Is Food the New Sex? (2009)

http://www.hoover.org/research/food-new-sex

by tacon • 12 years ago

82 81 12 years ago

tacon2• 12 years ago

I thought this was the craziest title, until I read the entire essay. And now I think the author has made a very deep analysis of modern society. It's almost as if there is a conservation law for conservative ideas. Sex isn't doing it anymore, so we are switching to food where we impose moral judgements on others who are "doing it wrong".

dalke8• 12 years ago

I found it difficult to read the entire essay, so I didn't. I had problems with a lot of the characterizations.

To start, "What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want?"

This is only true for a subset of the people, but it's always been true for a subset of the people. When I read about the nobility of the 1600s, I see that there was a whole lot of sex going on, and surely they had enough food for themselves.

The 1960s/1970s era of free love, after the pill and before HIV/AIDS and drug resistant venereal diseases was also, I think, more free than now. The author writes that HIV/AIDS is "manageable", for those with access to good medical care, but doesn't dismiss the point that it's not true that adults now are freer in their ways than (again, a subpopulation of) adults in the 1960s.

"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."

Home deep freezers weren't really available until after the Second World War, so that description of a 1958 era is one of food plenty, not food deficit, and that description is only true for a couple of decades.

"If there is anything “fresh” on the plate, it is likely a potato."

That's just not true. I've seen the pictures of the farmers in the late 1800s/early 1900s coming into town with their produce on wagons. There's more than just potatoes during the growing season.

For a real-world example, see http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html , and quoting from Barbara Hubbard, Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1956: "This is a treat for them, especially when they are served hamburgers, fruit salad, carrot sticks, and an ice cream bar for dessert. They consider this menu a real party and what could be easier for Mother. When the children finish their supper they usually go upstairs to watch Daddy shave and tell him about their day. Then he reads them a story and tucks them into bed. This gives me time to broil a steak, mix the green salad, and dress the baked potatoes with sour cream and chives."

So, the children have fruit salad and carrot sticks, and in addition to potato, the adults have a green salad.

On the same link, a menu from Family Circle, August 1957, includes corn, salad, and honeydew melon, and from Women's Day 1959 has tomatoes, vegetable salad, and a fruit basket. Both have more than just potatoes.

"Wavering in and out of vegetarianism"

As was recently pointed out to me, C.S. Lewis in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader", written in the 1950s, ridicules vegetarianism as being faddish.

It's easy to believe that the author created examples specifically to illustrate a point, rather than to describe real cultural trends.

What I see, when I look at the same events, is a move away from a conformist culture to a diverse culture. The moral strictures of church, class, race, gender, etc. are less binding.

Remember too the author writes for the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. As such, works from them are more likely to be aligned with conservative views, and not, say, rail against patriarchy.

tacon2• 12 years ago

It would have helped if you read the entire essay. I was a kid during that 1958 description, and it is exactly what was happening in my house (Alexandria, VA). My mom wasn't shopping at farmers markets. And now no one particularly cares how much sex you have in the privacy of your home, but "food woo" is rampant, and if you are feeding your kids gluten, well, you are just a bad parent.

At the moment my father is having chronic bowel issues, so my sisters are urging "probiotics", a term coined in 1907 (patent medicine era) that has little or no actual proof of efficacy, but that doesn't stop marketers from acting like it's critical to health. The doctor is not wrong if he doesn't bring up probiotics, just like he's not wrong for not bringing up alternative medicine.

This is only true for a subset of the people, but it's always been true for a subset of the people. When I read about the nobility of the 1600s, I see that there was a whole lot of sex going on, and surely they had enough food for themselves.

No, the freedom to have all the sex you want is new, for pretty much everyone in the US. Not everyone takes advantage of it, but there is little or no limit on your private sexual behavior now. Just consider gay marriage. And there was a huge risk with private sexual behavior back then.

Part of the "food woo" is the curse of capitalism, the infinite and never ending expansion of choice in the marketplace. With all those new food variations, it's important to convince people that they are eating wrong. That it is becoming a moral choice is just icing on the cake for marketers.

acqq2• 12 years ago

Totally agree. I also had problems reading it as I just can't agree with the premises. It seems as written by somebody who lived under the glass bell for most of his/her life and not by anybody having some clear idea about the basic ideas of sociology.

I had to check then the author's background. Interesting bio, though I still don't understand what her academic basis is:

http://www.hoover.org/profiles/mary-eberstadt

It seems she was mostly involved in politically related work?

