Mary Eberstadt, another deep Catholic thinker with ties to Leon Kass,
New Atlantis, and
First Things, has a strange and silly essay in
Policy Review in which she tells a fantasy of two women, one from the 50s, and one from the 90s. Eberstadt claims the woman of the 50s had mass-produced food, the production of which she had few moral questions about, but when it comes to sex, she had very strong opinions about it. The woman of the 90s, in contrast, has very strong opinions about the morality of her food, but no strong opinions about sex. The essay is uncleverly entitled
Is Food the New Sex?.
The answer, sadly for Ms. Eberstadt, is "no." Her conclusion is a funny one. After going through the usual arguments about how monogamous men are happier than promiscuous ones, and how "nontraditional sexual morality" is bad for
the children (cue
George Carlin) (and to be honest, I give her some slack on the evidence there), she writes:
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.
This is ridiculous nonsense.
She starts out with a peculiar notion-- that we are post-scarcity on food
and sex. She has two different and contradictory definitions of sex in her essay. The first is risky, it involves the vulnerability of nakedness and the dangers of swapping bodily fluids. The second is impersonal, removed, the participants separated from one another by time and space. Eberstadt deliberately and cynically conflates masturbating to pornography with having sexual congress, and she does so only to highlight the malevolent aspects of each. She wants her audience to believe that out there people are having impersonal, distant, sex-for-money relationships separated by time and distance that still, somehow, result in STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
But the important thing that Eberstadt misses is that food has become a moral issue not because we have become less aware of the dangers of sex; it's that we have become more aware of the complications of food. Ebestadt's 1950s mom died in 1983 of congestive heart failure, mostly due to bad dietary habits. She developed diabetes and spend her last six years confined to a bed due to crippling rheumatoid arthritis aggravated by sharp weight gain late in life. The 1990's woman is more aware of what happened to previous generations than any generation prior; she has more documentation, in full color and surround sound, about what her parents' generations went through, a signficant and impactful historic awareness of recent history that I don't think gets enough attention. (Her awareness extends to food
and sex.)
Food has become more diverse and more interesting-- and even worthy of moral concern-- because there's more of it. We now have the freedom to debate the merits of canned versus fresh, a luxury of which Miss Eberstadt points out and then fails to miss the import. We have the freedom, and the knowledge to debate the merits of free ranged versus factory farming. More importantly, we have access to an incredible range of knowledge about food, and we've become uncomfortably aware that food production can be the cause ecological harm and, depending upon your view, morally unacceptable suffering. Mrs. 1950s probably never thought twice about the life her meat led. Ms. 1990s very much has.
Eberstadt tries to joke about the different labels for different types and degrees of vegetarianism, saying, "The terminological complexity only amplifies the point that food now attracts the taxonomical energies once devoted to, say, metaphysics." I wonder what Eberstadt thinks of the taxonomical complexity of heavy metal bands? You've got heavy metal, vegetarian progressive grindcore, superblack metal, Viking dëath mëtal, progressive metal mathcore, and
lounge. Does she think that the taxonomic complexity of sex has somehow faded? Quick, make her listen to six hours of a poly-vs-open-relationships shouting match!
Taxonomic complexity occurs when the fundamentals have been decided upon; all that's left is tribal arrangement by precision. The fundamentals of vegetarianism are well-established, as are the steps one must go through to ensure nutritional sufficiency.
And sure, there is some moral high-minded and noisy opinionating between fish-eaters versus dairy-drinkers. If Eberstadt doesn't think the same thing isn't going on among people who have sex, now, where did I leave that six-hour tape of a poly-vs-open-relationships screaming match again?
Food isn't the new sex. It isn't the new heavy metal, either. Food and sex are on similar courses, both aided by technology. We have moral opinions about food because we assume that our stewardship over the Earth includes a responsibility to eliminate suffering in those weaker than ourselves and because our food choices do have a long-term impact on the planet we hope to leave behind for future generations. Sex, despite Eberstadt's handwringing, doesn't. We assume that adults having sex with other adults have the responsibility needed to do so with regard to each other and their offspring. (Eberstadt really goes off the rails when she claims that young people today have no strong moral feelings about unplanned children about whom the parents cannot manage responsibility. Does she even know any young people?)
The challenges of food and sex are challenges about our bodies, and control over them, and the ever-widening awareness we have of what "food" means, combined with the de-mystification of what "sex" means. Control that humanity is wresting away from both cruel biological fate and the old, cold hands of dead "tradition" by the inexorable reach of technology. Someday, there will be a cure for everything, an ideal form of birth control, and an efficient, minimally ecologically harmful way of producing a diversity of food sufficient for every living soul. We aren't there yet. We are definitely on our way.
To ask "Is Food the New Sex" is to miss the point: both the "old food" and the "old sex" have been left behind. Moral sensibilities about both have evolved, not in some absurdist zero-sum way as if morality was phlogiston to be pushed about, now some here, now some there. I don't think we'll get to a "post-moral" world. We don't argue about the morality of sexual congress; we argue about the morality of bringing children into the world you can't raise, and about having sex without taking into account the risks of disease and broken hearts. We argue about pig farm waste versus salmon farm waste versus overfishing versus industrial crop farming because those, too, have important moral consequences. Mary Eberstadt is being left behind by our world, and I hope she doesn't suffer too much being so.
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