Sorry about the low posting, I was on vacation and busy with work/politics of late.
This is an interesting article, wherein George Will explains how food has taken the moral position of sex in modern society. In the 1950's people had rules about sex and ate what they wanted. Now, we have rules about our food, but on sex, not so much.
Here's the opening salvo:
Put down that cheeseburger and listen up: If food has become what sex was a generation ago -- the intimidatingly intelligent Mary Eberstadt says it has -- then a cheeseburger is akin to adultery, or worse. As eating has become highly charged with moral judgments, sex has become notably less so, and Eberstadt, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, thinks these trends involving two primal appetites are related. In a Policy Review essay "Is Food the New Sex?" -- it has a section titled "Broccoli, pornography, and Kant" -- she notes that for the first time ever, most people in advanced nations "are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want." One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened -- mindful eating and mindless sex.
The other thing to remember, especially as we've recently entered Lent--a period of fasting--is that the Church has spoken up the virtues and vices of both food and sex. As Will concludes, so do I:
Bon appetit,
Thomas More
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