Edit: researching more, I've just found she was a "Telluride scholar" which actually doesn't say much:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride_Association

benihana• 12 years ago

You're really picking at surface issues in the first few paragraphs that are wholly unimportant to the message of the article (which wasn't overly conservative or political at all). It's worth a read if you can manage to look past your biases.

pdeuchler3• 12 years ago

> I found it difficult to read the entire essay, so I didn't. I had problems with a lot of the characterizations.

...

> Remember too the author writes for the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. As such, works from them are more likely to be aligned with conservative views, and not, say, rail against patriarchy.

There's no need to politicize the article and then make subjective judgements based on your affiliations... Read the article for its merits. She talks about a lot more than just veggies.

ringolo• 12 years ago

Like sex, food is essential to survival as a species. When things are essential, there are always ways to do it "wrong" :)

humanrebar5• 12 years ago

  It's almost as if there is a conservation law for
  conservative ideas. Sex isn't doing it anymore, so we
  are switching to food where we impose moral judgements
  on others who are "doing it wrong".

The author didn't appear to be advocating food-based morality to me. Did I miss something?

It seems like the author is describing how food ethics have waxed while sexual ethics have waned. The final paragraphs about how that might be described by the ascendancy of the philosophy of Nietzsche (postmodern, materialist, and individualist), which certainly isn't a conservative philosphy (at least not in the American sense).

Though perhaps you mean that there's conservation of morality? As in, everyone is compelled to judge each other by some standard or another? I suppose that could be true. But if it is, it's either a condemnation of postmodernism or of mankind itself since that compulsion would pit humanity against the "that's fine if it works for you" attitude.

Animats2• 12 years ago

We know what happens when humans are free to have all the food we want. They get fat. Next question.

The food guilt thing is a product of marketing. Visit a Whole Foods and look at the displays.

Sex guilt is back. (For straight people only.) It's not clear why. In the US, it's not due to religion; the religious right peaked in the last century. There are whole new areas of guilt since the 1980s, from sexual harassment to an expanded definition of rape. Not only are abortions harder to get, even birth control pills are harder to get. Women's clothing is more conservative, too.

lentil_soup• 12 years ago

"We know what happens when humans are free to have all the food we want. They get fat. Next question".

I'm not so sure about that, not all societies that can "have all the food" they want are fat, for example France.

antidaily• 12 years ago

Obesity rates are way up in France over the last 10 years too, though. They've doubled.

GuiA3• 12 years ago

I don't know if I agree or not with you, but I don't think France is the best example because it has such a strong food culture.

I'm a French person who's been living in the US for about 5 years now. My main realization regarding the way food is treated in each country is that in France, the relationship with food is conditioned culturally very strongly since the moment you're born. When you grow up as a French person in a culturally French family, you grow up in an environment where you constantly hear about what foods go and don't go with one another, how you should eat, etc. You hear this through your own family, through meals at schools, through meals you share when you go to your friend's house, and so on. Little things like "you're supposed to eat bread with your salad", "we've already had meat for lunch let's not have it for dinner", "don't eat with your hands", etc. For the first 18 years of your life, you hear these things on an everyday basis to the point that when you start living on your own, they're part of your subconscious. If you ate pizza on Monday, you're not going to eat it again on Tuesday because you'll hear your grandma's voice in your head that says "You already had pizza last night, eat some vegetables tonight". When you have dinner with your friends in college, you're likely to still cook something fairly healthy because most people share that upbringing with you. And then when you raise a family of your own, you yourself repeat these things and the cycle continues.

This culture has evolved and been passed from generation to generation over centuries, and the result is that the average French person has a fairly strong instinct for "eating healthily" because of this, even though they're not compulsively counting calories at every meal. Their cultural baggage means they can just cook according to their gut, and their meals are likely to be balanced over time. The same is probably true for other countries with strong food cultures such as other mediterranean countries, Japan/South Korea, and so on.

Such a culture does not exist to such an extent in the US. I've found the contrast to be pretty stark - when I eat with French friends, there's an entire set of manners and habits that are never expressed but mutually understood, which does not happen when I eat with most American friends. As a teenager, I lived in the US with a host family for a summer who never ate together - different family members would just pick and choose from the fridge at different times of the day as they saw fit, with no regards for whether their food intake was balanced or not; then maybe once or twice a week, they'd have a barbecue all together. This would be completely inconceivable in a French family.

