Is Food the New Sex?

George Will has an interesting editorial in the Washington Post about how food has become the new bell-weather of personal morality, replacing sex. This argument about how moral attitudes toward food and sex are being transposed is based on a policy-review document entitled "Is Food the New Sex" by Mary Eberstadt.

Essentially, the argument goes that Americans (and I presume they mean "North Americans") are increasingly loading food choices with moral implication. So people are becoming prudes about eating fair trade, organic, healthy, etc. food. But choices around sex seem to have less moral weight or meaning.

[Eberstadt] notes that for the first time ever, most people in advanced nations "are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want." One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened -- mindful eating and mindless sex. (source).

How do we account for the imbalance of prohibition on two goods that, objectively speaking, are both harmful in excess? Why the the transposition of inhibition from one to the other?

But her argument goes much further than showing that this has happened--she wants to explore the relationship between the sexual revolution and our current attitudes toward food:

Today "the all-you-can-eat buffet" is stigmatized and the "sexual smorgasbord" is not. Eberstadt's surmise about a society "puritanical about food, and licentious about sex" is this: "The rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone -- and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat."

Perhaps. Stigmas are compasses, pointing toward society's sense of its prerequisites for self-protection. Furthermore, as increasing numbers of people are led to a materialist understanding of life -- who say not that "I have a body" but that "I am a body" -- society becomes more obsessive about the body's maintenance. (source)

It's a fascinating analysis of the relationship between two primal human drives. And who can resist reading an essay with section titles like "Broccoli, pornography, and Kant"?

-t