Food, Sex, and Us

March 28th, 2009
by George Weigel

George F. Will calls Mary Eberstadt “intimidatingly intelligent.” George must be easily intimidated these days, because Mary is one of the nicest (and funniest) people I know.

She’s also our premier analyst of American cultural foibles and follies, with a keen eye for oddities that illuminate just how strange the country’s moral culture has become.

In mid-2008, Mary penned the “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae,” the best defense of the encyclical written on its 40th anniversary. (If you missed it, you can retrieve it at firstthings.com). Now, in Policy Review, she’s written “Is Food the New Sex?”, a brilliant dissection of culinary puritanism and bedroom libertinism that includes the greatest subhead in recent magazine history: “Broccoli, Pornography, and Kant.” But don’t let the invocation of the Sage of Koenigsberg put you off your feed, so to speak; the article is quite accessible to those who last encountered The Critique of Pure Reason via Cliff Notes. the rest