
Is Food the New Sex? (2009) - tacon
http://www.hoover.org/research/food-new-sex
======
sgentle
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.

------
tacon
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".

~~~
dalke
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](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.

~~~
tacon
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.

~~~
dalke
Like I said, I couldn't get through the essay because I fundamentally
disagreed with it.

You say your memories of the 1950s are in agreement with it. I point out
multiple examples from that era which show it isn't the case. I trust copies
of literature from that era better than I do memories of childhood. I know how
distorted my own memories of childhood were compared to the reality of the
1970s.

Here's another: [http://calorielab.com/news/2005/08/25/family-dinners-
school-...](http://calorielab.com/news/2005/08/25/family-dinners-school-
lunches-and-fast-food-in-the-1950s/) \- "Dinners consisted of meat, potatoes,
a green vegetable, dinner rolls, salad. and dessert." Or look at the image of
a Swanson's TV dinner from the 1950s ,
[http://leitesculinaria.com/10348/writings-dining-through-
the...](http://leitesculinaria.com/10348/writings-dining-through-the-decades-
american-food-history.html) , with potato and peas.

You say your mom wasn't shopping at a farmer's market. I never mentioned that
- my reference was to 50 years previous. Fruit and vegetables are available at
the supermarket. Here are pictures of a 1950s supermarket.
[http://fl4projects.tumblr.com/post/16150521363](http://fl4projects.tumblr.com/post/16150521363)
. See the produce section? Same for
[http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27021666487620537/](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27021666487620537/)
.

You say that "food woo" is rampant now. I pointed out that C.S. Lewis against
vegetarianism of the 1950s. Or I can point you to
[http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/12/food/fo-36243](http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/12/food/fo-36243)
and how "From the 1930s through the '60s, Americans were convinced you had to
have a certain kind of bowl to make a proper green salad: a plain, unvarnished
wooden bowl which could never be washed." Or I could point out the radium
craze of the early 1900s, when it seems you could get just about anything with
a bit of radium added to it, for good health.

Here's a better description of my point, at
[http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article10.htm](http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article10.htm)
:

> Why do so many people think American families are facing worse problems now
> than in the past? Partly it's because we compare the complex and diverse
> families of the 1900s with the seemingly more standard-issue ones of the
> 1950s, a unique decade when every long-term trend of the 20th century was
> temporarily reversed. In the 1950s, for the first time in 100 years, the
> divorce rate fell while marriage and fertility rates soared, creating a boom
> in nuclear-family living. The percentage of foreign-born individuals in the
> country decreased. And the debates over social and cultural issues that had
> divided Americans for 150 years were silenced, suggesting a national
> consensus on family values and norms. ...

> But much nostalgia for the 1950s is a result of selective amnesia-the same
> process that makes childhood memories of summer vacations grow sunnier with
> each passing year. The superficial sameness Of 1950s family life was
> achieved through censorship, coercion and discrimination. People with
> unconventional beliefs faced governmental investigation and arbitrary
> firings. African Americans and Mexican Americans were prevented from voting
> in some states by literacy tests that were not administered to whites.
> Individuals who didn't follow the rigid gender and sexual rules of the day
> were ostracized.

The 1950s also had the "curse of capitalism". All of the new processed food
companies want to get in on the action, after the rationing of the war. Look
at [http://thehairpin.com/2013/10/lets-eat-some-weird-
shi](http://thehairpin.com/2013/10/lets-eat-some-weird-shi) and see just how
many ways the free market was trying to convince people in the 1950s to add a
bit of their branded processed food to a recipe. "Fill the center of the
peaches with Miracle Whip." "Split frankfurter buns in half and spread with
Kraft Mayonnaise. Fill with good thick strips of Velveeta and brush the tops
of the buns with melted butter or Parkay Margarine.", etc.

I don't see any awareness of these issues in that essay, which makes it very
frustrating to read. It comes across like a specific, typically conservative
viewpoint which emphasizes a certain hierarchical conformist culture.

~~~
daveloyall
I didn't get all the way through your post because I fundamentally disagreed
with it.

