The Food Issue: November 2006 Archives

William Saletan of Slate Magazine just wrote an article identifying parallels between contraception and obesity control.

The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don't get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.

Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?

See the quotes in context here.

While the tone of article is in very poor taste. (Saletan sees both pregnancy and obesity as consequences of having too much "fun" whereas sex can be anything but fun) but the parallels are sound.

I'm particularly curious why contemporary moralists, especially religious moralists, have so little to say on the subject of eating when they've had so very much to say about sex.

Any conceivable claim you could make about natural vs. unnatural interventions into sex, any talk of cheapenings, or alienations, or reductionisms, or degradations, or violations of natural orders, or, responsibilities or, especially, any conversations about dignity must hold equally for food. And yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (for instance) is mum.

As Saletan says, whereas tradition provided only for abstinence, modern science has provided barrier methods, pharmaceutical blocks, and even surgical interventions to remove offending tissue or to prevent its formation to begin with. If one's bad the other ought to be equally so. And yet...

[Note: Please don't construe anything in this post as an acceptance or rejection of the controversial issue of weight or weight management. The closest it comes is a abstract-level question about the way we discuss that acceptance or rejection. --fl]