That being said, France is changing, families are becoming more and more multicultural, and things like fast food restaurants are changing norms.

humanrebar5• 12 years ago

  even birth control pills are harder to get

How is that true? Some birth control is now available over the counter and, with exceptions, health care plans are covering birth control these days. And anyone can walk into any number of places and grab all the condoms they want for free. Am I missing something?

Animats2• 12 years ago

Am I missing something? Yes. See: "http://reproductiverights.org/en/project/contraceptive-acces...

king_jester• 12 years ago

We know what happens when humans are free to have all the food we want. They get fat. Next question.

Nope, not even close. Access to food is not a causal relationship with being fat and fat people exist even when food isn't easily accessible. Fat people have existed since people have existed.

sowhatquestion3• 12 years ago

These issues are simpler to explain than the author realizes--and without any special invocation of Kant. Simply put, technology has made sex a lot safer at the same time as it has made food a lot more dangerous. Sex is safer (in the sense of creating fewer risks and uncertainties), as we all know, thanks to developments like condoms, STD testing, contraception, and legalized abortion. Meanwhile, food is a lot more dangerous, thanks to food science being used to create "hyperpalatable" junk food--cf. Paul Graham's "The Acceleration of Addictiveness."[1] As a 20-something in the U.S., I look around me and see obesity as an almost guaranteed outcome once people reach a certain age (with diabetes and heart disease not far behind)--and like many of my peers, I'm spooked.

In response to this, I wouldn't exactly say people have made healthy eating into a new Categorical Imperative. Instead, they've become paranoid and superstitious about what it is in modern food that's hurting them. Hence we get ridiculous cargo cults like gluten-free, organic, anti-GMO, everything Dr. Oz pushes, etc. Meanwhile, evidence-based approaches to the issue have not yet produced a diet that is optimal, practical, and that provides the level of enjoyment that we're used to from food. I personally think that Soylent is off to a promising start, although it has a long way to go.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

slapshot• 12 years ago

made food a lot more dangerous

You are almost certainly too young to remember it in the United States, but it wasn't that long ago that food was terribly dangerous. Start at non-sterile meat, bad canning practices (botulism killed 2,000+ per year in the United States until around WWII, down to a handful today) and go all the way to pellagra (an easily-solved Vitamin B deficiency that still killed 7500 people per year in the US in the 1930s; effectively 0 today).

Remember Wonder Bread? It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because the color and texture proved that it wasn't adulterated like many local bakers did at the time (flour was expensive, sawdust was cheap and could stretch meager supplies).

Food was not safe for a long time.

craigwblake• 12 years ago

Let's put those numbers in perspective, though. The CDC [1] claims that 600,000 people die per year due to heart disease, most of the causes of which (again according to the CDC) are people's choices in food and drink. That's pretty good evidence that food, on the whole, is not safer now.

1. http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

beachstartup• 12 years ago

an interesting side note: this is exactly what's happening in china today.

jp5552• 12 years ago

Sterile meat? Yuk! Why would someone want sterile meat? The best beef for example has been tenderized by bacteria for several weeks before being butchered.

There's maybe a couple dozen kinds of bacteria that pose a threat, the vast majority are either benign or good for us.

Attempting to eliminate food danger can paradoxically increase the danger. If you go to a grocery in Europe you'll see eggs sitting on shelves instead of inside the fridge as you'd see in the US. This is because eggs in the US are cleaned so much that the egg's cuticle is washed away, which is the egg's natural barrier to bacteria. In Europe they do not wash the cuticle away and eggs store safely on room-temp shelves.

I'd suggest that sterile meat is more dangerous as it is devoid of the natural bacterial "cloak" that provides protection from the nasty bugs.

sowhatquestion3• 12 years ago

Yes, this is an excellent point, although it doesn't contradict anything I said. In fact, it might help explain the demographic trends: older generations might be more likely to see food innovations as benevolent, because these innovations formerly played a legitimate role in increasing the supply of food that wouldn't make you sick.

Schoen's comment below makes an excellent, related point: older generations might have a lower, or at least different standard of what constitutes "dangerous" food. It used to be that dangerous food would immediately give you an infectious disease; whereas today, dangerous food very slowly gives you a chronic non-communicable diease.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because

...it was the first bread sold to consumers presliced, and that (and before it was preslicing, its quality for slicing) was heavily and effectively marketed.

