788 lines
45 KiB
Markdown
788 lines
45 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2014-11-20T16:46:31.000Z'
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title: Is Food the New Sex? (2009)
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url: http://www.hoover.org/research/food-new-sex
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author: tacon
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points: 82
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 87
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1416501991
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_tacon
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- story_8636624
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objectID: '8636624'
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year: 2009
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---
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Of all the truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today — deeper
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than our financial fissures, wider even than our most obvious political
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and cultural divides — one of the most important is also among the least
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remarked. That is the chasm in attitude that separates almost all of us
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living in the West today from almost all of our ancestors, over two
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things without which human beings cannot exist: food and sex.
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The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are
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closely connected. About that much, philosophers and other commentators
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have been agreed for a very long time. As far back as Aristotle,
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observers have made the same point reiterated in 1749 in Henry
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Fielding’s famous scene in Tom Jones: The desires for sex and for food
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are joined at the root. The fact that Fielding’s scene would go on to
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inspire an equally iconic movie segment over 200 years later, in the Tom
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Jones film from 1963, just clinches the point.
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What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are
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free to have all the sex and food they want?
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Philosophers and artists aside, ordinary language itself verifies how
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similarly the two appetites are experienced, with many of the same words
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crossing over to describe what is desirable and undesirable in each
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case. In fact, we sometimes have trouble even talking about food without
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metaphorically invoking sex, and vice versa. In a hundred entangled
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ways, judging by either language or literature, the human mind juggles
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sex and food almost interchangeably at times. And why not? Both desires
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can make people do things they otherwise would not; and both are
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experienced at different times by most men and women as the most
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powerful of all human drives.
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One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this:
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Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not
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only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself.
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No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been subject
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in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus the
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potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual
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aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called “home-wrecking”
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— have been ameliorated in every recorded society by legal, social,
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and religious conventions, primarily stigma and punishment. Similarly,
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all societies have developed rules and rituals governing food in part to
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avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls over scarce necessities. And
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while food rules may not always have been as stringent as sex rules,
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they have nevertheless been stringent as needed. Such is the meaning,
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for example, of being hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the
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marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering rations on a ship.
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These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now
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raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was
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not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people
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reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at
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least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human
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beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?
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This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely
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connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect
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that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that
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they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so,
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for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with
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similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.
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In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly
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the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many
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people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they
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end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand
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as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration
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of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.
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As much as you want
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The dramatic expansion in access to food on the one hand and to sex on
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the other are complicated stories; but in each case, technology has
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written most of it.
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Up until just about now, for example, the prime brakes on sex outside of
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marriage have been several: fear of pregnancy, fear of social stigma and
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punishment, and fear of disease. The Pill and its cousins have
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substantially undermined the first two strictures, at least in theory,
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while modern medicine has largely erased the third. Even hiv/aids, only
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a decade ago a stunning exception to the brand new rule that one could
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apparently have any kind of sex at all without serious consequence, is
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now regarded as a “manageable” disease in the affluent West, even as it
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continues to kill millions of less fortunate patients elsewhere.
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As for food, here too one technological revolution after another
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explains the extraordinary change in its availability: pesticides,
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mechanized farming, economical transportation, genetic manipulation of
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food stocks, and other advances. As a result, almost everyone in the
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Western world is now able to buy sustenance of all kinds, for very
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little money, and in quantities unimaginable until the lifetimes of the
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people reading this.
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One result of this change in food fortune, of course, is the
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unprecedented “disease of civilization” known as obesity, with its
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corollary ills. Nevertheless, the commonplace fact of obesity in today’s
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West itself testifies to the point that access to food has expanded
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exponentially for just about everyone. So does the statistical fact that
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obesity is most prevalent in the lowest social classes and least
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exhibited in the highest.
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And just as technology has made sex and food more accessible for a great
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many people, important extra-technological influences on both pursuits —
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particularly longstanding religious strictures — have meanwhile
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diminished in a way that has made both appetites even easier to indulge.
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The opprobrium reserved for gluttony, for example, seems to have little
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immediate force now, even among believers. On the rare occasions when
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one even sees the word, it is almost always used in a metaphorical,
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secular sense.
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Similarly, and far more consequential, the longstanding religious
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prohibitions in every major creed against extramarital sex have rather
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famously loosed their holds over the contemporary mind. Of particular
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significance, perhaps, has been the movement of many Protestant
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denominations away from the sexual morality agreed upon by the previous
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millennia of Christendom. The Anglican abandonment in 1930 of the
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longstanding prohibition against artificial contraception is a special
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case in point, undermining as it subsequently did for many believers the
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very idea that any church could tell people what to do with their
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bodies, ever again. Whether they defended their traditional teachings or
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abandoned them, however, all Western Christian churches in the past
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century have found themselves increasingly beleaguered over issues of
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sex, and commensurately less influential over all but a fraction of the
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most traditionally minded parishioners.