> _I trust copies of literature from that era better than I do memories of
> childhood._

You're doing it wrong! :)

Really. "Literature" that specifies what people should eat is likely pulp (a
class of literature). You can't gain any information about my diet--or even
the average diet--by flipping through the magazine racks at the grocery store
checkout--not in this decade or decades past.

~~~
dalke
I have an autobiographical essay by someone written in around 2001. It says X
about something that happened in the 1960s. I have a paper written by the same
person in 1964. It says not X.

That's evidence that people's memory fades or changes over time. Of course
that's well known. For example, "Not only are our memories faulty (anyone who
has uncovered old diaries knows that), but more importantly Schiller says our
memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a
facsimile of things gone by.", from [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-
right/201307/your-m...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-
right/201307/your-memory-isnt-what-you-think-it-is) .

I have printed menu suggestions, restaurant menus, and pictures and movies
from the 1950s which say that "meat and two veg" was far more common than just
potatoes.

Certainly it's not indicative of anyone's specific diet. Certainly it may be
true for the OP's history. But if the only "fresh" vegetable on a typical
dinner was potato, why are there so many non-potatoes vegetables in those
pictures of 1950s grocery stores?

Recall too that the original essay discusses a hypothetical diet of the 1950s,
and a comparison to a hypothetical one now. There are not that many
vegetarians now for the modern example to be representative of a general
modern trend, and I pointed out that vegetarianism was also part of general
culture of the 1950s. The essay is therefore an artificially constructed and I
argue essentially meaningless comparison.

Here's a perhaps atypical diary entry from 1954 for a farewell dinner,
[http://annbkennedy.blogspot.se/2013/04/june-29-30-1954-farew...](http://annbkennedy.blogspot.se/2013/04/june-29-30-1954-farewell-
dinner.html):

> Long menu in courses--celery, etc., soup, then small lobsters with rice,
> filet mignon, gr. beans, mushrooms, then asparagus salad, peach melba,
> coffee & fruit.

That's yet another piece of evidence that says that many people ate dinner
with fresh vegetables other than potato.

(To be fair, in winter it would be hard to get fresh veg. But the essay is
using fresh veg as a proxy for food surplus, and it's better to look at food
surplus directly. Otherwise it makes no sense to say that King Louis XIV of
France, deprived of fresh peas in winter, is somehow food impoverished.)

~~~
daveloyall
You can't tell a person older than you that they are wrong about their own
life during a period that happened before you were born. _Especially not with
with pulp sources._

This is not an internet points game and it is not wikipedia. This is a
conversation between more or less like-minded people. Personal insight is to
be _valued_.

If you want to actually prove your point, get the 1950/1960 US Census data,
average them, analyze the income and employment numbers, and tell me how the
center of the bell curve could afford a three course meal on the daily. Don't
forget that 36% of the country wasn't employed at all (in 1950, includes
children), but still needed to eat (includes children!).

In short, yes, you can trump personal memory with hard numbers (and you
should!)--but not with a mere large volume of citations.

~~~
dalke
What you ask, regarding the analysis of census data, is completely besides the
point because it doesn't even fit the example in the essay.

You make a statement about the bell curve. Jennifer, the modern vegetarian, is
not in the bell curve.

[http://www.vegetariantimes.com/article/vegetarianism-in-
amer...](http://www.vegetariantimes.com/article/vegetarianism-in-america/)
suggests that 10 percent of U.S., adults, or 22.8 million people, say they
largely follow a vegetarian-inclined diet.

Even if it's 20%, that's still not near the center of the modern US diet. So
already the essay isn't a strong match to modern culture.

I sure can say that someone is wrong about their memory, but in this case I'm
saying that the OP's recollections don't fit the data. Even if true for the
OP, it appears to be atypical.

You complain that I mention pulp sources. I've also mentioned diary entries.
Every single entry is a "personal insight."

See
[http://diaries.markbartlett.net/diary58.html](http://diaries.markbartlett.net/diary58.html)
for another example. "We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, date nut
bread and coffee for dinner." and "Mrs. Colburn gave us sack of green beans
and Mrs. Burnett more green beans, onions and beets." (Some of that would have
been canned, but some certainly eaten fresh.) "Mr. and Mrs. Kluckman and baby
here tonight – brought green beans and cabbage."

Or [http://melissa-ellison.tripod.com/id25.html](http://melissa-
ellison.tripod.com/id25.html) from 1933, "July 9 We were all alone today. No
one came. Very warm. We had string beans for dinner today." (They picked and
canned the string beans the day before, so these were fresh beans.) "Sept 26
Very warm and sultry. We are again to have boiled bacon and swisschard for
dinner today." "Nov 14 Cloudy and snowflurries. We had spare ribs and carrotts
cooked together for dinner."

[https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/Diary%201951.%20America.ht...](https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/Diary%201951.%20America.html)
which is about a British man visiting the US in 1951: "For dinner I had fruit
and soup and bread and broccoli & 2 huge lamb chops & Pepsi Cola & chocolate
cake & milk.", "We had a fine lunch of meat, potatoes, vegetables, apple
juice, raspberries & ice-cream." (It's entirely possible that the vegetables
were canned or frozen. At some point though I don't think it makes a
difference. Most of my vegetables now are frozen too.)

I'll make my point again. The author of the essay sets up a hypothetical
"Betty" from 1958 in a situation which does not appear to be characteristic of
the larger society. The OP - the one who linked to the essay - finds the
description to be characteristic of the OP's own history. That doesn't mean
that that OP's memory is a true reflection of the time.

You want me, I believe, to demonstrate somehow that the OP must not be
correct. I am trying instead to show that the hypothetical Betty is likely not
characteristic of the era, and given the well-known problems with human
memory, I want something stronger than a childhood memory when the available
"pulp" evidence so strongly shows a much wider variety of food dishes for that
era.

This was absolutely the era before the War on Poverty, and before the Civil
Rights era. The essay seems to exclude immigrant foods (fresh bok choi for
Chinese dishes), regional foods (like Southern dishes with collard greens),
etc. That's why I argue that it isn't representative of the 1950s, but only
representative perhaps of the most culturally influential social groups of
that era .. and the OP may also be a member of that group.

------
sowhatquestion
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html)

