How many people who write articles like this actually eat fast food all the time?

I once observed, while watching movie trailers in a movie theater, that the scene changed really often and it was somewhat disorienting and unpleasant; I looked away from the movie, and was able to continue seeing with my peripheral vision how often the scene changed; I found this kind of amusing.  (It's possible that I was led to observe this by my sister making a similar comment about TV commercials.)  I imagine that the scene changes are supposed to keep "the audience"'s attention, but they do the opposite for me.  (Or they have in the past.  I don't watch movies in theaters much, but I think that's still the case.)

I don't get fast food often (usually I get it as a byproduct of hanging out with friends who like to go to In N' Out).  When I do, I'm frequently faced with the fact that other people apparently like meat that's charred on the outside.  In N' Out is relatively good about avoiding this; many Mexican food places and some Asian food places are not.  Anyway, I hate this charred stuff, and frequently I'll expend significant effort in trying to cut that part out or otherwise avoid it.  I also hate even mildly spicy food, and can't understand why people like it; likewise carbonation in drinks, so I never drink soda-like things (or am like "FFFF- <spit>" when I discover my drink is carbonated).

Now let's move toward food that doesn't meet with the above objections.  Sometimes I'm with a big bag of potato chips, or someone has brought in a package of cookies.  I can eat a lot of those things, although with cookies I usually eventually feel like it's going directly to my bowels.  I can also eat a bunch of some fruits like strawberries or grapes, though, as a general rule, too much of any one food group gets unpleasant.  (It tends to be persistent, too; when I have an unpleasant experience with some food, I tend to not want to eat it for a while.)  Even with potato chips, I eventually encounter some limiting factor; too much grease feels bad, and perhaps also salt.  If I eat pure meat, I kind of feel like my digestive system has to work hard to turn the protein into energy or something.

Too much of any one thing is eventually disgusting.  The article touches on this, mentioning "a jumbo fountain soda, sweetened with enough high-fructose corn syrup to make a 10-year-old pixie stick addict wince", but it doesn't press the point.  If you think there's no limit to how much salty food you can eat, try eating from a saltshaker.

Here and there I have the experience of being with food that I actually want to keep eating until I'm full.  Given the above limitations, it has to have multiple food groups (and usually one of them is carbohydrates), and be not spicy or charred or too greasy, and maybe a few other things.  Spaghetti with tomato sauce can get me pretty far.  Sometimes food in a university cafeteria fits this criterion, especially when I've been able to assemble burgers (buns, lettuce, tomato, patty).  Combinations of rice and meat work pretty well, though I usually want a bit of something else too.  I think the most fast-food-like thing that I can fill up on is a couple of kinds of Chinese food: fried rice with vegetables and egg, chicken chow fun, beef with broccoli.  Also I like Subway.

In the general case, where someone is making a product that gives you some kind of raw sensory pleasure but is generally bad for you, there are a few options.  One, which the article might seem to take, is to complain and... somehow or other get them to stop making that product.  I don't consider this an option.  Another is to attempt to reduce that pleasure; if these things are "hardwired", then that seems difficult or impossible.  I guess another is to create some healthy pleasures that out-compete this pleasure; this might or might not be feasible (for food, I do tend to neglect eating when I'm doing something interesting).  And the last option is to have the bad product also give you bad feelings, which distract you from whatever raw pleasures it gives you.

I seem to implement this last option pretty thoroughly.  It is difficult for me to eat very much of most "unhealthy" foods.  The result?  I have never been fat; I am skinny, and my family has sometimes been concerned about me being underweight.  I can't really relate to the people mentioned around 3:25 in this video (Hey, anyone wanna get a Double Down with me?  It's that time of day when I have to shove food in my fucking face! <picture of extremely greasy food>): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFPrKvtVXI&t=3m1s  Nor can I relate to the sentiment underlying sentences like this in the article: "We love certain tastes; salt, sugar, protein – and that’s all you get in your greasy, brown paper bag."

Am I... extremely unusual?  Do I have weird genetics making me weirdly sensitive to certain things?  (Probably; I dislike loud noise--the very lowest volume setting on an iPod with its earbud headphones is about tolerable for me--and bright sunlight; and apparently one of my recent-ish ancestors was albino.)  Does it make a difference that I was brought up in a more or less "all food we buy is organic and healthy" household?  (Probably somewhat; I tend to like foods I'm familiar with, so it helps if I'm familiar only with "healthy" food.)  Do weird aspects of my personality factor in somehow?  I dunno.

Simply have a bad reaction to the mostly-crap stuff, to distract you from the bits that work directly on your salt receptors or whatever, and then have that bad reaction not occur when you're faced with good stuff.  I think this is better than dulling your reactions to everything (if that is possible) so that all that's left is your "rational mind's preference", which I think some people try to do.

Going away from food, on to other things.  Games, videos, articles.  For me, a general-purpose bad reaction to this "entertainment" stuff is something like the thought, "Could someone keep me occupied forever with this thing, with little effort on their part?"  That's an embarrassing, perhaps threatening, thought if I'm not getting anything out of it.  (On the other hand, if I am getting good things out of it, then there is no problem.)

