Last week, the internet filled with unboxing videos of a perfume. A cool blue box. An ice cream scoop. You dig through it and find, at the bottom, a bottle of Miu Miu’s Fleur de Lait. The ice cream looks beautiful and delicious. In reality, it is kinetic sand.

Why are we seeing more and more brands choose to frame their products through the language of food? And why is it so mesmerizing to watch?

A 2025 study from Hokkaido University followed a group of young adults and measured the relationship between smartphone use and interoception, the ability to detect and trust internal signals from the body. Hunger. Fatigue. Stress. Heartbeat.

The finding: people with high attentional bias toward their smartphones showed a measurable decline in this capacity.

“Attention continuously drawn to technology impairs the ability to perceive internal signals.”

• Dr. Kazuki Miyahara, Hokkaido University, 2025

This is a physiological mechanism: when attention is oriented outward toward the screen, it competes with attention oriented inward. Both directions cannot operate at full capacity simultaneously.

The Human Clarity Institute’s Digital Life Survey, which included 1,003 respondents across six countries, added another dimension: more than half described a feeling of emptiness after prolonged screen use, not tiredness, but a kind of hollow.

“Scrolling produces movement without arrival.”

The body, meanwhile, waits. It looks for landing. Something with an end. Texture. Smell. Resistance.

Anemoia is a word coined by lexicographer John Koenig, to name emotions that exist in no language yet.

A nostalgia for a past you never lived.

A generation that grew up inside a digital world finds itself longing for a time when moments didn’t need to be filtered, storied, documented, in order to be real. A longing for a time when the body was present to itself, not recorded from the outside.

This is not nostalgia for a past they knew. It is a thirst for a presence they never had. And for the Hokkaido study that measured the decline of interoception, anemoia is not a poetic feeling. It is a logical response to a measurable deficit.

To understand the ice cream you cannot eat, you need to go back to the 1920s.

The concept of “guilty pleasure” is not ancient. It was born with the flappers the thin women of the Jazz Age. For the first time in modern history, Western culture bound morality to food: there are foods that are “allowed” and foods that are “forbidden,” and what you eat reflects who you are.

In 2025 and 2026, this dynamic found a new face worth noting not as judgment, but as cultural diagnosis. GLP-1 medications have introduced what researchers describe as a clinicalization of the body: a growing detachment from physical appetite, where hunger becomes a signal to manage rather than one to follow. Fashion has quietly returned to 1990s silhouettes. Bodies receding not through effort but through pharmacology.

This is not a moral observation. It is a structural one: when ingestion becomes fraught, the desire for sensory experience doesn’t disappear, it migrates.

And then Miu Miu arrives, offering ice cream you cannot eat. Pleasure without the weight of ingestion. Something that photographs, that carries scent, that has texture you can feel.

This mechanism has a name in another context: the mukbang phenomenon — eating videos that accumulated billions of views. Studies found that people restricting their eating used these videos as a form of sensory substitution: experiencing food through another, without ingesting it themselves. One participant described it plainly:

“It feels good to watch someone eat food I can’t have, something too expensive, or too indulgent.”

A 2025 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research confirmed: watching mukbang, sight and sound alone is sufficient to produce sensory satisfaction. The brain registers the food even when the body has not eaten it.

What Miu Miu understood is that this same need for tactile grounding in an increasingly abstract world could be met not through a screen, but through an object. Kinetic sand. A scent. Something that resists the finger.

Same impulse. Mukbang is the raw, unbranded version. Miu Miu gave it a container.

This is why so many brands are moving in the same direction.

Rhode three years, ten products. Glazing Milk, Barrier Butter, Caramelized Banana Lip Treatment. Names that resonate before you buy them. Their approach: don't create a need ignite a craving

Jacquemus show invitations with real bread and butter, logo embossed. Food as visual language that says: luxury doesn’t have to be cold.