Ironically, Wonder and other cheap white bread -- and other mass produced foodstuffs of the same period of mass industrialization of food supply -- and their popularity contributed several of the deficiency-related diseases you refer to as evidence of food being dangerous (later, they were enriched specifically to address the deficiencies that diets heavy in the them produced.)

ambler04• 12 years ago

Whether or not an organic diet (whatever that may be exactly) ultimately proves to be healthier, it's wrong to describe the movement to eat such food as a "ridiculous cargo cult". It's clear what people are worried about (dangerous pesticides, environmental pollutants) and the expectation that food labeled as organic is better in this respect is not unreasonable. Whether or not labeling food "certified organic" makes enough of a difference is a different discussion; clearly there is no substitute for knowing where your food comes from.

The fact that you lump this in with gluten-free and anti-GMO, which are themselves interesting and unique topics of discussion that have in common only their faddishness, and then lump all three of these in with a charlatan like Dr. Oz, shows to me that you have an oversimplified view of these issues.

sowhatquestion3• 12 years ago

you have an oversimplified view of these issues

Nice try, but no.

"On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%. Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries." (emphasis mine)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

"Study of 100 Billion Animals Finds GMOs Safe"

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/comprehensive-s...

"A recent study has shown that for those with non-Celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), the gluten itself might not be to blame for GI troubles."

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/does-non-celia...

"Organic food no more nutritious than conventionally grown food"

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/organic-food-no-more-nutr...

...

Admittedly, the issue of organic food is more controversial than the others. There was also a study showing that organic foods had higher levels of antioxidants: http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-organic-foods-20140715...

But given the amount of money people spend on organic food and the level of enthusiasm for it, you would think it cured cancer--not that there was inconclusive evidence that it might have somewhat higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of pesticide residue. In any case, antioxidants can be supplemented, much more cheaply than buying organic food. But that doesn't provide the level of enjoyment (or for some people, the pseudo-religious experience) of buying organic produce.

And THAT is as complex as I think the issue is. The term "cargo cult" hits close enough to the mark, for me.

AnimalMuppet3• 12 years ago

My wife has a friend who is very into organic. She says that all those pesticides are not good for us, and she's probably right, at least to some degree.

But the thing is, famine is really not good for you. If pesticides prevent that (and, arguably, they have done pretty well at doing so), then they're better than the alternative of not using them.

Of course, the best alternative is "neither"...

pizza234• 12 years ago

Hence we get ridiculous cargo cults like gluten-free, organic, anti-GMO, everything Dr. Oz pushes

As a 20-something in the US, you're certainly very uninformed.

Gluten free, organic and anti-gmo have nothing to do with cargo cults and food fanatism.

Essentially nobody buys gluten-free products because they're gluten free (except who needs it). GF products are a very little minority, because the lack of gluten is a serious limitation in food preparation. Plus, such products are very expesive. Nobody turns "gluten-free" unless he has to.

Organic is part of a bigger cultural picture. In some countries, the majority of the people eat [much] organic. Nobody expects to become super fit and super healthy from it. It's just a choice judged to be healthier as a whole. It's actually the opposite of a cargo cult, since people who choose organic, do it for life, not to follow a fad who lasts a short time (which is essential to cargo culting).

And finally, it's not smart to bash anti-GMO just because smart people are supposed to be pro-GMO. There are also rational reasons for being anti-GMO and cretinic reasons for being pro-GMO (like assuming that the increased yield of a crop automatically implies economic convenience).

If Soylent is optimal and provides enjoyment, well, you better move to another country and try real food. Besides, in the bigger picture, Soylent carries the assumption that human nutrition is nothing else than intake of isolated nutritional elements, which is foolish.

humanrebar5• 12 years ago

not to follow a fad who lasts a short time (which is essential to cargo culting).

Cargo cults are groups who follow rituals they don't understand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

If a group is following a diet without understanding it, I think it's apt (though perhaps needlessly divisive) to call that group a cargo cult. If someone doesn't eat gluten and can't describe what gluten is and why it's bad, he or she is exhibiting the behavior of a member of a cargo cult.

SwellJoe• 12 years ago

"Nobody turns "gluten-free" unless he has to."

That's demonstrably untrue. The existence of non-Celiac gluten sensitivity is not demonstrated by science. It is a clear example of the "nocebo" effect. I know lots of people eating gluten free because they believe they have to...but, there's no reason to believe that's true.

