equation, so to speak.
Do I get to give up the inconvenience and time-sink of #2 as well?
Yeah I don’t see this working out positively from that set of rules.
My current food budget is a fairly low percentage of my income, and rule #6 basically guarantees this won’t change any time soon. I’m supposed to trade this for the sum of future food pleasure?
Very interested in the pill, but important question: What about poop?
I would take it in a heartbeat. In fact, I have been demanding exactly such a pill for years.
Absolutely. I’ve always said that if they made meals in pill form, I’d take them probably 4 days out of 5.
Question #2 has been addressed in the post. That is to say, the question regarding #2.
Surely this drug would be given a made up name that’s not *quite* a real word, no? Something like Satietin or Fillify? Or a little more on the nose: Anorex?
Sign me up, I’ll be first in line.
Yes, yes. Sign me up. Can I get one so I don’t have to sleep either?
If I could still get pleasure/satisfaction out of one coffee drink per day, then I would totally take the pill. But if the “no enjoyment” thing also applied to coffee drinks, then no way.
Never! The act of eating is so pleasurable, I don’t want to lose it. Even when I’m really hungry, the feeling of finally getting to eat is so satisfying. I couldn’t give that up.
No, I would not take the pill. I derive too much pleasure from enjoying and preparing food (I wouldn’t be able to cook because you can’t prepare good food if nothing tastes good to you). The burden of having to eat is one I am more than willing to bear.
I figure that the pure awesomeness of Rob Cockerham’s Bacon Churner bacon-wrapped sticks of butter (Atkinz Approved) would surely still provide pleasure even to those who have taken the pill, so we’re safe on that front.
If I could still get pleasure/satisfaction out of one coffee drink per day, then I would totally take the pill. But if the “no enjoyment” thing also applied to coffee drinks, then no way.
You would get as much enjoyment from drinking coffee as you would from a flavorless caffeine pill of equivalent mg., nothing more.
The constant dieter in me wants to know: Just how many calories? Cause it it’s 1500, yes. 3000, no.
Hellllllll no. Why remove a simple and reliable source of pleasure from my life?
It produces the optimal quality of calories for your height / sex / body type.
(By the way, I am not just making up these answer as I go. I was stuck in traffic the other day and pondered pretty much every conceivable aspect of this question before coming to my conclusion.)
I would take it, then, and I would hate it.
^ lol.
In all honesty, even with eating/drinking set aside, I enjoy my private bathroom time too much to (er) eliminate it.
Con: I derive a lot of enjoyment from eating.
Pro: I could take a small fraction of my future expected food budget and do a Anthony Bourdain-style world tour and try everything once before popping the pill.
Con: I assume the pill will be based on our current understanding of proper nutrition. What if it turns out we need more of something than mainstream science believes, e.g. Seth Roberts claims about fermented/probiotic food?
Pro: As someone whose risk tolerance for weird street food isn’t always accompanied by a risk-tolerant digestion, I’d appreciate never having to deal with that again.
Con: What effect will it have on your social life? Will people tolerate going out for dinner and watching you sip water and stare at your napkin? Or will you end up only socializing with other pill-takers?
Pro: Instantly become a candidate for future Mars missions.
I would take the equivalent pill for sleep in a hot second, and I suspect many many people would agree, which makes that question a lot less interesting.
Does this pill prevent cavities? If I did not eat, would I not need to brush my teeth / floss?
What about bubble gum? It is technically not ingested, but does have a taste. Would I still taste it? Would I still need to chew it in order to not lose muscle mass in my jaw?
What about smoking? Would I no longer want to smoke cigarettes ever again?
And if I DID eat, even if it were tasteless, would I have to perform bathroom activities as normal?
While you didn’t address it, can we assume that nausea is a thing of the past? Or does no food input mean dry heaves and bile?
Is this pill a “just for me” opportunity, or will others be taking advantage as well? I don’t want to miss out on the social situations dining usually provides, but if I’m the only one who’s never eating again, that could be awkward. (I assume I’ll forgo eating, since all calories are now extra calories and eating anything is going to enfatten me.)
I’d take it. As much as I enjoy eating sometimes, I hate cooking all the time.
