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Is Food the New Sex?
By Mary Eberstadt
A curious reversal in moralizing
Of all the truly seismic shifts transforming daily life today — deeper
than our financial fissures, wider even than our most obvious
political and cultural divides — one of the most important is also
among the least remarked. That is the chasm in attitude that separates
almost all of us living in the West today from almost all of our
ancestors, over two things without which human beings cannot exist:
food and sex.
The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are
closely connected. About that much, philosophers and other
commentators have been agreed for a very long time. As far back as
Aristotle, observers have made the same point reiterated in 1749 in
Henry Fielding's famous scene in Tom Jones: The desires for sex and
for food are joined at the root. The fact that Fielding's scene would
go on to inspire an equally iconic movie segment over 200 years later,
in the Tom Jones film from 1963, just clinches the point.
What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings
are free to have all the sex and food they want?
Philosophers and artists aside, ordinary language itself verifies how
similarly the two appetites are experienced, with many of the same
words crossing over to describe what is desirable and undesirable in
each case. In fact, we sometimes have trouble even talking about food
without metaphorically invoking sex, and vice versa. In a hundred
entangled ways, judging by either language or literature, the human
mind juggles sex and food almost interchangeably at times. And why
not? Both desires can make people do things they otherwise would not;
and both are experienced at different times by most men and women as
the most powerful of all human drives.
One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this:
Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not
only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself.
No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been
subject in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus
the potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual
aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called
"home-wrecking" — have been ameliorated in every recorded society by
legal, social, and religious conventions, primarily stigma and
punishment. Similarly, all societies have developed rules and rituals
governing food in part to avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls
over scarce necessities. And while food rules may not always have been
as stringent as sex rules, they have nevertheless been stringent as
needed. Such is the meaning, for example, of being hanged for stealing
a loaf of bread in the marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering
rations on a ship.
These disciplines imposed historically on access to food and sex now
raise a question that has not come up before, probably because it was
not even possible to imagine it until the lifetimes of the people
reading this: What happens when, for the first time in history — at
least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human
beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?
This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely
connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to
expect that 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.
In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly
the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many
people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time,
they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by
shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an
exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is
driving it.
As much as you want
The dramatic expansion in access to food on the one hand and to sex on
the other are complicated stories; but in each case, technology has
written most of it.
Up until just about now, for example, the prime brakes on sex outside
of marriage have been several: fear of pregnancy, fear of social
stigma and punishment, and fear of disease. The Pill and its cousins
have substantially undermined the first two strictures, at least in
theory, while modern medicine has largely erased the third. Even
hiv/aids, only a decade ago a stunning exception to the brand new rule
that one could apparently have any kind of sex at all without serious
consequence, is now regarded as a "manageable" disease in the affluent
West, even as it continues to kill millions of less fortunate patients
elsewhere.
As for food, here too one technological revolution after another
explains the extraordinary change in its availability: pesticides,
mechanized farming, economical transportation, genetic manipulation of
food stocks, and other advances. As a result, almost everyone in the
Western world is now able to buy sustenance of all kinds, for very
little money, and in quantities unimaginable until the lifetimes of
the people reading this.
One result of this change in food fortune, of course, is the
unprecedented "disease of civilization" known as obesity, with its
corollary ills. Nevertheless, the commonplace fact of obesity in
today's West itself testifies to the point that access to food has
expanded exponentially for just about everyone. So does the
statistical fact that obesity is most prevalent in the lowest social
classes and least exhibited in the highest.
And just as technology has made sex and food more accessible for a
great many people, important extra-technological influences on both
pursuits — particularly longstanding religious strictures — have
meanwhile diminished in a way that has made both appetites even easier
to indulge. The opprobrium reserved for gluttony, for example, seems
to have little immediate force now, even among believers. On the rare
occasions when one even sees the word, it is almost always used in a
metaphorical, secular sense.
Similarly, and far more consequential, the longstanding religious
prohibitions in every major creed against extramarital sex have rather
famously loosed their holds over the contemporary mind. Of particular
significance, perhaps, has been the movement of many Protestant
denominations away from the sexual morality agreed upon by the
previous millennia of Christendom. The Anglican abandonment in 1930 of
the longstanding prohibition against artificial contraception is a
special case in point, undermining as it subsequently did for many
believers the very idea that any church could tell people what to do
with their bodies, ever again. Whether they defended their traditional
teachings or abandoned them, however, all Western Christian churches
in the past century have found themselves increasingly beleaguered
over issues of sex, and commensurately less influential over all but a
fraction of the most traditionally minded parishioners.