~~~
slapshot
> 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
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](http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm)

~~~
schoen
Seems to be an interesting difficult in terms of whether the dangers in food
are ones that people consuming it can expect to perceive. In an era when food
poisoning was more common, maybe a lot of people knew quickly whether the food
they ate had harmed them; now folks eating junk food might have to wait years
to experience some of the adverse effects, and can't really relate those
effects to a particular purchase or product or vendor.

I worry about a similar thing for computer security. A lot of the threats that
we used to think about in terms of, say, viruses, wanted to get the user's
_attention_ either through innocuous mischief, or by showing off with
spectacularly destructive behavior, like deleting files or crashing the
machine or even erasing the hard drive. "Look at me, I infected your
computer!" And later we saw adware which tries to get the user's attention for
marketing purposes (which is definitely still a thing).

But now a whole lot of attackers have a goal of long-term, pervasive, convert
compromise, to be used selectively later on -- botnets for DDoS attacks and
spam, keyloggers for delayed financial fraud or government surveillance,
"advanced persistent threats" to compromise infrastructure, maybe in service
of transitively compromising other infrastructure.

[http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum...](http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Documents/14.pdf)

So in the past there was a common expectation that a virus would do something
that the user could notice, or else what's the point? Whereas nowadays if
someone says "the government is spying on me, my computer displayed a weird
security warning message" it tends to _reduce_ the credibility of the claim,
because we expect that botnet developers and government hackers are as covert
as possible, delaying the moment when victims of compromise would notice
anything's wrong for as far as possible, trying to break or obfuscate the link
between the attack and its results as much as possible.

So in one sense computers have also gotten more dangerous because there are
more powerful and pervasive attackers, but in another sense there may be a
trend _away_ from risks of getting any kind of malware whose effects you will
notice any time soon.

------
martinflack
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](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.

~~~
ANTSANTS
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.

~~~
dalke
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](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](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....](http://www.billszone.com/fanzone/archive/index.php/t-224620.html)
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.

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

~~~
r00fus
Has food become more available in the past decade? Or perhaps France is
getting more factory-food on the shelves? Ten years ago I didn't notice that
people were going hungry.

~~~
ANTSANTS
It might be tied to the increased rates of immigration many European countries
have seen in recent years.

------
nazgulnarsil
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.

------
serve_yay
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".

~~~
GuiA
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.

------
peterwwillis
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]

------
zasz
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...](http://books.google.com/books?id=knN9HzkY1pEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=premarital+pregnancy+rates+america+nineteenth+century&source=bl&ots=33AKmshrTb&sig=ae-
VOz3pg4fbFvzq1Be0TrxtZ-s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Y1xuVMb2D5GuogSh0YHgDw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=premarital%20pregnancy%20rates%20america%20nineteenth%20century&f=false))

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...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-divorce-bad-
for-children/)

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.

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

I am impressed by the open-mindedness you display.

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

~~~
Sophistifunk
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.

------
wsc981
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](http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s14e14-creme-fraiche)

------
Arnor
> 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.

~~~
Arnor
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...

------
thedufer
Mods: could use a (2009) tag.

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

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

