He stood in the restaurant with the menu in his hands and nothing in him wanted the food. Not hunger exactly but the absence of its possibility. The dishes were explained in careful detail, each ingredient called out like evidence at a trial. Heirloom tomatoes. Locally sourced. Grass-fed. As if the naming of things could make you want them.

The waiter waited.

I'll have the steak, he said.

The steak came and he ate it without tasting it. His mouth moved. His jaw worked. The meat went down. Somewhere in him the ancient machinery processed protein into energy but the circuit that translated food into pleasure had gone dark. Like a phone that charges but won't turn on.

Around him people photographed their plates. Small bright screens in the dim restaurant. Recording what they would not remember eating.

ii. the refrigerator ritual

At home he opened the refrigerator and looked at the food and closed it again. Opened it. Closed it. A ritual with no culmination. Everything in there he had eaten a thousand times. Not the actual food, but its template. Its category. Its idea. The sandwich he might make had already been made in his mind and found wanting before his hands had moved.

He ordered delivery. Scrolled through infinite options on the small bright screen. Each dish with a photograph more vivid than the thing it represented. His finger moved. Thai food. Italian. Mexican. Japanese. Burgers. Pizza. Back to Thai. He'd had Thai food yesterday. What did that matter. He'd had Thai food his whole life. Every permutation. Every possible arrangement of protein and rice and sauce.

He ordered the same thing he always ordered and when it came he ate it watching a video of someone else eating something else. The food on the screen looked better than the food in his hands. It always did.

iii. the old man knew about wanting

His father had come from a place where hunger was simple. You ate what there was. No choosing. The meal was the meal and you were grateful or you were not but you ate it either way. The old man had tried to explain this once, near the end, when language was leaving him. About appetite. About desire. How it used to work.

You wanted something and then you got it and then you didn't want it anymore, the old man said. That was how it was supposed to go.

And now?

Now you want it and you get it and you still want it. But more. Always more.

The old man had died wanting nothing. The morphine had seen to that. But even before the morphine there had been a settling. A quieting. He ate his meals in the hospice without complaint and without pleasure. Just the act of eating because the act was expected.

Toward the end he had said: I can't remember what hungry feels like.

iv. god knows you're hungry

The algorithm knew what he wanted before he did. Served him videos of people eating food he had never tried. Exotic fruits cut open to reveal flesh like alien organs. Street food from countries he would never visit. Mukbang videos where people consumed quantities that should have killed them.

He watched a woman eat a bucket of fried chicken. Watched a man eat fifty burgers. Watched someone bite into a honeycomb still full of living bees.

His own appetite guttered like a candle in wind.

v. thirty types of cereal

In the store he walked the aisles and everything looked the same. Thirty types of cereal. Forty types of bread. The paradox of choice wrapped in plastic and stacked to the ceiling. He picked things up and put them down. Nothing called to him. Nothing promised satisfaction.

A child screamed for candy. The mother said no. The child screamed louder. The mother relented. The child took the candy and grew quiet but did not seem happy. Just pacified. The candy disappeared into the child's mouth with mechanical efficiency.

He thought: we are teaching them early.

At the register he bought food he would not enjoy eating. The transaction processed. The bags were handed over. Outside the parking lot stretched away under flat gray sky.

vi. the infinite scroll

That night he lay in bed scrolling. Food videos. Travel videos. Videos of people opening packages. Videos of people watching videos. The dopamine came in small controlled bursts. Never enough to satisfy. Just enough to keep him scrolling.

He thought about hunger. Real hunger. The kind that makes your hands shake. The kind that the old man had known.

He had seen the faces. Scrolled past them between the food videos and the unboxings. Children with bellies swollen tight as drums. Flies on their faces. Eyes that looked through the camera to some point beyond it. The advertisements said seventy cents a day could feed them. Less than his coffee cost. Less than the delivery fee on the Thai food he ordered and half-ate and threw away.

He had never donated. Had thought about it. Had hovered his finger over the button. But then what? He sends seventy cents and tomorrow there are more faces. Always more faces.

He kept scrolling.

Somewhere in the house the refrigerator hummed. Full of food he would open and close the door on tomorrow. Looking for something he could not name. Something that was not there. Something that had never been there.

The screen glowed in the dark.

His finger moved.

The videos played.

Nothing satisfied but nothing stopped him from trying.