S P R I N G 2012
all the fall out, to map this new world. That’s what I’m trying to do in a very, very preliminary matter is just try and map out a little of where we are once we get to the surface and we can see the damage that’s been caused.
The City: You pose a provocative question in your book about sex and food. And as someone who knows a great number of foodies I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about this. I actually think this is a very fascinating argu‐ ment, but I wonder if you could boil it down essentially for our readers in terms of the perspective that you advance.
George: Well, one of the main themes of the book is that the sexual revolution has changed more than just the obvious things. We’ve been talking about family breakup, and guys not growing up, and things like that, and that’s sort of on the surface of all this. But un‐ derneath I think it’s also changed all kinds of ways in which we oper‐ ate socially. And in the chapter you’re talking about I make the ob‐ servation that over the past 50 years people have gotten less and less moralistic about sex. We all know that of course. Look at the gay rights revolution. Look at the very phenomena of no fault divorce. Look at the lack of stigma attached to out of wedlock births. Obvi‐ ously things have changed and they’ve changed for lots and lots of people. People have gotten less censorious about sex. But at the same time there’s been this parallel movement that I find fascinating which is that people are more and more censorious about food issues. They attach moral weight to all kinds of things concern‐ ing the consumption of food. For example, organic, or vegan, or buy‐ ing from buying your tuna fish from a place that doesn’t catch dol‐ phins in their nets. And I’m not making fun of this—on a personal note I’m a vegetarian so I actually get to say this with some objectivi‐ ty. People have become more and more holistic about food. My point in that chapter is that if you lay these two phenomena side by side it really looks like people took what had been their mor‐ al concerns about sex and latched them onto food instead. And my hypothesis is that this great big transformation happened because of the sexual revolution. And because, again, to go back to the party metaphor, nobody wanted to leave the party yet—people found it less appealing to be traditionalists about sex but they also seem to find it more appealing to be moralist about food. And I think these two things are related. 53