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Of course this waning of the traditional restraints on the pursuit of
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sex and food is only part of the story; any number of non-religious
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forces today also act as contemporary brakes on both. In the case of
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food, for example, these would include factors like personal vanity,
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say, or health concerns, or preoccupation with the morality of what is
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consumed (about which more below). Similarly, to acknowledge that sex is
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more accessible than ever before is not to say that it is always and
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everywhere available. Many people who do not think they will go to hell
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for premarital sex or adultery, for example, find brakes on their
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desires for other reasons: fear of disease, fear of hurting children or
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other loved ones, fear of disrupting one’s career, fear of financial
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setbacks in the form of divorce and child support, and so on.
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Even men and women who do want all the food or sex they can get their
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hands on face obstacles of other kinds in their pursuit. Though many
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people really can afford to eat more or less around the clock, for
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example, home economics will still put the brakes on; it’s not as if
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everyone can afford pheasant under glass day and night. The same is true
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of sex, which likewise imposes its own unwritten yet practical
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constraints. Older and less attractive people simply cannot command the
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sexual marketplace as the younger and more attractive can (which is why
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the promises of erasing time and age are such a booming business in a
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post-liberation age). So do time and age still circumscribe the pursuit
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of sex, even as churches and other conventional enforcers increasingly
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do not.
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Still and all, the initial point stands: As consumers of both sex and
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food, today’s people in the advanced societies are freer to pursue and
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consume both than almost all the human beings who came before us; and
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our culture has evolved in interesting ways to exhibit both those
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trends.
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Broccoli, pornography, and Kant
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To begin to see just how recent and dramatic this change is, let us
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imagine some broad features of the world seen through two different sets
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of eyes: a hypothetical 30-year-old housewife from 1958 named Betty, and
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her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age, today.
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Begin with a tour of Betty’s kitchen. Much of what she makes comes from
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jars and cans. Much of it is also heavy on substances that people of our
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time are told to minimize — dairy products, red meat, refined sugars and
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flours — because of compelling research about nutrition that occurred
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after Betty’s time. Betty’s freezer is filled with meat every four
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months by a visiting company that specializes in volume, and on most
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nights she thaws a piece of this and accompanies it with food from one
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or two jars. If there is anything “fresh” on the plate, it is likely a
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potato. Interestingly, and rudimentary to our contemporary eyes though
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it may be, Betty’s food is served with what for us would appear to be
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high ceremony, i.e., at a set table with family members present.
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As it happens, there is little that Betty herself, who is adventurous by
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the standards of her day, will not eat; the going slogan she learned as
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a child is about cleaning your plate, and not doing so is still
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considered bad form. Aside from that notion though, which is a holdover
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to scarcer times, Betty is much like any other American home cook in
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1958. She likes making some things and not others, even as she prefers
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eating some things to others — and there, in personal aesthetics, does
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the matter end for her. It’s not that Betty lacks opinions about food.
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It’s just that the ones she has are limited to what she does and does
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not personally like to make and eat.
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Now imagine one possible counterpart to Betty today, her 30-year-old
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granddaughter Jennifer. Jennifer has almost no cans or jars in her
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cupboard. She has no children or husband or live-in boyfriend either,
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which is why her kitchen table on most nights features a laptop and goes
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unset. Yet interestingly enough, despite the lack of ceremony at the
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table, Jennifer pays far more attention to food, and feels far more
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strongly in her convictions about it, than anyone she knows from Betty’s
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time.
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Wavering in and out of vegetarianism, Jennifer is adamantly opposed to
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eating red meat or endangered fish. She is also opposed to
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industrialized breeding, genetically enhanced fruits and vegetables, and
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to pesticides and other artificial agents. She tries to minimize her
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dairy intake, and cooks tofu as much as possible. She also buys
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“organic” in the belief that it is better both for her and for the
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animals raised in that way, even though the products are markedly more
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expensive than those from the local grocery store. Her diet is heavy in
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all the ways that Betty’s was light: with fresh vegetables and fruits in
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particular. Jennifer has nothing but ice in her freezer, soymilk and
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various other items her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized in the
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refrigerator, and on the counter stands a vegetable juicer she feels she
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“ought” to use more.
