“Don’t you
think that’s an awful lot of salt?”
The
question surprised me. My classmate
Scott was pouring what seemed to be about a third of the salt in the shaker
onto his pasta, but I had become used to that after years of dining with him in
seminary. What shocked me was that he be
challenged on it right there at the table.
“No,” he
answered unperturbed, and continued shaking.
Eating
comes with all sorts of expectations and even rules: which fork to use, how to
obtain an item from across the table, and no double dipping. Because food is something we need to live,
there is an assumed intention to avoid what is harmful and seeking what is
healthful. Sometime this can bring about
concern over seemingly unhealthy eating choices, like my friend Scott’s. But those concerns encounter the etiquette of
what is polite to discuss at the table, and criticizing the food choices of
others while they are eating has a
substantial stigma - or at least it did at one time.
Now,
activists vandalize restaurants because of items served there, and loudly harass
diners for what they are eating. On a
more intimate level, table companions are more likely to chide one another because
of what they eat for reasons beyond health, ranging from substance, source, and
price to environmental impact.
Meanwhile,
over the same period of time, another activity essential to human thriving,
also subject to all sorts of expectations and even rules, has undergone the
reverse transition: fewer rules, and criticism or correction is forbidden. I speak of sexual relations.
I recently
finished reading Adam and Eve after the
Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, by Mary Eberstadt, a local
resident, but a nationally known author.
Apparently it has been out for some years, since Fr. Gallaugher observed
he had read it when it was in hardback. Eberstadt
presents in straightforward and conversational manner a matter-of-fact analysis
of data about the impact of certain behavioral changes in advanced countries
over the past fifty years. She has
identified a widespread and willful ignorance of measurable results of the changes
advanced by the sexual revolution, results that have been grievously harmful.
One of her
chapters, Is Food the New Sex? presents
the fascinating analysis that public
moralizing has shifted from sexual behavior to eating behavior. If you think about it, you will not have
trouble coming up with examples.
She
writes: Both appetites, if pursued
without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also
to other people, and even to society itself. …What
happens when, for the first time in history, …adults are more or less free to
have all the sex and food they want? …The
all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasboard is not.
So what does it mean to have a civilization that is
puritanical about food, and licentious about sex? …It would seem to be that the norms society
imposes on itself in pursuit of its own self-protection do not wholly disappear,
but rather mutate and move on.
I highly recommend
this little book to you; it will change the way you look at all sorts of
things, if you look at them the way you have been trained over the past fifty
years. You will think you have been let
“in” on some big secret. You will wonder
why everybody didn’t notice long ago.
You may
also smile quietly the next time you are seated near someone who is a vegan,
and arguing that you should be one, too.
Monsignor Smith
