The Food Issue: Public health
So what would public health be like if cultural mores about sex and eating were reversed? I can think of a couple of things right off the bat.
Obesity would be as big a nervous curiosity to the general public as BDSM wear, and as poorly understood.
Diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and arterial sclerosis and food-borne illnesses such as salmonella, trichinosis, and E.Coli would also be pitifully understudied and misunderstood.
The U.S. Deparment of Agriculture would be housed in the Department of Justice.
Trichinosis and diabetes would be lingering uncurable illnesses. Efforts to study it and limit it's spread would be aggressively blocked by conservatives on family value grounds. Meanwhile HIV and Herpes would most likely have been nipped in the bud. If they persisted they'd be studied and attacked in a well-funded, coordinated fashion.
Conservatives would complain bitterly about trafficking of undocumented farm workers but would ignore the much lower-frequency traffick in undocumented sex workers. If they worried about it at all it would be because illegal sex workers were stealing jobs from hardworking American men and women.
Progressives would decry the spread of fast-fuck joints saying that they provide unhealthy and overprocessed sexual experiences. Columnists would wax nostalgic for the good old days when most people had sex at home. Fringe purists would argue endlessly that unassisted two-person sex was more natural. Everyone would think that was going too far. Vagegans would be claiming you should have only vaginal/penile sex. Hardly anyone would pay attention to them.
Not everything would change, of course, Right-wing red-state knuckledraggers would continue having sex with their underage relatives, but thanks to childhood vaccinations and early education programs venerial disease and teen pregnancy wouldn't be as chronic in red states. And blue-state liberals would still feel unnecessarily guilty about giving their children dairy products and red mean, but they'd be put in jail for it if caught doing it.