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Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude
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separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that
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there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her
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exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who
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believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And
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she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people
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evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on
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occasion when she can.
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In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s
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definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of
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maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.
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Betty, on the other hand, would be baffled by the idea of dragooning
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such moral abstractions into the service of food. This is partly
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because, as a child of her time, she was impressed — as Jennifer is not
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— about what happens when food is scarce (Betty’s parents told her
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often about their memories of the Great Depression; and many of the
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older men of her time had vivid memories of deprivation in wartime).
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Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no
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sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter
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does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s
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mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that
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opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste
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— and only that.
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This clear difference in opinion leads to an intriguing juxtaposition.
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Just as Betty and Jennifer have radically different approaches to food,
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so do they to matters of sex. For Betty, the ground rules of her time —
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which she both participates in and substantially agrees with — are
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clear: Just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is subject to
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social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and out of
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established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly adheres to a
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traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Thus, for example, Mr. Jones
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next door “ran off” with another woman, leaving his wife and children
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behind; Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and wasn’t allowed back in
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school; Uncle Bill is rumored to have contracted gonorrhea; and so on.
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None of these breaches of the going sexual ethic is considered by Betty
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to be a good thing, let alone a celebrated thing. They are not even
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considered to be neutral things. In fact, they are all considered by her
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to be wrong.
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Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de
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gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong
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about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further
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believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people
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better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such
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on occasion when given the chance.
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In short, as Jennifer does with food, Betty in the matter of sex
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fulfills the requirements for Kant’s Categorical Imperative.
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Jennifer’s approach to sex is just about 180 degrees different. She too
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disapproves of the father next door who left his wife and children for a
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younger woman; she does not want to be cheated on herself, or to have
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those she cares about cheated on either. These ground-zero stipulations,
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aside, however, she is otherwise laissez-faire on just about every other
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aspect of nonmarital sex. She believes that living together before
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marriage is not only morally neutral, but actually better than not
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having such a “trial run.” Pregnant unwed Susie in the next town doesn’t
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elicit a thought one way or the other from her, and neither does Uncle
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Bill’s gonorrhea, which is of course a trivial medical matter between
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him and his doctor.
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Jennifer, unlike Betty, thinks that falling in love creates its own
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demands and generally trumps other considerations — unless perhaps
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children are involved (and sometimes, on a case-by-case basis, then
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too). A consistent thinker in this respect, she also accepts the
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consequences of her libertarian convictions about sex. She is
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pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, indifferent to ethical questions about
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stem cell research and other technological manipulations of nature (as
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she is not, ironically, when it comes to food), and agnostic on the
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question of whether any particular parental arrangements seem best for
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children. She has even been known to watch pornography with her
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boyfriend, at his coaxing, in part to show just how very
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laissez-faire she is.
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Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by
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universal moral law; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.
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Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between
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the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right
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and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and
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Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for
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opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that,
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for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and
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doesn’t like.
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Thus far, what the imaginary examples of Betty and Jennifer have
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established is this: Their personal moral relationships toward food and
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toward sex are just about perfectly reversed. Betty does care about
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nutrition and food, but it doesn’t occur to her to extend her opinions
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to a moral judgment — i.e., to believe that other people ought to do as
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she does in the matter of food, and that they are wrong if they don’t.
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In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way;
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it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done. Jennifer,
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similarly, does care to some limited degree about what other people do
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about sex; but it seldom occurs to her to extend her opinions to a moral
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judgment. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a
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different way — because it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental,
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simply not done.
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On the other hand, Jennifer is genuinely certain that her opinions about
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food are not only nutritionally correct, but also, in some deep,
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meaningful sense, morally correct — i.e., she feels that others ought to
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do something like what she does. And Betty, on the other hand, feels
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exactly the same way about what she calls sexual morality.
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As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different
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areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding,
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that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition
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of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative
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concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just
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||
over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a
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great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated
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people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty
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thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal
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moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.
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What has happened here?
