I’d been planning to continue my discussion of psychology in the media in a post about alcohol and drug abuse, but that topic will have to wait. I can’t resist seizing a timely opportunity to comment on an article in this week’s Food section of the Washington Post.

The piece, part of a spread on the cupcake craze, starts with the headline, “Harmless or Hedonistic? An unfrosted look at how they feed our souls.”  The reporter explores the long history of the diminutive confection and interviews bakery owners, economists, and food trend commentators about the explosion of cupcake emporia in the mid-2000s. All fine and kind of interesting to me because I like to keep up with food trends.  But then the journalistic train starts to wobble wildly and finally careens completely off the rails when a number of mental health “experts” weigh in. The reporter quotes a psychiatrist; a “registered interventionist,” whatever that is, who’s a regular on The Dr. Oz Show; a psychoanalyst; and two “psychotherapists,” one of whom has also received the Dr. Oz seal of approval. Dr. Oz, by the way, is a cardiac surgeon, not a psychologist or psychiatrist.

Paraphrasing couldn’t begin to do justice to the psychological interpretations, so I will reprint them verbatim.

Everyone has come [to the bakery] for a hug.  People are lining up not just because the cupcakes taste good.  A lot of things taste good.  They’re looking for that same feeling inside.  They’re all hungry for hugs.

Cupcakes are indicative of where this country is with our desire to self-soothe through food.  People tell themselves, ‘One won’t hurt me” because [cupcakes] are so small, dainty and delicious. Our desire for more and for self-soothing is out of control.

A good childhood experience is going to be relived over and over again as an adult.  The experience [of buying cupcakes from a truck, like the ice-cream trucks of childhood] might evoke, consciously or unconsciously, a very positive experience of feeling connected to one’s parents and feeling special in one’s parents’ eyes. 

And the best quote—and by best, I mean the most patently absurd piece of [looks like chocolate cupcake frosting] I’ve ever heard:

The popularity of cupcakes directly tracks the rise in cultural narcissism that has resulted from the Internet’s impact on our individual and cultural psyche.  Through our over-reliance on the Internet, we’ve become a culture of emotionally disconnected individuals who live in socially isolated cyber-fantasy worlds. The fantasy worlds we create for ourselves on the Internet are an equivalent of the modern myth of Narcissus where we spend hours in an isolated aggrandizement of self. Through cupcakes, seemingly innocent little ‘treats,’ we can project fantasies of who and what we desire to be. Instead of connecting us to others, however, cupcakes keep us separate and add to our sense of isolation. . . cupcakes evidence the narcissism born of the Internet by feeding us in shallow and un-nutritious ways. Similar to the way we cruise the Internet looking for bite-size and delicious bits of information, cupcakes enable us to cruise the sugary world of self-indulgence. 

Where to begin? After I finished reading the opinions of the therapists , I felt the powerful urge, which I am now indulging, to scream:  I AM NOT ONE OF THEM!

Had the reporter interviewed me, I would have suggested that our current obsession with cupcakes–and I don’t mean “obsession” in the clinical sense–is a fad, plain and simple, like flagpole sitting in the twenties (boy, those Dr. Oz experts could have really had a field day with that one!). Food trends come and go. Remember bagels in the nineties before everyone worried about carbs and became gluten-sensitive? Did their popularity stem from a need to fill an empty hole in the middle of our soul? Or how about our rampant consumption of foamy coffee beverages? Maybe the omnipresence of Starbucks signifies our yearning for connection by means of a shared caffeinated experience.

Whatever.

I could sure go for a cupcake right now. I wonder what that means.