I once tried an online city-building game.  Jesus H. Christ it was designed to get people to pay for stuff and to keep playing.  You would build buildings and upgrade them (barracks, resource-gatherers, etc), and they would take real time to complete; you could press a button to finish them immediately, but it only worked if the build time was 5 minutes or less; you had some items that would subtract 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, or whatever from build times and research times and stuff, but you had only a few of these, and to get more, you had to get in-game currency (and you started with a small number of in-game coins), which you'd basically have to get by paying U.S. dollars or equivalent.  Here's a *definite* sign: you could only build one building at once (or one resource building and one main-city building), and you couldn't make a build queue; if you wanted to upgrade this building after that building was done, you would have to click it yourself.  Also there was a daily lottery, which was the other way to get items that you'd otherwise have to pay money for.  Mmm, I guess that most of these descriptions of Farmville apply directly to the game, although this game might be even more advanced in some ways: http://www.philmichaelson.com/user-generated-content/8-design-tactics-farmville/

My reaction was to make use of keyboard macro software.  I wrote a Common Lisp program to automate upgrading and crap, and left my computer running.  I even made it warn me when it was about to do something (by switching between applications--something I'd notice--and giving me a few seconds to stop typing or mousing), so I could continue using my computer and be relatively uninterrupted.  Eventually I had fully upgraded my cities, and found that you could only control two cities at a time (more if you pay money or get lucky), and lost interest; I was no longer nearly so able to accumulate capital (in the form of knowledge and expertise in the game--I make no distinction between "I know how to do stuff" and "I know how to make my computer do stuff"--and in-game capital) and dominate the world.  (I've played a lot of Civilization.)

For lulz, here is my code.  Don't ask how to try to run it; I'm just throwing it out there.  http://pastebin.com/cwNK2FHy

I can take an autistic joy in doing mundane things (if that's the correct use of the term).  As long as there are things that prevent me from spending too long on unhealthy things, this is a sustainable strategy.  (I will throw out the idea that nerds, by definition, have avoided one time-sucking unhealthy thing: working to maintain social status.)  It doesn't even necessarily matter *what* drives me away from bad things, as long as something, sooner or later, reliably does so.

At the end of one event, several people (including me) came up to talk to Paul Graham.  He talked one-on-one with some of us, and I observed that there was a line of people waiting to do the same.  He seemed absorbed and interested in all the conversations he had; I think there are a lot of nice people that want to talk to Paul Graham about things that interest him, and he could probably spend all his time talking to these people.  How does he avoid that?  One of his co-organizers (also his wife) said that they had to go now, and he said, ah, ok, and got up and left.  That is one way to avoid having your interests consume your life, without making them non-interests.

I think that, as people get deeply into some thing, they develop tastes.  I hate games that fail in various ways: tower defense games that require you to select towers with the mouse rather than a key is an example from the top of my head.  Or when the game guides you to do some other painful, repetitive thing a lot, and it doesn't have a way to automate it.  (Then maybe I figure out how to use keyboard macro software to put that crap in.  I've done that with various flash games.)

As people get used to some higher standard of living, they take it for granted and start wanting more.  I think many people *lament* this fact.  The story Brave New World is a testament to how *hard* it is to overcome this: they deprive most people of oxygen in their artificial wombs to make them stupider (already that can't happen in a free country), indoctrinate them by day and hypnotically by night to be satisfied with their position in life, and again indoctrinate them to desire and to keep reaching for frivolous new clothes and consumer products; and even then I'm not convinced they can keep things that way without a proactive police force that identifies and pacifies dissidents.

Note also that, um... this might be kind of harsh, but if eating bad food and stuff and being obese is a trait with strongly negative survival value, then those people will slowly die out.  You might expect people with a gene that makes them hate to eat too much grease to start becoming widespread.  If everyone wastes their life watching videos, then those who find it painful to look at a screen for too long will have an advantage.  Also, if learned behaviors and emotional associations can help you avoid bad things, then of course successful people will have those, and they will probably spread outwards.  Humans will adapt, one way or another, as long as no one actively goes and kills everyone.

Look deeply into things.  Feel them fully.  If you feel something that annoys you, or leaves you unsatisfied, notice that; wonder about it, and feel it, until you understand what's wrong.  Then see if you can fix it, or see if you're satisfied with just tolerating it.  Often the task of fixing something will lead you to do something awesome, if you feel deeply enough.  I get annoyed at people writing Youtube comments about "N people disliked this video"/"N people suck", and I write some shell commands to estimate the percentage of top-voted comments of this form.  I'm irritated at some artificial limitations and what I consider bad decisions in the EV Nova game engine; I try to write the game myself, and then I find that I need to create a language implementation with real-time garbage collection.  All right, I'm working on that.  Mike Stoklasa is irritated at all the things wrong in some Star Trek and Star Wars movies, and he creates long video reviews that complain about them, that combine humor with an incidental filmmaking and general storytelling education.  At the very least, you'll probably come out with a deep understanding of whatever topic it is.

Does this work for everyone?  Does it even work for me?  I don't know.  I just prefer to live this way.  But maybe we can expect to see it do well in the future, to be a strategy that makes its users resistant to wasting their lives on superstimuli; they will take the superstimulus and find imperfections and go do something about those imperfections--frequently something good and productive.  (I asked, about my food preferences, "Do weird aspects of my personality factor in somehow?"  That seems likely now.)

What the hell did I just write?  Did I have a point in all this?  (That I'm right about everything.)  Oh well, time to post.  ...Lolz.  "That comment was too long."  Time to put this on pastebin.