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Role reversal
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Betty and jennifermay be imaginary, but the decades that separate the
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two women have brought related changes to the lives of many millions. In
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the 50 years between their two kitchens, a similar polar transformation
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||
has taken root and grown not only throughout America but also throughout
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||
Western society itself. During those years, cultural artifacts and
|
||
forces in the form of articles, books, movies, and ideas aimed at
|
||
deregulating what is now quaintly called “nonmarital sex” have abounded
|
||
and prospered; while the cultural artifacts and forces aimed at
|
||
regulating or seeking to re-regulate sex outside of marriage have
|
||
largely declined. In the matter of food, on the other hand, exactly the
|
||
reverse has happened. Increasing scrutiny over the decades to the
|
||
quality of what goes into people’s mouths has been accompanied by
|
||
something almost wholly new under the sun: the rise of universalizable
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||
moral codes based on food choices.
|
||
|
||
Begin with the more familiar face of diets and fads — the Atkins diet,
|
||
the Zone diet, the tea diet, the high-carb diet, Jenny Craig, Weight
|
||
Watchers, and all the rest of the food fixes promising us new and
|
||
improved versions of ourselves. Abundant though they and all their
|
||
relatives are, those short-term fads and diets are nevertheless merely
|
||
epiphenomena.
|
||
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||
Digging a little deeper, the obsession with food that they reflect
|
||
resonates in many other strata of the commercial marketplace. Book
|
||
reading, for example, may indeed be on the way out, but until it goes,
|
||
cookbooks and food books remain among the most reliable moneymakers in
|
||
the industry. To scan the bestseller lists or page the major reviews in
|
||
any given month is to find that books on food and food-thought are at
|
||
least reliably represented, and sometimes even predominate — to list a
|
||
few from the past few years alone: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s
|
||
Dilemma; Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation; Gary Taubes’ Good Calories,
|
||
Bad Calories; Bill Buford’s Heat.
|
||
|
||
Then there are the voyeur and celebrity genres, which have made some
|
||
chefs the equivalent of rock stars and further feed the public curiosity
|
||
with books like Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary
|
||
Underbelly or Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping
|
||
Waiter or The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making
|
||
of a Great Chef. Anywhere you go, anywhere you look, food in one form or
|
||
another is what’s on tap. The proliferation of chains like Whole Foods,
|
||
the recent institution by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of
|
||
state-mandated nutritional breakdowns in restaurants in the state of
|
||
California (a move that is sure to be repeated by governors in the other
|
||
49): All these and many other developments speak to the paramount place
|
||
occupied by food and food choices in the modern consciousness. As the
|
||
New York Times Magazine noted recently, in a foreword emphasizing the
|
||
intended expansion of its (already sizeable) food coverage, such writing
|
||
is “perhaps never a more crucial part of what we do than today — a
|
||
moment when what and how we eat has emerged as a Washington issue and a
|
||
global-environmental issue as well as a kitchen-table one.”
|
||
|
||
Underneath the passing fads and short-term fixes and notices like these,
|
||
deep down where the real seismic change lies, is a series of revolutions
|
||
in how we now think about food — changes that focus not on today or
|
||
tomorrow, but on eating as a way of life.
|
||
|
||
One recent influential figure in this tradition was George Ohsawa, a
|
||
Japanese philosopher who codified what is known as macrobiotics.
|
||
Popularized in the United States by his pupil, Michio Kushi,
|
||
macrobiotics has been the object of fierce debate for several decades
|
||
now, and Kushi’s book, The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health: A Complete
|
||
Guide to Naturally Preventing and Relieving More Than 200 Chronic
|
||
Conditions and Disorders, remains one of the modern bibles on food.
|
||
Macrobiotics makes historical as well as moral claims, including the
|
||
claim that its tradition stretches back to Hippocrates and includes
|
||
Jesus and the Han dynasty among other enlightened beneficiaries. These
|
||
claims are also reflected in the macrobiotic system, which includes the
|
||
expression of gratitude (not exactly prayers) for food, serenity in the
|
||
preparation of it, and other extra-nutritional ritual. And even as the
|
||
macrobiotic discipline has proved too ascetic for many people (and
|
||
certainly for most Americans), one can see its influence at work in
|
||
other serious treatments of the food question that have trickled
|
||
outward. The current popular call to “mindful eating,” for example,
|
||
echoes the macrobiotic injunction to think of nothing but food and
|
||
gratitude while consuming, even to the point of chewing any given
|
||
mouthful at least 50 times.
|
||
|
||
Alongside macrobiotics, the past decades have also seen tremendous
|
||
growth in vegetarianism and its related offshoots, another food system
|
||
that typically makes moral as well as health claims. As a movement, and
|
||
depending on which part of the world one looks at, vegetarianism
|
||
predates macrobiotics.[1](#note1) Vegetarian histories claim for
|
||
themselves the Brahmins, Buddhists, Jainists, and Zoroastrians, as well
|
||
as certain Jewish and Christian practitioners. In the modern West, Percy
|
||
Bysshe Shelley was a prominent activist in the early nineteenth century;
|
||
and the first Vegetarian Society was founded in England in 1847.