What about a pill that eliminates commuting, at the expense of enjoying travel?
And are both pills named Unemployment ™?
Wondering how many people would become extremely dehydrated when they could no longer feel thirsty. That’s a pretty important signal from your body to get some liquid in it.
That being said I don’t think I’d take it. Could do without the food, but damn I’d miss the flavor of beer on a Sunday afternoon.
I would take it.
It would make my summer backpacking trips much easier if I don’t have to eat or drink along the way, and I could no doubt find a cheaper place to rent if I don’t require a kitchen or toilet. Add in the money and time saved not having to cook or buy food and it seems like a no-brainer.
another foodie here – absolutely no pill for me
Hell, yes!!!! You said the drug won’t stop you from “consuming intoxicants for their effects,” so theoretically, I could still achieve bliss through Spicy Salmon Rolls. Or 12-year old Jamaican rum. Or home made cinnamon buns. Or…
Excuse me. I feel this overwhelming need to eat and drink my face off. :)
Yes. How could I miss what I no longer enjoyed? Also, think of the things I could do with the section of my brain devoted to Pretzel Combos! I might even remember how to do long division.
No one has mentioned the social aspect yet. I wouldn’t mind not having to worry about eating but I’d feel like an a-hole having to negotiate the social awkwardness of being “the guy who doesn’t eat” at meals with family or friends.
When you say “pill” you mean suppository, right? If so, then yes, yes yes!
Why would eating be an unendurable burden if you weren’t actually doing it?
If you had asked me this twenty years ago, I would have said “yes, I’ll take the pill” without a moment’s hesitation. Now, though, I would answer “hell no, I’d never take such a pill,” also without a moment’s hesitation.
No way. Life without chocolate and port and french fries and fresh strawberries and cinnamon rolls? Not worth the trade-off.
I often quite literally forget to eat. I’ve been known to go three days before I start to wonder why I feel weak. So yeah, I’d take the pill. It would just eliminate that pesky weakness.
Not a chance. Having come off a weekend where my sister and I packed a 20×10 storage unit into a 26 foot U-Haul, unloaded it into a flea market space, stood around in 100 degree heat selling off the lot of it, and carting what remained off to be donated, and then looking at the 7 day, 545 mile bicycle ride I’m preparing for next year, I can assure you that trying to subsist off of a set daily amount of Calories + water would be nothing but dangerous, even though the rest of my life is relatively inert.
And then there’s the fact that I like (learning) to cook and eat.
No way. Now say, there’s a version of the pill that wears off after 6 months to a year, I’d definitely give it a try. It really makes more sense that way anyway so the pharma overlords can get theirs.
gimmie the pill!
As someone who struggles with weight, I’m tempted to say yes, but I think the social aspect sways me — we as a society just spend way too damn much time doing stuff involving food for it not to become incredibly boring and awkward not to eat. However, as a picky eater I’ve often said that I would probably take a pill that killed my sense of taste so I could eat all the healthy stuff I hate, even at the expense of the delicious stuff I love.
I enjoy food way too much to take such a pill. The pill would not be worth never enjoying a prime rib or roast beef dinner again.
Yes, I would take it. I’ve ranted before about all the time we have to spend eating. And don’t even get me started on sleeping.
But I’ll bet it would seem a lot more appealing to people if you described it as something that requires an expensive procedure. If you have to pay a lot for it, it suddenly seems more valuable.
Heck no. I think the thought-experiment pill ignores (by design) many important aspects of food, nutrition, and nourishment that science cannot measure, such as cultural tradition, food energetics, etc. Also it promotes disconnection from the mind-body relationship to a degree I find potentially dangerous. And I think enjoyment is part of the human experience. Why remove it?
Fascinating discussion! :)
The social aspect of eating is incredibly enjoyable for me, but as someone who’s about to have surgery to remove my cancerous colon, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
I took an early version of this pill, or at least it sometimes feels like I did. I have never had the slightest interest in drinking alcohol.
This has been a blessing and a curse. I’ve saved a lot of money over the years. (My jaw drops when I hear how much my friends spend on cocktails.) And of course I have never experienced a hangover.