Both are tapping into the same cultural moment: a hunger for physical experience in a world that has become too digital. Food that cannot be eaten, yet just by looking, you can almost taste it.

The difference is subtle. Food as experience without the body, ice cream you don’t eat. The experience of food, without the act of eating.

Same hunger. From opposite directions.

The impulse to touch ice cream you cannot eat, this is not “consumerism.” It is not “clever marketing.” It is the architecture of desire: the way longing finds a form when its direct routes are blocked.

When the body loses interoception, it seeks intense sensory experience from outside. When culture makes ingestion fraught. it seeks food that can be felt without eating. When the digital disconnects, it seeks something it can actually feel.

Miu Miu did not create a need. They found a gap that already existed and gave it a beautiful container.

The brands that will matter in the coming years will not be those that understand what people want to buy. They will be those that understand what the body is trying to say, when it no longer has language to say it.

Image credits Miu Miu, Rhode, Jacquemus

Sources

Haruki et al., Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness, Communications Psychology, 2025

Human Clarity Institute, Digital Life Survey, 2025

Journal of Medical Internet Research, Use of Mukbang in Health Promotion: Scoping Review, 2025

Fast Company, Rhode Most Innovative Companies 2026, March 2026

The Drum, How brands showed up in 2025, April 2026

The entire conversation about humanoid robots has narrowed into one question: How advanced are they already?

The demos look good. The videos are smooth. Everyone’s measuring the gap between human and machine like it’s just a matter of time before it closes.

But this misses what’s actually happening. Not because the question isn’t important, it is. But because it lets us skip over the systems being built right now, today.

There’s a difference between a robot in a warehouse and a robot in a home. Warehouses are controlled environments. Mapped, predictable, repetitive. The tasks are clear, the variables are limited, and the logic is straightforward.

It is about reducing cost, increasing efficiency, and removing the need for human bodies during routine operation. This is where the technology works because this is where the world has already been designed to accommodate it.

Homes are different.

A home changes constantly. Objects carry meaning, not just function.

There are children, pets, fatigue, embarrassment, and mess. A domestic robot doesn’t just need to perform tasks, it needs to read context, to know when not to act, and to move through a space where a mistake isn’t just inefficient, it’s harmful.

And here’s the reality. Most of these systems don’t work autonomously yet. Not reliably in actual homes. To bridge this gap, companies increasingly rely on remote human operators.

Sometimes this is called expert mode, sometimes it is described as training, and sometimes it is not mentioned at all.

The robot appears independent, but someone somewhere is seeing through its cameras and making decisions on its behalf.In a controlled demo, this is occasional. In a real home, this is constant.

This gap won’t close overnight. The decisions being made now about how to organize this human labor aren’t temporary fixes. They’re setting the foundation.

How do we organize this human presence?

There are two directions this can go. One is a future where technology hides the humans inside it.

The robot appears polite, smooth, and independent while an invisible human enters the most private spaces of someone else’s life without acknowledgment or mutual accountability.

The human relationship exists, but only as hidden infrastructure designed to maintain the appearance of autonomy.

The other offers a different choice, and we already have a working example. In Tokyo, a café employs remote controlled robots operated entirely by people with severe disabilities like ALS or paralysis, conditions that make physical presence impossible. They work from home, earn income, interact with customers through the robot, and everyone in the café knows exactly who they’re speaking with. The technology doesn’t hide them. It extends them.

It creates real encounters between people who would otherwise never meet.

The components are similar, but the choices shape entirely different human futures.Most of the public conversation still focuses on when robots will be truly autonomous. It’s easier to talk about a future that hasn’t arrived yet. But whether we build this human dependence honestly or hide it will matter more than any algorithm.

A domestic robot isn’t just another appliance. It is a presence that mediates human connection. The real choice is whether we build those relationships honestly.

This is Inter-Human Experience™: making visible the space between machine and human, where all the real decisions live. What we build into that space becomes the world we inhabit. Part of Humane Future Ecologies™, creating futures that feel like home.

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