|
||
|
||
Around the same time in the United States, a Presbyterian minister named
|
||
Sylvester Graham popularized vegetarianism in tandem with a campaign
|
||
against excess of all kinds (ironically, under the circumstances, this
|
||
health titan is remembered primarily for the Graham cracker). Various
|
||
other American religious groups have also gone in for vegetarianism,
|
||
including the Seventh Day Adventists, studies on whom make up some of
|
||
the most compelling data about the possible health benefits of a diet
|
||
devoid of animal flesh. Uniting numerous discrete movements under one
|
||
umbrella is the International Vegetarian Union, which started just a
|
||
hundred years ago, in 1908.
|
||
|
||
Despite this long history, though, it is clear that vegetarianism apart
|
||
from its role in religious movements did not really take off as a mass
|
||
movement until relatively recently. Even so, its contemporary success
|
||
has been remarkable. Pushed perhaps by the synergistic public interest
|
||
in macrobiotics and nutritional health, and nudged also by occasional
|
||
rallying books including Peter Singer’s Animal Rights and Matthew
|
||
Scully’s Dominion, vegetarianism today is one of the most successful
|
||
secular moral movements in the West; whereas macrobiotics for its part,
|
||
though less successful as a mass movement by name, has witnessed the
|
||
vindication of some of its core ideas and stands as a kind of
|
||
synergistic brother in arms.
|
||
|
||
To be sure, macrobiotics and vegetarianism/veganism have their doctrinal
|
||
differences. Macrobiotics limits animal flesh not out of moral
|
||
indignation, but for reasons of health and Eastern ideas of proper
|
||
“balancing” of the forces of yin and yang. Similarly, macrobiotics
|
||
also allows for moderate amounts of certain types of fish — as strict
|
||
vegans do not. On the other hand, macrobiotics also bans a number of
|
||
plants (among them tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and tropical fruits),
|
||
whereas vegetarianism bans none. Nonetheless, macrobiotics and
|
||
vegetarianism have more in common than not, especially from the point of
|
||
view of anyone eating outside either of these codes. The doctrinal
|
||
differences separating one from another are about equivalent in force
|
||
today to those between, say, Presbyterians and Lutherans.
|
||
|
||
And that is exactly the point. For many people, schismatic differences
|
||
about food have taken the place of schismatic differences about faith.
|
||
Again, the curiosity is just how recent this is. Throughout history,
|
||
practically no one devoted this much time to matters of food as
|
||
ideas (as opposed to, say, time spent gathering the stuff). Still less
|
||
does it appear to have occurred to people that dietary schools could be
|
||
untethered from a larger metaphysical and moral worldview. Observant
|
||
Jews and Muslims, among others, have had strict dietary laws from their
|
||
faiths’ inception; but that is just it — their laws told believers what
|
||
to do with food when they got it, rather than inviting them to dwell on
|
||
food as a thing in itself. Like the Adventists, who speak of their
|
||
vegetarianism as being “harmony with the Creator,” or like the Catholics
|
||
with their itinerant Lenten and other obligations, these previous
|
||
dietary laws were clearly designed to enhance religion — not replace it.
|
||
|
||
Do today’s influential dietary ways of life in effect replace religion?
|
||
Consider that macrobiotics, vegetarianism, and veganism all make larger
|
||
health claims as part of their universality — but unlike yesteryear, to
|
||
repeat the point, most of them no longer do so in conjunction with
|
||
organized religion. Macrobiotics, for its part, argues (with some
|
||
evidence) that processed foods and too much animal flesh are toxic to
|
||
the human body, whereas whole grains, vegetables, and fruits are not.
|
||
The literature of vegetarianism makes a similar point, recently drawing
|
||
particular attention to new research concerning the connection between
|
||
the consumption of red meat and certain cancers. In both cases, however,
|
||
dietary laws are not intended to be handmaidens to a higher cause, but
|
||
moral causes in themselves.
|
||
|
||
Just as the food of today often attracts a level of metaphysical
|
||
attentiveness suggestive of the sex of yesterday, so does food today
|
||
seem attended by a similarly evocative — and proliferating — number of
|
||
verboten signs. The opprobrium reserved for perceived “violations” of
|
||
what one “ought” to do has migrated, in some cases fully, from one to
|
||
the other. Many people who wouldn’t be caught dead with an extra ten
|
||
pounds — or eating a hamburger, or wearing real leather — tend to be
|
||
laissez-faire in matters of sex. In fact, just observing the world as it
|
||
is, one is tempted to say that the more vehement people are about the
|
||
morality of their food choices, themore hands-off they believe the rest
|
||
of the world should be about sex. What were the circumstances the last
|
||
time you heard or used the word “guilt” — in conjunction with sin as
|
||
traditionally conceived? Or with having eaten something verboten and not
|
||
having gone to the gym?