But I also have never had the experience of being mildly, pleasantly drunk, either. Nor have I shared that experience with my friends — I have never “gone out for drinks.” The few times I’ve found myself in a bar, I was very uncomfortable, noticeably so to those around me. Parties, too. How I envied Lloyd Dobler in “Say Anything,” the way he fit in to high-school party atmosphere despite being the Keymaster! Maybe there are people like that in real life, who can fit in with the drinkers without drinking, but I’m certainly not one of them.
And so not drinking has had an undeniably negative effect on my social life. I no longer worry about it — I mean, I’m over 40 now, and married with kids — but my college days and the years just beyond them were often quite lonely. It’s amazing how much socializing revolves around drinking.
Now, I guess I COULD have bought a drink and held it in my hand, and sipped at it once in a while — but, this essentially mimics the “derive no enjoyment” part of what your pill does. I would have had to pretend I was enjoying myself while all my friends were actually enjoying themselves. That gets exhausting after not too long.
So, no, I wouldn’t take the pill to stop taking food. Then I would have to pretend to enjoy myself at restaurants, too, and eating dinner with my family would be a chore instead of a joy, and I would no longer take pleasure in cooking a great meal for my wife. Food provides lots of yummy tastes, no doubt about it, but it’s the social benefits that I would miss terribly. No pill for me.
I’d like to see an answer to whether this is a special unique opportunity for “me” or whether it is available to everyone. From the “scientists have invented” part, it sounds more like the latter, which I think would have implications that are so-far unconsidered — namely that the existence of the pill seems to be to create an inevitable spiral toward a world in which everyone (other than a small, rich, elite) will have taken the pill, and that this would have very far-reaching consequences in the world at large.
Notice — I didn’t bother counting, but at least half of the commenters here say would take the pill. Certainly a higher percentage of the population at large would take it, because it seems like the primary reason for witholding is the joy of food, which is not going to be a factor for a large segment of people with significant money problems that would be alleviated by cutting food from the budget.
So now, we have a world where at least half the people, and probably more take the pill right away. Imagine what this does to restaurants, grocery stores, farmers, and other links in the “food chain”. Demand is down by half at least. Prices drop, but there are so many fewer customers that grocery stores and restaurants start disappearing very fast. With fewer and fewer places to come by food, more and more people turn to the pill, which perpetuates the process. At some point it will become virtually impossible to live without having taken the pill.
Given that, it’s hard to imagine the extent of the drastic changes the pill would bring about. For instance, all the people previously employed by the industries that grow, process, ship, sell, or prepare food are out of work, and other than the manufacture of “The Pill” I don’t see any industry taking its place. We will however have significantly more space — all the land taken up by agriculture (growing our food, growing feed for our food, pasturing our food, etc) is now up for grabs for other development (which is good because without the need to feed the population, our numbers can grow to expand into that space). Cities and towns gain real estate from the disappearing markets and restaurants, but that will likely be filled by other retail since people have considerably more disposable income to spend now.
There will also probably be other casualties as well — the diet industry, gyms, packaging design/creation, appliance manufacture (refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers, all unnecessary). How much would healthcare change with all food and diet related illness wiped away? How much of our landfills are devoted to by products of food consumption? Would we be able to make drastic reforms to waste water processing if we knew there would be little-to-no human waste? Would bars and the alcohol industry be sustainable when everyone would be drinking “on an empty stomach”?
Anyhow, it seems like there are a LOT of interesting implications to think about when considering a world with this pill well beyond the personal decision (especially since, as I theorize,it becomes harder and harder, and eventually impossible, to hold out as time passes after the pill’s introduction). Anyone care to extend this line of thinking?
This is a trick question, isn’t it?
Anyone taking the pill would turn into a mutant/zombie/vampire, a la “Legend.”
You know, I feel like most of us have already taken that pill. Look at most people around the planet and across most of history (we can even leave out pre-history) and the amount of time, energy, and thought that normally goes into acquiring, preparing, eating, and evacuating food for them Compare that to what most of us have reduced the process to. Compared to how far we have removed ourselves from this process, this pill is a very small step.