March 23, 2009

Food in America is abundant, cheap, and diverse. Supermarkets, convenience stores, and eateries are on every corner, many open 24 hours “for your convenience.”

Sex in America is also abundant, cheap (requiring little to no commitment), and diverse. Sex is also ubiquitous. Internet pornography, “adult” entertainment, and the hook-up culture are signs that old taboos have vanished.

We at a time when for the first time in history live, “adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want” as Mary Eberstadt writes in “Is Food the Next Sex?” in the February/March issue of Policy Review.

One would expect, she reasons, that since both food and sex are plentiful and since the appetites for food and for sex appear to be linked, “people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.”

But rather than approaching food and sex reasonably and in a similar way, we have opted for what she calls “mindful eating and mindless sex.”

To illustrate, Eberstadt introduces “a hypothetical 30-year old housewife from 1958 named Betty, and her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age, today.”

When Betty cooks dinner it is typically meat (much of it red), vegetables from a can or jar, potatoes (the only fresh food on the plate), bread with margarine, and a sweet dessert. She cooks what she likes to cook and what she and her family like to eat. Betty feels, say Eberstadt, “that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of taste—and only that.”

Her granddaughter could not disagree more:

Wavering in and out of vegetarianism, Jennifer is adamantly opposed to eating red meat or endangered fish. She is also opposed to industrialized breeding, genetically enhanced fruits and vegetables, and to pesticides and other artificial agents. …Her diet is heavy in all the ways that Betty’s was light: with fresh vegetables and fruits in particular.

And the difference goes beyond personal choices. “Jennifer,” writes Eberstadt, “feels that there is a right and wrong about these opinions that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer.” The world would be a better place, thinks Jennifer, if everyone behaved as she does.