Specifically, the research team that first posited gluten sensitivity followed up with a more comprehensive study, and found: "On current evidence the existence of the entity of NCGS remains unsubstantiated". And, "Recent randomized controlled re-challenge trials have suggested that gluten may worsen gastrointestinal symptoms, but failed to confirm patients with self-perceived NCGS have specific gluten sensitivity."

Reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574 (Though I can't find a full article text online for free, Googling about this study will find pretty good summaries of it, and that's where I found one of the quotes above.)

nazgulnarsil• 12 years ago

Employment conditions are scary, marriage seems to have stabilized at a much lower equilibrium, housing is no longer the bastion of security it once was, etc. I look around at my peers and I see people who don't feel that they are in control of their lives. This winds up going one of two ways. Either food is seen as one last unadulterated pleasure and abused, or tightly regimented as one last bastion of control. I think the health food sector is growing because it gives people a sense of autonomy, when that feeling is in short supply.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Betteridge's law of headlines applies very well here. The entire article is basically a philosophical ramble. I also think it's funny to remove the word 'New' from the title [only in part due to this being penned in 2009]

serve_yay• 12 years ago

A lot of this rests on an examination of two characters who ostensibly represent their respective eras, but I am really not sure the analysis of these two people holds up to much scrutiny.

On what basis do we claim that Jennifer thinks sex is "de gustibus", for example? I suspect it is more likely that both would hold similar reservations, just regarding different circumstances. For example, they both may think some sexual activity is wrong but just disagree on which in particular.

Maybe Betty thinks gay sex is wrong and Jennifer doesn't, but they would both agree that a person leaving their family behind to "run off" with a new and exciting partner. In fact the suggestion otherwise strikes me as veiled grumbling about "millennials".

GuiA3• 12 years ago

I don't think the distinction here is extrapolated at all.

Try explaining something like Tinder to someone born in the first half of the previous century, and how most urban single 20-somethings use it everyday.

wsc981• 12 years ago

I only skimmed the article, but I guess the link between food and sex was also shown in a Southpark episode:

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s14e14-creme-fraiche

ndomin• 12 years ago

I call bullshit. I've gone much longer without sex than without food.

whiddershins• 12 years ago

I don't agree with the first paragraph, that social mores exist to limit the danger of uninhibited indulgence in sex. I think most if not all (other than disease) downsides of sexual indulgence are because it violates customs. The author has that completely backwards.

fibbery• 12 years ago

So you think "customs" are totally arbitrary? Not following the logic.

Sophistifunk• 12 years ago

No, they're mostly designed to keep a few Italian men in white hats in charge of 16th century Europe. We should probably take a long hard look at them.

thedufer• 12 years ago

Mods: could use a (2009) tag.

dang• 12 years ago

How could we have missed that very large year? Thanks!

martinflack• 12 years ago

How much of this is more easily explained in that Betty is conservative and her granddaughter Jennifer is liberal?

Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives touches on sex and food (see time index 7:09): http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

If there is a shift in the decades in common cultural attitudes, it might be explained by a general pendulum swing back and forth between conservative attitudes versus liberal attitudes holding more common sway in any particular decade.

humanrebar5• 12 years ago

How much of this is more easily explained in that Betty is conservative and her granddaughter Jennifer is liberal?

Perhaps the author is trying to explore why they prototypical conservative believes one way and the prototypical liberal believes another. I'm not sure just calling one "conservative" and the other "liberal" really explains anything.

dalke8• 12 years ago

I don't think it does explain much. It could be that Betty is a poor Lithuanian immigrant living in the slums of NYC in the 1960s, and Jennifer has converted to Buddhism, but doesn't always follow the vegetarianism aspect of the religion.

The problem with the example is that "Betty is much like any other American home cook in 1958" hides the diversity of America. Had Betty been living in New Mexico, there would be green chile on the plate. Had Betty been living in Louisiana then the food would be different still.

But by given simple hypothetical examples it's all too easy for us to fill in the details with what we think are the right answers.

ANTSANTS3• 12 years ago

My family is conservative and holds more traditional views about sex, family, and religion than most, yet is caught up in the obsession with healthy eating just as much as its liberal counterparts. That's what makes this interesting from my perspective: attitudes about food have changed dramatically across social boundaries and political boundaries, to a greater degree than even our attitudes about sex.

You don't have to agree with the author's conclusions (I mostly don't) to be interested in the way food is being treated in recent years as simultaneously a status symbol and the object of moral and political dogma.

dalke8• 12 years ago

Food has often been treated that as a status symbol. Being overweight was historically an indication of wealth. The poor could not afford much food, and were sometimes prohibited from certain foods.

