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As anyone who's ever admitted to "lusting" over a "luscious" and "sinful" piece of chocolate cake knows, there's some heavy crossover between the vocabulary of food and the vocabulary of sex. In this fascinating Policy Review piece, public intellectual Mary Eberstadt asks whether we have actually replaced sex with food as the subject of popular public moralizing. In the affluent West, the fears of disease, unwanted pregnancy and social stigma that may have prevented pre-marital sex have been substantially lessened by condoms, birth control and increasingly liberal secular attitudes. In the same countries, fears of starvation have been almost erased by mechanized farming and its resulting cheap food.
"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?" Eberstadt wonders.
As it turns out, Eberstadt says, as our attitudes about sex have become much more relaxed, our attitudes about food have become much more strict and moralistic. While Americans in the 1950s may have felt that certain sexual acts were "wrong" or "sinful," they would never have applied those words to food. Now, in a time where many of us have a "live and let live" attitude about sexual practices, words like "evil" and "immoral" are commonly applied to things like agribusiness, packaged junk foods, etc. and words like "virtuous," "honest," and "pure" are often used to describe organic or local food.
Our moralizing about food is part of a larger societal obsession with eating - Top Chef, Anthony Bourdain's racy kitchen memoirs, books like Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter - which Eberstadt argues are rather voyeuristic. Which I guess makes this blog "gastroporn" - a term which perfectly encapsulates the essay's point!
Ebertstadt's conclusion? That perhaps, all this moralizing and rule-making about food suggests that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has changed society.
What do you think? Why do so many of us apply moral attitudes towards food but not towards sex? Is this a good thing? A bad thing?
“We have recently been lucky enough to discover several previously lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of our office sofa. These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food.” Thus begins a hilarious 