|
||
|
||
Perhaps the most revealing example of the infusion of morality into food
|
||
codes can be found in the current European passion for what the French
|
||
call terroir — an idea that originally referred to the specific
|
||
qualities conferred by geography on certain food products (notably wine)
|
||
and that has now assumed a life of its own as a moral guide to buying
|
||
and consuming locally. That there is no such widespread, concomitant
|
||
attempt to impose a new morality on sexual pursuits in Western Europe
|
||
seems something of an understatement. But as a measure of the reach of
|
||
terroir as a moral code, consider only a sermon from Durham Cathedral in
|
||
2007. In it, the dean explained Lent as an event that “says to us,
|
||
cultivate a good terroir, a spiritual ecology that will re-focus our
|
||
passion for God, our praying, our pursuit of justice in the world, our
|
||
care for our fellow human beings.”
|
||
|
||
There stands an emblematic example of the reversal between food and sex
|
||
in our time: in which the once-universal moral code of European
|
||
Christianity is being explicated for the masses by reference to the now
|
||
apparently more-universal European moral code of consumption à la
|
||
terroir.
|
||
|
||
Moreover, this reversal between sex and food appears firmer the more
|
||
passionately one clings to either pole. Thus, for instance, though much
|
||
has lately been made of the “greening” of the evangelicals, no
|
||
vegetarian Christian group is as nationally known as, say, People for
|
||
the Ethical Treatment of Animals or any number of other vegetarian/vegan
|
||
organizations, most of which appear to be secular or anti-religious and
|
||
none of which, so far as my research shows, extend their universalizable
|
||
moral ambitions to the realm of sexuality. When Skinny Bitch — a hip
|
||
guide to veganism that recently topped the bestseller lists for months —
|
||
exhorts its readers to a life that is “clean, pure, healthy,” for
|
||
example, it is emphatically not including sex in this moral vocabulary,
|
||
and makes a point of saying so.
|
||
|
||
C.S. Lewis once compared the two desires as follows, to make the point
|
||
that something about sex had gotten incommensurate in his own time:
|
||
“There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would
|
||
be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main
|
||
interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food
|
||
and dribbling and smacking their lips.” He was making a point in the
|
||
genre of reductio ad absurdum.
|
||
|
||
But for the jibe to work as it once did, our shared sense of what is
|
||
absurd about it must work too — and that shared sense, in an age as
|
||
visually, morally, and aesthetically dominated by food as is our own, is
|
||
waning fast. Consider the coining of the term “gastroporn” to describe
|
||
the eerily similar styles of high-definition pornography on the one hand
|
||
and stylized shots of food on the other. Actually, the term is not even
|
||
that new. It dates back at least 30 years, to a 1977 essay by that title
|
||
in the New York Review of Books. In it author Andrew Cockburn observed
|
||
that “it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels
|
||
between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of
|
||
food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same
|
||
apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn
|
||
heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by
|
||
proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.”
|
||
|
||
With such a transfer, the polar migrations of food and sex during the
|
||
last half century would appear complete.
|
||
|
||
Respecting some hazards, ignoring others
|
||
|
||
If it is true that food is the new sex, however, where does that leave
|
||
sex? This brings us to the paradox already hinted at. As the consumption
|
||
of food not only literally but also figuratively has become
|
||
progressively more discriminate and thoughtful, at least in theory (if
|
||
rather obviously not always in practice), the consumption of sex in
|
||
various forms appears to have become the opposite for a great many
|
||
people: i.e., progressively more indiscriminate and unthinking.
|
||
|
||
Several proofs could be offered for such a claim, beginning with any
|
||
number of statistical studies. Both men and women are far less likely to
|
||
be sexually inexperienced on their weddings now (if indeed they marry)
|
||
than they were just a few decades ago. They are also more likely to be
|
||
experienced in all kinds of ways, including in the use of pornography.
|
||
Like the example of Jennifer, moreover, their general thoughts about sex
|
||
become more laissez-faire the further down the age demographic one goes.
