Thanissaro wrote at length about the process of feeding and nutriment in his book dependent co-arising. Reading that might clear a lot of things up. It seems too much to reduce everything to dukkha. Sensual pleasures are just that, but there is a much greater happiness disjoined from it all.
At any given moment, the mind is presented with a wide range of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. From this range, it chooses which things to focus attention on and which to ignore in its search for food. These choices shape the world of its experience. This is why, if you and I walk through a store at the same time, for example, we will experience different stores to the extent that we’re looking for different things. The mind’s search for nourishment is constant and never-ending, because its food— especially its mental food—is always threatening to run out. Whatever satisfaction it derives from its food is always short-lived. No sooner has the mind found a place to feed than it’s already looking for where to feed next. Should it stay here? Should it go somewhere else? These incessant questions of “What next?” “Where next?” drive its search for well-being. But because these questions are the questions of hunger,they themselves keep eating away at the mind. Driven by hunger to keep answering these questions, the mind often acts compulsively—sometimes willfully—out of ignorance, misunderstanding what causes unnecessary stress and what doesn’t. This causes it to create even more suffering and stress. The purpose of meditation is to end this ignorance, and to root out the questions of hunger that keep driving it. (Thanisaro, Each and Every Breath)
“Where there is no passion for the nutriment of physical food, where there is
no delight, no craving, then consciousness does not land there or increase.
Where consciousness does not land or increase, there is no alighting of name-&-
form. Where there is no alighting of name-&-form, there is no growth of
fabrications. Where there is no growth of fabrications, there is no production of
renewed becoming in the future. Where there is no production of renewed
becoming in the future, there is no future birth, aging, & death. That, I tell you,
has no sorrow, affliction, or despair." SN 12:64
“Sensing a feeling of pleasure, [the arahant] senses it disjoined from it. Sensing a feeling of pain, he senses it disjoined from it. Sensing a feeling of neither pleasure nor pain, he senses it disjoined from it. This is called a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones disjoined from birth, aging, & death; from sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs. He is disjoined, I tell you, from suffering & stress” — SN 36:6