Life's Pleasures Quote by Marvin Harris

The sting in Harris's line is the word "unfortunately" - not because he's surprised by corporate behavior, but because he thinks the outcome is predictable once you understand humans as animals with mismatched hardware. "Our weakness" is doing a lot of work. It frames overeating less as moral failure and more as a design flaw: appetites evolved for scarcity, then got dropped into an ecosystem where calories are cheap, omnipresent, and engineered to be hard to stop eating. Harris's intent is to move the conversation from willpower to structure, from personal responsibility to incentives.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of an industry that treats ignorance as a resource. "Not knowing when we have had enough" isn't just about individual satiety cues; it's about how modern foods are built to blur them - hyper-palatable combinations of salt, sugar, fat, texture, and portion sizing that outpace the body's slower "I'm full" signals. The exploitation isn't incidental; it's business logic. If profit correlates with frequency and volume, the market naturally selects for products and marketing that keep the eating loop running.

Context matters: Harris, as an anthropologist-leaning scientist, made a career arguing that culture and consumption aren't mysteries of taste but outcomes of material conditions and power. This quote sits comfortably in a late-20th-century moment when processed food, television advertising, and supersized portions were normalizing a new baseline. He's not asking for better manners at the table; he's calling for an external brake - regulation, reformulation, or at least ethical restraint - because the internal one has been deliberately outgunned.