Feasts and Famine: Consumption on “The Bachelor” 

In the Bachelor mansion, the kitchen stays empty. There are no gourmet chefs; no kind mothers work in the kitchen. No phones to order UberEats, no Instacart; no internet, even if you had the phones in the first place. There is you, your peers, and a fridge — filled once a week by well-meaning production assistants and interns — against the world. For most breakfasts, contestants partake of prepped, ready-to-eat ingredients to cut down on cooking time: fruits, hard boiled eggs, and granola bars. Lunches are pre-assembled items like salads or sandwiches.1 But the end of the day is communal. It's lived-in. "We were responsible for making all of our meals in the house," Ashley Spiver (a contestant from Bachelor Season 15, competing for the hand of Brad Womack) told Refinery29. "Dinner would be prepared by whoever felt like cooking for everyone."2 This means that contestants, who perhaps had cried over another's advances just three hours ago on a group date, come together to chop, simmer, and saute to feed and nourish one another, putting aside old feuds and fresh ones for a taste of care and comfort in the company of one another. The cameras are off for this one slice of quotidian life that the contestants are allowed to have: we never see it, not because it's boring per se, but because it breaks the fantasy of the unreal life of luxury the women supposedly live in during their journey. Eating — the viewing of, and the attending to — breaks the fantasy of the perfect woman, who supposedly needs nothing but the approval of her husband-to-be to nourish herself.

You can eat at the mansion, but in the Bachelor franchise, you do not eat on dates. It's too loud for the mics strategically placed on your clothes and in your hair; it's too messy for the carefully crafted lipstick smudged on your plumped lips (natural, of course — that's what you tell the cameras, anyways). Rather than food (glistening tenderloins, bright green beans, savory gravies with breads begging you to mop them up) it's you up for consumption tonight: does your outfit accentuate your curves? Flatter your complexion? Does your hemline match with your shoes? Did you bring a purse, packed with the essentials in case you need a makeup touchup, after a heartfelt sob-story about your family back home who hates seeing you single, alone and sad? Bekah Martinez, a contestant on season 22 of The Bachelor (wooing Arie Luyendyk Jr.), stated on a TikTok video posted to her channel that the other contestants on her season spent thousands of dollars on their pieces, ranging from 10+ date night, cocktail party, and rose ceremony dresses, along with assorted odds and ends to attend to any weather needs.3 (Bekah herself borrowed clothes from a former employer and, when she needed more, wore dresses from Nordstrom's with the tags still on in the hopes of a return.)4

You owe it to the good American viewers at home — not to mention your date sitting across from you, staring at you without the benefit of filters and editing — to be as perfect as possible. You have to, in a sense, prove your worth, simultaneously eschewing the vain, self-absorbed, follower-hungry label that gets thrown on the women more and more while still putting thought into your appearance. Because of your role as a good — a service, even: the picture-perfect future Wife and Mother — you can't be seen eating food with too much gusto. You can eat in kind, however: The Bacherlor's resident Pretty Woman treatment. This means diamonds (Leslie Hughes, season 17 for Sean Lowe), a sold-out baseball field (Joelle "Jojo" Fletcher, season 20 for Ben Higgins),5 and a closet's worth full of new clothes custom picked for you by celebrity stylists (Rachael Kirkconnel, season 25 for Matt James).6Material beyond belief, consumption beyond what the average watcher consumes in a year. "It amuses me to feed you beautiful things," says the sinister, charming Ballin Mundson in Charles Vidor's Gilda, "because you eat with such a good appetite."7By consuming goods but not food, this places the contestants in a passive position: spoil them beyond belief, but god help us if a morsel crosses their lips on camera. Eating puts contestants in an active role, showing them as people with wants, needs, and desires, a role traditionally reserved for the Bachelor in this show. In his ability to act as both prize and prize-giver through the rose ceremony, the Bachelor is able to throw off the passive tropes of eye-candy that the women must adhere to. Allowing the women to eat — on camera, in front of the society that must uphold them as "winnable"— would be allowing them to break away from their assigned place in the show's structure.

