My Struggle with Vice: Food Porn

Apparently, looking at websites such as fxcuisine.com, smittenkitchen.com, and The Paupered Chef are the modern equivalent of sneaking a peek at the those magazines wrapped in plastic and hidden behind the black covering on the top row of the convenience store rack (not that I would know or notice, of course!). So says George F. Will in today's Washington Post:

Today "the all-you-can-eat buffet" is stigmatized and the "sexual smorgasbord" is not. Eberstadt's surmise about a society "puritanical about food, and licentious about sex" is this: "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."

Modern science, our culture's de facto authority figure, has little willingness to speak about sex in terms of morality, but it has a tremendous amount to say about the value and danger of various foods.

This can be a good thing - a dear friend is having great success fighting cancer in part due to a strict diet of mostly fresh organic fruit. My wife's grandfather has managed his heart and blood pressure condition for years with little more than flax seed oil. There is definitely scientific cause and effect at work in the foods we eat. There is also a limit.

In terms of percentages, garbage in = garbage out. People who drink a twelve-pack of soda or beer a day are generally not in good shape. Yet there remain the statistical outliers - the 96 year-old who smokes, drinks, and chews while never leaving the coach except to prepare a frozen dinner, and, unfortunately, the healthy athlete whose life is cut far too short by cancer.

So, sure, I think about what I eat, and I try to burn a few calories here and there, but nature and our bodies are far to complex for simple binary relationships. That, and I don't get suckered by the trap of absolute materialism as pointed out by Will:

Furthermore, as increasing numbers of people are led to a materialist understanding of life -- who say not that "I have a body" but that "I am a body" -- society becomes more obsessive about the body's maintenance. Alas, expiration is written into the leases we have on our bodies, so bon appetit.

Bon appetit indeed. Of course in moderation less we delve into gluttony, but bring on a slice of that gorgeous, sexy, creamy, delicious food porn.