Are our evolv­ing social and cul­tural judg­ments about sex and food related? Mary Eber­stadt, fel­low at Stan­ford University’s Hoover Insti­tute, believes so.

Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed colum­nist George Will dis­cusses Eberstadt’s the­ory, stat­ing that nowa­days we judge peo­ple more for their food choices than their sex­ual behav­iours, whereas a gen­er­a­tion ago these moral poles would have been reversed.

In a Pol­icy Review essay, Is Food the New Sex? – it has a sec­tion titled “Broc­coli, pornog­ra­phy, and Kant” — she notes that for the first time ever, most peo­ple in advanced nations “are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want.” One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pur­sued with an ardor heed­less of con­se­quences, or that both would be sub­jected to anal­o­gous codes con­strain­ing con­sump­tion. The oppo­site has hap­pened — mind­ful eat­ing and mind­less sex.