The most puzzling addictions are those that don’t involve the consumption of any substance. Gambling is the obvious example – we’ve known for hundreds of years that it can tear apart families as ruthlessly as hard liquor. In academic circles, these non-substance addictions are known as ‘process addictions’. It’s now clear that things you don’t eat, drink, smoke or inject can nevertheless disturb your brain in much the same way as drugs. And, in an age when so much digital entertainment – notably video games and online pornography – is designed to be as addictive as possible, their potential to do this is accelerating rapidly.
The global marketplace offers a bewildering selection of consumer experiences, simultaneously delightful and dangerous. It’s constantly modifying products and experiences that were never previously considered to be addictive – or simply didn’t exist until recently.
Also, as we’ll see, corporations have learned how to supercharge old-established intoxicants by popularising new patterns of consuming them. One vivid example is the phenomenon of recreational binge drinking, particularly by women. People have always got drunk, and a minority have always enjoyed going on binges with their friends. What no one predicted was the emergence of the binge as everyday behaviour. Ordinary drinkers, with no history of a problem with alcohol, now plan evenings to end in a messy and helpless surrender to the drug. And this is seen as normal.
It would be silly to pretend that everyone is equally threatened by this changing style of consumption. But the prospect of whole populations learning new ways of tampering with the flow of pleasure-giving chemicals in their brains is one that should make us feel very uneasy.
With that in mind, let’s take another look at the cake, the phone and the pill.
In 1996 a tiny corner shop called the Magnolia Bakery opened in Manhattan’s West Village. Its old-fashioned cakes and pies quickly became the objects of guilty fantasy for women who liked to pretend that nothing more fattening than tuna carpaccio ever passed their lips. Then, in 2000, the bakery featured in an episode of Sex and the City. This was the moment America’s cupcake craze began in earnest.
In the episode, Carrie and Miranda were filmed sitting outside the Magnolia. Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, told her friend that there was a new obsession in her life. This turned out to be a new boyfriend called Aidan – but viewers could have been forgiven for thinking it was icing sugar, judging by the way Parker was pushing the rose-coloured cupcake into her face. Viewed in slow motion, it’s a faintly disgusting spectacle. The truth is, there’s no elegant way to eat a Magnolia cupcake, which is why customers adopt self-mocking smiles as the fluorescent globules of frosting tumble down their chins.
‘When Carrie took her first bite, she left teeth marks in my neighbourhood,’ wrote Emma Forrest, a journalist living opposite the bakery. ‘Not long after the episode was broadcast, the tourists started to arrive and the bakery started charging them if they wanted to take photographs of Carrie and co’s favourite haunt. With the influx of tourists came the rats, as half-eaten cupcakes were dumped into overflowing bins outside my apartment … Riding on this extraordinary upturn in its fortunes, Magnolia changed its hours, and stayed open to midnight throughout the summer. I was kept awake each night by the hoots and hollers coming from the queue that now snakes all the way around the block.’4
In 2006 and 2007 I spent quite a lot of time in the West Village visiting my friend Harry Mount, then New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. By this time, Sex and the City was off the air and the cupcake craze had gone mainstream: Magnolia-style bakeries were opening all over America. Yet, on chilly autumn evenings, there was still a queue outside the original store, and it didn’t seem to consist of tourists. ‘Our local stick-thin fashion victims can’t get enough of the things,’ explained Harry. In which case, how come they were stick-thin? Was there a parking lot at the back where they threw them up?
That was a bad-taste private joke between Harry and me, but when I recently did a word search on ‘cupcakes’ and ‘bulimia’ I discovered a blog by a bulimic mother of two entitled ‘Eating Cupcakes in the Parking Lot’. Its posts appear to have been deleted, but cupcakes feature prominently in many other blogs devoted to eating disorders. After a row with her boyfriend, one bulimic girl baked cupcakes decorated with the words ‘I am sorry’. She added mournfully: ‘And now where are those cupcakes? Floating along a sewage pipe.’5
This sort of incident isn’t unusual. Abigail Natenshon, a psychotherapist who treats eating disorders, tells another horror story involving cupcakes: ‘One young woman with bulimia found herself, at a time of great stress, compelled to drive into a 7–11 convenience store where she purchased three cupcakes; she then proceeded to stuff them down her throat whole in an emotional frenzy in the dark and deserted alley behind the store. As far as she was concerned, her binge had begun at the moment when she drove her car up to the front door and did not finish until she had purged the cupcakes.’6
The disturbing subculture of ‘pro-ana’ (pro-anorexia) websites actually encourages girls to starve themselves, or ‘b/p’ (binge and purge). A recurring question on these sites is: are cupcakes easy to throw up? Answer: not as easy as ice cream, but eating them with diet soda can help.
‘It doesn’t surprise me that cupcakes are favourites with bulimics,’ the food writer Xanthe Clay told me. ‘They’re the ultimate eye-candy, primped and styled like a teen pop star, the food incarnation of many girls’ fantasies.
‘In the gossip magazine world, where shopping is the only serious rival to celebrity in terms of aspiration, cupcakes are consumer-desirable in a way a Victoria sponge isn’t. If having an eating disorder is about a desperate attempt to take control, then eating these artificial, too-perfect creations may be particularly satisfying. More likely, the huge sugar rush will feed the craving, and provide a quivering kick of hypoglycaemia. The texture – smooth, aerated, oily – may, like ice cream, be especially suitable for regurgitation.
‘And – just my prejudice this – but perhaps the ultimate emptiness of cupcakes, those empty calories, the way they never deliver on flavour what they promise in looks, is a metaphor for the hopelessness of the woman, or man, with bulimia.’
Although a high proportion of bulimics have ‘issues’ with cupcakes, clearly the overwhelming majority of people who eat them don’t throw them up. They do, however, seem obsessed with them. A chain called Crumbs sells 1.5 million cupcakes every month in 35 US stores; in June 2011, it started trading on the Nasdaq, with an opening valuation of $59 million. And market analysts predict robust growth if Crumbs moves into emerging markets such as China.
The Facebook group for Sprinkles Cupcakes had, at the time of writing, been ‘liked’ by 325,000 people and was spreading the cupcake gospel with near-hysterical enthusiasm.7 For Valentine’s Day: ‘It’s back! The first 50 people to whisper “love at first bite” at each Sprinkles receive a free raspberry chocolate chip!’ For Super Sunday: ‘Whether you’re rooting for the New York Giants or New England Patriots or just tuning in for the commercials, Sprinkles Super Sunday boxes will score a touchdown at any viewing party. Each box contains 6 Red Velvet and 6 Vanilla cupcakes, adorned with football sugar decorations and your favourite team’s name. Just don’t get tackled reaching for the last one!’ There were even signs that cupcakes were trying to infiltrate the military-industrial complex: ‘Sprinkles is excited to bring freshly baked cupcakes to the Pentagon! Pentagon employees can find us in the Main Concourse …’
This is a resilient craze, as Dana