|
||
|
||
Consider as further proof of the dumbing-down of sex the coarseness of
|
||
popular entertainment, say through a popular advice column on
|
||
left-leaning Slate magazine called “Dear Prudence” that concerns
|
||
“manners and morals.” Practically every subject line is window onto a
|
||
world of cheap, indiscriminate sex, where the only ground rule is
|
||
apparently that no sexual urge shall ever be discouraged unless it
|
||
manifestly hurts others — meaning literally. “Should I destroy the
|
||
erotic video my husband and I have made?” “My boyfriend’s kinky fetish
|
||
might doom our relationship.” “My husband wants me to abort, and I
|
||
don’t.” “How do I tell my daughter she’s the result of a sexual
|
||
assault?” “A friend confessed to a fling with my now-dead husband.” And
|
||
so on. The mindful vegetarian slogan, “you are what you eat,” has no
|
||
counterpart in the popular culture today when it comes to sex.
|
||
|
||
The third and probably most important feature of sex in our time
|
||
testifying to the ubiquity of appetites fulfilled and indulged
|
||
indiscriminately is the staggering level of consumption of Internet
|
||
pornography. As Ross Douthat recently summarized in an essay for the
|
||
Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Pornography Adultery?”:
|
||
|
||
> Over the past three decades, the
|
||
>
|
||
> vcr
|
||
>
|
||
> , on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled
|
||
> the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on
|
||
> innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and
|
||
> personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica
|
||
> compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and
|
||
> our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up.
|
||
|
||
Statistics too, or at least preliminary ones, bear out just how
|
||
consequential this erotic novelty is becoming. Pornography is the single
|
||
most viewed subject online, by men anyway; it is increasingly a
|
||
significant factor in divorce cases; and it is resulting in any number
|
||
of cottage industries, from the fields of therapy to law to academia, as
|
||
society’s leading cultural institutions strive to measure and cope with
|
||
its impact.[2](#note2)
|
||
|
||
This junk sex shares all the defining features of junk food. It is
|
||
produced and consumed by people who do not know one another. It is
|
||
disdained by those who believe they have access to more authentic
|
||
experience or “healthier” options. Internet pornography is further
|
||
widely said — right now, in its relatively early years — to be harmless,
|
||
much as few people thought little of the ills to come through convenient
|
||
prepared food when it first appeared; and evidence is also beginning to
|
||
emerge about compulsive pornography consumption, as it did slowly but
|
||
surely in the case of compulsive packaged food consumption, that this
|
||
laissez-faire judgment is wrong.[3](#note3)
|
||
|
||
This brings us to another similarity between junk sex and junk food:
|
||
People are furtive about both, and many feel guilty about their pursuit
|
||
and indulgence of each. And those who consume large amounts of both are
|
||
also typically self-deceptive, too: i.e., they underestimate just how
|
||
much they do it and deny its ill effects on the rest of their lives. In
|
||
sum, to compare junk food to junk sex is to realize that they have
|
||
become virtually interchangeable vices — even if many people who do not
|
||
put “sex” in the category of vice will readily do so with food.
|
||
|
||
At this point, the impatient reader will interject that something else —
|
||
something understandable and anodyne — is driving the increasing
|
||
attention to food in our day: namely, the fact that we have learned much
|
||
more than humans used to know about the importance of a proper diet to
|
||
health and longevity. And this is surely a point borne out by the facts,
|
||
too. One attraction of macrobiotics, for example, is its promise to
|
||
reduce the risks of cancer. The fall in cholesterol that attends a true
|
||
vegan or vegetarian diet is another example. Manifestly, one reason that
|
||
people today are so much more discriminating about food is that decades
|
||
of recent research have taught us that diet has more potent effects than
|
||
Betty and her friends understood, and can be bad for you or good for you
|
||
in ways not enumerated before.
|
||
|
||
All that is true, but then the question is this: Why aren’t more people
|
||
doing the same with sex?
|
||
|
||
For here we come to the most fascinating turn of all. One cannot answer
|
||
the question by arguing that there is no such empirical news about
|
||
indiscriminately pursued sex and how it can be good or bad for you; to
|
||
the contrary, there is, and lots of it. After all, several decades of
|
||
empirical research — which also did not exist before — have demonstrated
|
||
that the sexual revolution, too, has had consequences, and that many of
|
||
them have redounded to the detriment of a sexually liberationist ethic.
|
||
|
||
Married, monogamous people are more likely to be happy. They live
|
||
longer. These effects are particularly evident for men. Divorced men in
|
||
particular and conversely face health risks — including heightened drug
|
||
use and alcoholism — that married men do not. Married men also work more
|
||
and save more, and married households not surprisingly trump other
|
||
households in income. Divorce, by contrast, is often a financial
|
||
catastrophe for a family, particularly the women and children in it. So
|
||
is illegitimacy typically a financial disaster.