Of course this waning of the traditional restraints on the pursuit of
sex and food is only part of the story; any number of non-religious
forces today also act as contemporary brakes on both. In the case of
food, for example, these would include factors like personal vanity,
say, or health concerns, or preoccupation with the morality of what is
consumed (about which more below). Similarly, to acknowledge that sex
is more accessible than ever before is not to say that it is always
and everywhere available. Many people who do not think they will go to
hell for premarital sex or adultery, for example, find brakes on their
desires for other reasons: fear of disease, fear of hurting children
or other loved ones, fear of disrupting one's career, fear of
financial setbacks in the form of divorce and child support, and so
on.
Even men and women who do want all the food or sex they can get their
hands on face obstacles of other kinds in their pursuit. Though many
people really can afford to eat more or less around the clock, for
example, home economics will still put the brakes on; it's not as if
everyone can afford pheasant under glass day and night. The same is
true of sex, which likewise imposes its own unwritten yet practical
constraints. Older and less attractive people simply cannot command
the sexual marketplace as the younger and more attractive can (which
is why the promises of erasing time and age are such a booming
business in a post-liberation age). So do time and age still
circumscribe the pursuit of sex, even as churches and other
conventional enforcers increasingly do not.
Still and all, the initial point stands: As consumers of both sex and
food, today's people in the advanced societies are freer to pursue and
consume both than almost all the human beings who came before us; and
our culture has evolved in interesting ways to exhibit both those
trends.
Broccoli, pornography, and Kant
To begin to see just how recent and dramatic this change is, let us
imagine some broad features of the world seen through two different
sets of eyes: a hypothetical 30-year-old housewife from 1958 named
Betty, and her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age,
today.
Begin with a tour of Betty's kitchen. Much of what she makes comes
from jars and cans. Much of it is also heavy on substances that people
of our time are told to minimize — dairy products, red meat, refined
sugars and flours — because of compelling research about nutrition
that occurred after Betty's time. Betty's freezer is filled with meat
every four months by a visiting company that specializes in volume,
and on most nights she thaws a piece of this and accompanies it with
food from one or two jars. If there is anything "fresh" on the plate,
it is likely a potato. Interestingly, and rudimentary to our
contemporary eyes though it may be, Betty's food is served with what
for us would appear to be high ceremony, i.e., at a set table with
family members present.
As it happens, there is little that Betty herself, who is adventurous
by the standards of her day, will not eat; the going slogan she
learned as a child is about cleaning your plate, and not doing so is
still considered bad form. Aside from that notion though, which is a
holdover to scarcer times, Betty is much like any other American home
cook in 1958. She likes making some things and not others, even as she
prefers eating some things to others — and there, in personal
aesthetics, does the matter end for her. It's not that Betty lacks
opinions about food. It's just that the ones she has are limited to
what she does and does not personally like to make and eat.
Now imagine one possible counterpart to Betty today, her 30-year-old
granddaughter Jennifer. Jennifer has almost no cans or jars in her
cupboard. She has no children or husband or live-in boyfriend either,
which is why her kitchen table on most nights features a laptop and
goes unset. Yet interestingly enough, despite the lack of ceremony at
the table, Jennifer pays far more attention to food, and feels far
more strongly in her convictions about it, than anyone she knows from
Betty's time.
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. She tries to minimize
her dairy intake, and cooks tofu as much as possible. She also buys
"organic" in the belief that it is better both for her and for the
animals raised in that way, even though the products are markedly more
expensive than those from the local grocery store. Her diet is heavy
in all the ways that Betty's was light: with fresh vegetables and
fruits in particular. Jennifer has nothing but ice in her freezer,
soymilk and various other items her grandmother wouldn't have
recognized in the refrigerator, and on the counter stands a vegetable
juicer she feels she "ought" to use more.
Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude
separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels
that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends
her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn
those who believe otherwise, but she doesn't understand why they do,
either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if
more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even
proselytizes on occasion when she can.
In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant's
definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set
of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.
Betty, on the other hand, would be baffled by the idea of dragooning
such moral abstractions into the service of food. This is partly
because, as a child of her time, she was impressed — as Jennifer is
not — about what happens when food is scarce (Betty's parents told her
often about their memories of the Great Depression; and many of the
older men of her time had vivid memories of deprivation in wartime).
Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no
sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter
does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one's
mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not,
that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of
individual taste — and only that.
This clear difference in opinion leads to an intriguing juxtaposition.
Just as Betty and Jennifer have radically different approaches to
food, so do they to matters of sex. For Betty, the ground rules of her
time — which she both participates in and substantially agrees with —
are clear: Just about every exercise of sex outside marriage is
subject to social (if not always private) opprobrium. Wavering in and
out of established religion herself, Betty nevertheless clearly
adheres to a traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. Thus, for
example, Mr. Jones next door "ran off" with another woman, leaving his
wife and children behind; Susie in the town nearby got pregnant and
wasn't allowed back in school; Uncle Bill is rumored to have
contracted gonorrhea; and so on. None of these breaches of the going
sexual ethic is considered by Betty to be a good thing, let alone a
celebrated thing. They are not even considered to be neutral things.