The only time the banal act of eating is allowed is through the gauze of a fantasy life: Hometowns. Hometowns are a moment to share a sliver of your life with the one that you could be falling for. They're a moment to introduce them to yourself, to predict your future together. Reserved for the final four women in this journey, each takes a trip back to their city where their family lives, and shows them, essentially, what it would be like to be with them in a serious way. Ultimately, they're a moment to define "normalcy." And normal women — "cool girls," as Gillian Flynn dubs them — "jam[ . . . ] hot dogs and hamburgers into [their] mouth like [they're] hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2."8 Producers have stripped away the glamor of the romantic date setting and all of its semiotic renderings (candles and low lighting, velvet tablecloths, half-filled glasses of deep red wine; all cultural suggestions of media-defined sexual intimacy), and have turned it into a wholesome, family-oriented activity. By stressing the "home" in hometown, we instead are greeted with images of family dinners, beer by the lake at dusk, and ruddy-cheeked kids running around chasing the family's golden retriever: wholesome, salt of the earth American people. When then-president Barack Obama visited Philadelphia, the first thing he did was head to local staple Pat's and get himself a cheesesteak; to eat is to be American; to consume is to qualify yourself under capitalism and assert your market power. The freedom that food asserts is once again shattered, but in an entirely different way than the simple act of refusal to eat on camera. Here, the act of eating on camera — noshing on beloved city staples like deep dish pizza or shellfish — is a perversion of reality. It insists upon continuing the producer-fed version where the women competing become trophies themselves, not human beings: you are furthering a new notion of perfection by inverting its inversion, making imperfection part of perfection's image. It's exactly what the scenario requires you to do to maintain the appeal of hometown, down-to-earth goodness. On a date, one doesn't sully themselves or their designer clothes and precise makeup, or admit to the notion of wanting lest it residually transfer over to the person they're seeing. (Wanting, the act of it, is incredibly embarrassing; perfect girls don't want, they get. They deserve.) So, at home, one must be comfortable and at ease enough to endlessly gorge while still maintaining visual perfection. Crumbs or sauce on mouths and chins here aren't bad if you can laugh it off with your lover as he wipes the offending stain off with his dampened thumb or napkin, beaming at you with bright, soulful eyes. That's what America is all about.

By distorting the role of food on- and off-camera, producers of The Bachelor have elevated not only its validity as a capital-S Sign (one that stands for cultural currency and deep-seeded notions of tradition), but they have ultimately taken the act of eating and have turned it into an energetic act of consumption. By refusing to eat, the contestants on the show, glamorous as ever, feed the consuming male gaze of the bachelor himself and the eyes of American television viewers; or, as Alec Irwin argues, "Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life. On the one hand because eating implies dismemberment and destruction of that which is consumed: we live by making other beings die. On the other hand because eating reveals a contradiction in the basic structure of human desire. We long to be united with objects and beings outside ourselves, and eating — actual incorporation of an object into our own substance —  constitutes the ultimate form of union."9

The contestants have taken their hunger for food, their desire and their want, and have funneled it into the notion of The Bachelor: both the show and the man. On one hand, you have a multibillion dollar reality media corporation that success has been dwindling ever since the loss of its previous host, Chris Harrison, who defended the racist actions of a previous contestant on live camera.10The devastating cut to viewership has led the producers to rely on gimmicks such as two bachelorettes in one season competing for the same men (later, once the women realized the jealousy and arguing this was meant to produce, they divided the men amongst themselves). And yet, the franchise finds themselves with no lack of women vying to be considered to be on the show. On the other hand, you have a man who you've been told is your soulmate — he has to be, right? Or why else would twenty-something other girls want him too? He's handsome, he's funny when he wants to be, and he plans silly games and sweet dinners to go on together that always end in kisses in front of a dazzling display of fireworks. The show — and the man, and the man's worth in the eyes of America — need(s) the contestants to hunger for them in order to live. Simone Weil, theorist and mystic, talks in her writings of anthropophagy: a cannibalistic love that takes and consumes. We desire the other, she posits, because we need to feed off of their energy: "beloved beings . . . provide us with comfort, energy, a stimulant."11 We need them to continue living. We need them more than food itself. It is only in this desire can we find glimpses of ourselves solely because we have (re)constructed ourselves around this consumption. Perhaps this is why stories of cannibalism entice us so much: the thought of desiring the other enough to eat them. Roland Barthes talks of this theoretical all-consuming consumption of the other in his book A Lover's Discourse. In order to fall in complete, earth-shattering love, we must break down the Lover, the Other, into consumable, perverted parts that consume our every waking thought; in their wholeness, it's too much to bear. Instead we must pick them apart, gorging ourselves on their voice, their languor, their tears, their dedication. The amorous subject suffers the woes of love because of the potential of the feast.

It goes like this: you are young and looking for followers on apps that center the beautiful and thin. You adorn yourself in fantastic dresses and jewels, and you step out of a long limo filled with other girls — women;  no, competitors — and you lock eyes with the man who will be the love of your life no matter what. You fill your stomach with bubbles and fermented juices, you laugh and you smile and bat your lashes. The distance between you and your lover fills you with an undeniable hunger. You ache for him, for the camera, for the love. You love love. You love him. You are trying to love yourself.

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Madeline Shuron (@madelineshuron) studied theater at Bryn Mawr College and is an MFA candidate and lecturer in dance at Temple University. She is an artist, an educator, a scholar, and a movement/dance dramaturg; for more information, go to madelineshuron.com.

Bachelor fact: Hannah B. having sex in a windmill (twice!) changed my world.

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