Regular readers may realize that the body is a subject, and object, I recurrently come back to. Indeed, I designate this as the focus of my work however I do tend to perseverate on the brain. Other structures or assemblages have been known to generate great interest on my part but I'm all over that brain, all the time, that's me.
Now, in the past, I have focused numerous times on the relationship we hold with our own bodies, constructed around regimes, treatments, perceptions and respects for the body, our body. My concept of "bodily responsibility" suggests a separation from the self and the body and an absolute objectification. Here, with the nootropic drinks, we see the body as something to feed with what we can see as performance enhancing food in order to maintain optimum functioning. Fuel to an engine. Now, when everyone begins sentience with the same engine, equality would mandate all are given the same quality fuel. Marketed nootropic drinks bend this moral membrane we have naturally between what is and what is not a basic human right. Energy drinks, nootropic drinks, supplements and all other manner of proto-health sustenance that exist in the consumer realm are not basic human rights, as evidenced by their price point and accessibility. This puts the producers of such super foods in a hard spot between profiting from selling a lovely thought about who deserves to be healthy and selling a life-sustaining fluid, so essential to health it is deserved by all the lot of us, the 7 billion that is.
As Western bio-medical discourse preaches about maintenance and preventative care actions, consuming nootropic drinks and other supplemental foodstuffs can be seen as one such action, a fundamental severance occurs between the subjective,victim based model of suffering and the objective and morally weighted based model of suffering.
When engaging with the U.S. health care system, we can be made to feel, and indeed it may be the agenda, that we are responsible for our own health in the way we are responsible for a pet or a dependent. Health supplements, drinks included, may be expensive, but they make you a better person, physically and morally, all the same.
I do not disagree fully here, and to treat and maintain a healthy body is indeed a set of actions to be reflected upon with pride however, linkages between morality and health can be problematic. The problem being, not all health conditions can be controlled or avoided through responsible body ownership, indeed many can not. The brain is just as prevalent in this argument, with an added element of brain power that can be "harnessed".
SO, if we pair our sense of bodily responsibility with the neuro-movement that so saturates the consumer market at the moment then we get this:
or this
Are we to believe more the fallacy that is the concept of there being a convenient way to good health when seeing these? Do these beverages really exist in the democratic society we pretend to live in? A society where buying expensively carbonated water can increase intelligence and energy, and as the story goes, life as well?
I had the Brain Toniq today at lunch. With regularity, I hit the 2pm slump like every other office girl who lacks thrill in her job and although there is a Starbucks in my office building lobby, I try to find ways around engaging in that patronage. The so-called "energy drinks" are usually too harsh for my delicately inclined palate so I tend towards the cafe side of things and to give perspective, I have no real aversion to herbal qualities and rather like fennel, anise and tarragon, or liquorices. Though I like to think I have better uses for some four-dollar and odd cents every day around this time, I fail to find any one of those ways when I have fifteen minutes to refresh and recenter my energies. This all been said, I still can't get excited about Brain Toniq, even despite it so smugly self-identifying as a "think drink". I could really almost see myself getting behind any product that gets people thinking about their brains more. And I wish there was a drink that could actually make me think with greater anything, other than the stupidity brought on by alcohol or the cock-eyed enthusiasm caffeine totes with it. Damn.