Caligula famously threw a banquet once consisting of thousands of flamingo tongues, camel heels, and roast ostrich. Quoting from http://archive.archaeology.org/0111/abstracts/romans.html :

Eating well was not just a daily ritual, it was a philosophy and a way of life in Imperial Rome. Your reputation and acceptance in the upper echelons of society was often determined by your abilities as a generous host and as a connoisseur.

"Healthy eating", as the essay observes, has a long history in the US. Kellogg started the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the 1860s. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium, Kellogg "encouraged a low-fat, low-protein diet with an emphasis on whole grains, fiber-rich foods, and most importantly, nuts. Kellogg also recommended a daily intake of fresh air, exercise, and the importance of hygiene. Many of the theories of John Harvey Kellogg were later published in his book The Road to Wellness."

Battle Creek utilised information as known at that time to provide nutritional requirements for health and well-being relative to each person's requirements. Food required careful prescriptive preparation, with care also taken to ensure appetiveness and palatability were recognised. The diet lists included "scores of special dishes and hundreds of special food preparations, each of which has been carefully studied in relation to its nutritive and therapeutic properties", with the diet lists used "by the physicians in arranging the diet prescriptions of individual patients".

You may know Kellogg better as the producer of corn flakes.

Diet was also used as social distinction. As a clear example, Italian Americans brought with them a love of garlic, which wasn't popular in the US. A xenophobic slur was to call someone of Italian food heritage a "garlic eater." See http://www.billszone.com/fanzone/archive/index.php/t-224620.... for an example:

In 1960 "we had become truly one nation and one people"?!?!? Really??? You want to tell that to the millions of blacks under Jim Crow laws...government sanctioned institutional RACISM. Holy Jesus! Pat has now lost any semblance of that honesty I gave him.
Then he distorts history, leaving out the rank "racism" that the Irish...German...Italians...Poles...Jews and "other Eastern Europeans" suffered when they came to this country. My God...I felt first hand the prejudice and rank hatred directed toward Italians we'll into the 80's. Most notably, by the father of a woman I was seeing. He was a WASP, and he left no doubt that my Italian heritage made me a low life. He derisively called me "garlic eater" and let it be known that his daughter was too good for a Dago like me.

zasz• 12 years ago

I find this whole article rather suspect. For example, people have always had premarital sex. (http://books.google.com/books?id=knN9HzkY1pEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA...)

And the author simply asserts, without any proof, that children from divorced families do worse. Really? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-divorce-bad-for...

I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican, and lo and behold, she's with the Hoover Institute. Thought-provoking article, but given the assumptions made and how they clash with the facts as I know them, I don't buy any of it.

ANTSANTS3• 12 years ago

I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican

I am impressed by the open-mindedness you display.

Arnor2• 12 years ago

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.

Is anyone really eating organic food because of a perceived health benefit anymore? Everyone I know who eats organic (myself included) is doing for the sake of environmental consciousness or animal welfare not personal health.

Arnor2• 12 years ago

If you feel the need to downvote this, I think an explanation is in order... Perhaps your answer to my question is "Yes, I do eat organic food because of a perceived health benefit." If that's the case, a response would be more appropriate...

sgentle• 12 years ago

Sometimes I want to explain to someone what "begging the question" means in its original definition as a conclusion that relies on itself as a premise. I've often wished there was a perfect example of question-begging I could point to as a demonstration. Well, now I have one.

The most important - really, the only - point that this waffling diatribe offers is that food and sex are moral equivalents. Except it doesn't ever prove that point. Rather, it sort of wafts it in the air ("is food the new sex?"), assumes they are connected ("The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are closely connected") then throws out random just-so assertions ("Both [...] can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself")

The next thousand lines of condescending feigned surprise basically amount to "oh, how strange it is that although sex and food are very similar, we treat them differently". Yes, that would be surprising if they were very similar. But what if they're not very similar and you just made that up because it would be convenient for your worldview?

When your conclusion is your premise, anything is possible. I present here my new essay: Is Sex the New Eugenics? Sex and eugenics are inextricably linked. At various times laws have been made and wars have been fought over both sex and eugenics. We previously thought eugenics was a good idea but we now see it as morally bankrupt. We previously thought sex was morally bankrupt but we now see it as a good idea. But since they're the same, that's wrong. Sex and Eugenics are the same. Nietzsche.

Is Food the New Sex? (2009)

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