Hungry - Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning

"Hungry is an excellent text about people’s methods of adapting to modern life; it encompasses psychology, generational identities, and marketing in its considerations of contemporary society.”

—Foreword Reviews

We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers.

Why? What are we really hungry for?

In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today's global food and lifestyle culture. How are 21st-century innovations and pressures are redefining people's needs and desires? How does "foodie" culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression?

Weaving together evolutionary psychology and sociology with captivating investigative reporting from around the world, Turow-Paul reveals the modern hungers—physical, spiritual, and emotional—that are driving today's top trends:

The connection between the "death" of the cereal industry and access to work email on our smartphones

How posting images of our dinners on social media both fulfills and feeds our hunger for human connection in an increasingly isolated world

The ways "diet tribes" and boutique fitness gyms substitute for organized religion

How access to round-the-clock news relates to the blowback against GMO foods

Wellness retreats, astrology, plant parenthood, and other methods of easing modern anxiety

Why "eating local" might be the key to solving not just climate change, but our current global sense of disconnection

From gluten-free and Paleo diets to meal kit subscriptions, and from mukbang broadcast jockeys to craft beer, Hungry deepens our understanding of why we do what we do, and helps us find greater purpose and joy in today's technology-altered world.