|
||
|
||
By any number of measures, moreover, nontraditional sexual morality —
|
||
and the fallout from it — is detrimental to the well-being of one
|
||
specifically vulnerable subset: children. Children from broken homes are
|
||
at risk for all kinds of behavioral, psychological, educational, and
|
||
other problems that children from intact homes are not. Children from
|
||
fatherless homes are far more likely to end up in prison than are those
|
||
who grew up with both biological parents. Girls growing up without a
|
||
biological father are far more likely to suffer physical or sexual
|
||
abuse. Girls and boys, numerous sources also show, are adversely
|
||
affected by family breakup into adulthood, and have higher risks than
|
||
children from intact homes of repeating the pattern of breakup
|
||
themselves.
|
||
|
||
This recital touches only the periphery of the empirical record now
|
||
being assembled about the costs of laissez-faire sex to American society
|
||
— a record made all the more interesting by the fact that it could not
|
||
have been foreseen back when sexual liberationism seemed merely
|
||
synonymous with the removal of some seemingly inexplicable old stigmas.
|
||
Today, however, two generations of social science replete with studies,
|
||
surveys, and regression analyses galore stand between the Moynihan
|
||
Report and what we know now, and the overall weight of its findings is
|
||
clear. The sexual revolution — meaning the widespread extension of sex
|
||
outside of marriage and frequently outside commitment of any kind — has
|
||
had negative effects on many people, chiefly the most vulnerable; and it
|
||
has also had clear financial costs to society at large. And this is true
|
||
not only in the obvious ways, like the spread of aids and other stds,
|
||
but also in other ways affecting human well-being, beginning but not
|
||
ending with those enumerated above.
|
||
|
||
The question raised by this record is not why some people changed their
|
||
habits and ideas when faced with compelling new facts about food and
|
||
quality of life. It is rather why more people have not done the same
|
||
about sex.
|
||
|
||
The mindless shift
|
||
|
||
When friedrich nietzschewrote longingly of the “transvaluation of all
|
||
values,” he meant the hoped-for restoration of sexuality to its proper
|
||
place as a celebrated, morally neutral life force. He could not possibly
|
||
have foreseen our world: one in which sex would indeed become “morally
|
||
neutral” in the eyes of a great many people — even as food would come to
|
||
replace it as source of moral authority.[4](#note4)
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless, events have proven Nietzsche wrong about his wider hope
|
||
that men and women of the future would simply enjoy the benefits of free
|
||
sex without any attendant seismic shifts. For there may in fact be no
|
||
such thing as a destigmatization of sex simplicitur, as the events
|
||
outlined in this essay suggest. The rise of a recognizably Kantian,
|
||
morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the
|
||
international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding
|
||
with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics,
|
||
veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled
|
||
exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western
|
||
world during these same years.
|
||
|
||
Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or
|
||
both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it
|
||
than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a
|
||
universal moral code that he would have bind society against the
|
||
problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has
|
||
apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken
|
||
longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The
|
||
all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is
|
||
not.
|
||
|
||
In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that 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.
|
||
|
||
So what does it finally mean to have a civilization puritanical about
|
||
food, and licentious about sex? In this sense, Nietzsche’s fabled madman
|
||
came not too late, but too early — too early to have seen the empirical
|
||
library that would be amassed from the mid- twenty-first century on,
|
||
testifying to the problematic social, emotional, and even financial
|
||
nature of exactly the solution he sought.
|
||
|
||
It is a curious coda that this transvaluation should not be applauded by
|
||
the liberationist heirs of Nietzsche, even as their day in the sun seems
|
||
to have come. According to them, after all, consensual sex is simply
|
||
what comes naturally, and ought therefore to be judged value-free. But
|
||
as the contemporary history outlined in this essay goes to show, the
|
||
same can be said of overeating — and overeating is something that
|
||
today’s society is manifestly embarked on re-stigmatizing. It may be
|
||
doing so for very different reasons than the condemnations of gluttony
|
||
outlined by the likes of Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. But
|
||
if indiscriminate sex can also have a negative impact — and not just in
|
||
the obvious sense of disease, but in the other aspects of psyche and
|
||
well-being now being written into the empirical record of the sexual
|
||
revolution — then indiscriminate sex may be judged to need reining in,
|
||
too.
|
||
|
||
So if there is a moral to this curious transvaluation, it would seem to
|
||
be that the norms society imposes on itself in pursuit of its own
|
||
self-protection do not wholly disappear, but rather mutate and move on,
|
||
sometimes in curious guises. Far-fetched though it seems at the moment,
|
||
where mindless food is today, mindless sex — in light of the growing
|
||
empirical record of its own unleashing — may yet again be tomorrow.
|