In fact, they are all considered by her to be wrong.
Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de
gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong
about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further
believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people
better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such
on occasion when given the chance.
In short, as Jennifer does with food, Betty in the matter of sex
fulfills the requirements for Kant's Categorical Imperative.
Jennifer's approach to sex is just about 180 degrees different. She
too disapproves of the father next door who left his wife and children
for a younger woman; she does not want to be cheated on herself, or to
have those she cares about cheated on either. These ground-zero
stipulations, aside, however, she is otherwise laissez-faire on just
about every other aspect of nonmarital sex. She believes that living
together before marriage is not only morally neutral, but actually
better than not having such a "trial run." Pregnant unwed Susie in the
next town doesn't elicit a thought one way or the other from her, and
neither does Uncle Bill's gonorrhea, which is of course a trivial
medical matter between him and his doctor.
Jennifer, unlike Betty, thinks that falling in love creates its own
demands and generally trumps other considerations — unless perhaps
children are involved (and sometimes, on a case-by-case basis, then
too). A consistent thinker in this respect, she also accepts the
consequences of her libertarian convictions about sex. She is
pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, indifferent to ethical questions about
stem cell research and other technological manipulations of nature (as
she is not, ironically, when it comes to food), and agnostic on the
question of whether any particular parental arrangements seem best for
children. She has even been known to watch pornography with her
boyfriend, at his coaxing, in part to show just how very laissez-faire
she is.
Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by
universal moral law; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.
Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude
between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there
is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any
individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It's not
that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does
about food. It's just that, for the most part, they are limited to
what she personally does and doesn't like.
Thus far, what the imaginary examples of Betty and Jennifer have
established is this: Their personal moral relationships toward food
and toward sex are just about perfectly reversed. Betty does care
about nutrition and food, but it doesn't occur to her to extend her
opinions to a moral judgment — i.e., to believe that other people
ought to do as she does in the matter of food, and that they are wrong
if they don't. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in
a different way; it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply
not done. Jennifer, similarly, does care to some limited degree about
what other people do about sex; but it seldom occurs to her to extend
her opinions to a moral judgment. In fact, she thinks such an
extension would be wrong in a different way — because it would be
impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done.
On the other hand, Jennifer is genuinely certain that her opinions
about food are not only nutritionally correct, but also, in some deep,
meaningful sense, morally correct — i.e., she feels that others ought
to do something like what she does. And Betty, on the other hand,
feels exactly the same way about what she calls sexual morality.
As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two
different areas to an "ought" that they think should be somehow
binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same
— is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note:
Betty's Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer's
concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for
everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an
especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of
sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of
taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind;
and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.
What has happened here?
Role reversal
Betty and jennifermay be imaginary, but the decades that separate the
two women have brought related changes to the lives of many millions.
In the 50 years between their two kitchens, a similar polar
transformation has taken root and grown not only throughout America
but also throughout 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 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.
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 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
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
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
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.
Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and
consulting editor to Policy Review.
1 As defined by the International Vegetarian Union, a vegetarian
eats no animals but may eat eggs and dairy (and is then an ovo-lacto
vegetarian). A pescetarian is a vegetarian who allows the consumption
of fish. A vegan excludes both animals and animal products from his
diet, including honey. Vegetarians and vegans can be further refined
into numerous other categories — fruitarian, Halal vegetarian, and so
on. The terminological complexity here only amplifies the point that
food now attracts the taxonomical energies once devoted to, say,
metaphysics.
2 For a general discussion, see Pamela Paul, Pornified: How
Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our
Families (Times Books, 2005).
3 For clinical accounts of the evidence of harm, see, for example,
Ana J. Bridges, "Pornography's Effects on Interpersonal
Relationships," and Jill C. Manning, "The Impact of Pornography on
Women," papers presented to a conference on "The Social Costs of
Pornography," Princeton University (December 2008). For further
information and for pre-consultation drafts of these papers, see
http://www.winst.org/family_marriage_and_democracy/social_costs_of_pornography/consultation2008.php
(accessed January 7, 2008). The papers also include an interesting
econometric assessment of what is spent to avoid or recover from
pornography addiction: Kirk Doran, "The Economics of Pornography."
4 Interestingly, Nietzsche does appear to have foreseen the
universalizability of vegetarianism, writing in the 1870s, "I believe
that the vegetarians, with their prescription to eat less and more
simply, are of more use than all the new moral systems taken together.
. . . There is no doubt that the future educators of mankind will also
prescribe a stricter diet." Also interesting, Adolf Hitler — whose own
vegetarianism appears to have been adopted because of Wagner's (Wagner
in turn had been convinced by the sometime vegetarian Nietzsche) —
reportedly remarked in 1941 that "there's one thing I can predict to
eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian."
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
