Can We Talk About Food?

I have a pet peeve about the way we as a culture “talk” about food. On one hand, our everyday language portrays food as if it had a moral dimension, and not just a source of a fuel and should be also a pleasure. It is not “good” or “bad”. One’s diet as a whole can be healthy or unhealthy – equally for being too light on calories as for being too heavy in fat – but an individual item of food is not a moral choice.

On a broader level, ads have long used sexuality to encourage women to indulge –whether it’s chocolate or some other “decadent” food.

The newest trend seems to take an even more evil twist.

Foods which women aren’t supposed to eat since they are considered “naughty” seem to be increasingly advertised by women selling these foods to heterosexual men on the premise that they (the women) are somehow sexually kinky/dirty for enjoying these “naughty” foods. So we have women faking fake “naughtiness” in order to fake fake eroticism.

One word: Hardees.

Is it any wonder our ideas about food are just so out of whack?