King Erysichthon, so the ancient Roman legend goes (Ovid, Book VIII), was arrogant and contemptuous of the gods, for which he was severely punished: He was made to experience a voracious hunger, a “hurricane of starvation” (Hughes, 1997). All he could think about was his uncontrollable desire to procure food. “In the midst of feasts, he craves other feasts” (Marder, 2025). For Erysichthon, “food calls for food…” (Mandelbaum, 1993).

There is much more to this myth, and it does not end well for the king (Karasu, 2018). For our purposes, though, Erysichthon’s insatiable preoccupation with food, though admittedly with considerable poetic license, is a metaphor for those who experience what we call food noise.

Human survival, of course, depends on obtaining food. Ancel Keys began his monumental, almost 1,400-page tome, The Biology of Starvation (1950), with “…the history of man is in large part the chronicle of his quest for food. Hunger, or fear of it, has always played a major role in determining the actions and the attitudes of man."

Keys demonstrated that the 36 men who took part in what would come to be called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment exhibited symptoms of depression, irritability, "nervousness," and general emotional instability, with social withdrawal, difficulty concentrating, and loss of any sexual interest. Through the course of six months of semi-starvation, though, food and eating became their dominant concern, an “obsession,” “the most important thing” for these human guinea pigs, wrote Kalm and Semba (2005), who interviewed some of these men almost 60 years later. “…if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate,” reported one man.

Like Erysichthon, these men were led by circumstances to experience an extreme form of food noise, "incessant mental chatter" related to food (Dhurandhar et al., 2025).

No one knows from whom or where the term food noise originated. But it has taken social media by storm in recent years, and there are now thousands of references to it in the lay press, including in Scientific American (Young), The New York Times (Blum), and Weight Watchers. Both the Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia now include........

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