Is Food the New Sex? (2009)

A lot of this rests on an examination of two characters who ostensibly represent their respective eras, but I am really not sure the analysis of these two people holds up to much scrutiny.

On what basis do we claim that Jennifer thinks sex is "de gustibus", for example? I suspect it is more likely that both would hold similar reservations, just regarding different circumstances. For example, they both may think some sexual activity is wrong but just disagree on which in particular.

Maybe Betty thinks gay sex is wrong and Jennifer doesn't, but they would both agree that a person leaving their family behind to "run off" with a new and exciting partner. In fact the suggestion otherwise strikes me as veiled grumbling about "millennials".

I only skimmed the article, but I guess the link between food and sex was also shown in a Southpark episode:

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s14e14-creme-fraiche

I don't know if I agree or not with you, but I don't think France is the best example because it has such a strong food culture.

I'm a French person who's been living in the US for about 5 years now. My main realization regarding the way food is treated in each country is that in France, the relationship with food is conditioned culturally very strongly since the moment you're born. When you grow up as a French person in a culturally French family, you grow up in an environment where you constantly hear about what foods go and don't go with one another, how you should eat, etc. You hear this through your own family, through meals at schools, through meals you share when you go to your friend's house, and so on. Little things like "you're supposed to eat bread with your salad", "we've already had meat for lunch let's not have it for dinner", "don't eat with your hands", etc. For the first 18 years of your life, you hear these things on an everyday basis to the point that when you start living on your own, they're part of your subconscious. If you ate pizza on Monday, you're not going to eat it again on Tuesday because you'll hear your grandma's voice in your head that says "You already had pizza last night, eat some vegetables tonight". When you have dinner with your friends in college, you're likely to still cook something fairly healthy because most people share that upbringing with you. And then when you raise a family of your own, you yourself repeat these things and the cycle continues.

This culture has evolved and been passed from generation to generation over centuries, and the result is that the average French person has a fairly strong instinct for "eating healthily" because of this, even though they're not compulsively counting calories at every meal. Their cultural baggage means they can just cook according to their gut, and their meals are likely to be balanced over time. The same is probably true for other countries with strong food cultures such as other mediterranean countries, Japan/South Korea, and so on.

Such a culture does not exist to such an extent in the US. I've found the contrast to be pretty stark - when I eat with French friends, there's an entire set of manners and habits that are never expressed but mutually understood, which does not happen when I eat with most American friends. As a teenager, I lived in the US with a host family for a summer who never ate together - different family members would just pick and choose from the fridge at different times of the day as they saw fit, with no regards for whether their food intake was balanced or not; then maybe once or twice a week, they'd have a barbecue all together. This would be completely inconceivable in a French family.

That being said, France is changing, families are becoming more and more multicultural, and things like fast food restaurants are changing norms.

Seems to be an interesting difficult in terms of whether the dangers in food are ones that people consuming it can expect to perceive. In an era when food poisoning was more common, maybe a lot of people knew quickly whether the food they ate had harmed them; now folks eating junk food might have to wait years to experience some of the adverse effects, and can't really relate those effects to a particular purchase or product or vendor.

I worry about a similar thing for computer security. A lot of the threats that we used to think about in terms of, say, viruses, wanted to get the user's attention either through innocuous mischief, or by showing off with spectacularly destructive behavior, like deleting files or crashing the machine or even erasing the hard drive. "Look at me, I infected your computer!" And later we saw adware which tries to get the user's attention for marketing purposes (which is definitely still a thing).

But now a whole lot of attackers have a goal of long-term, pervasive, convert compromise, to be used selectively later on -- botnets for DDoS attacks and spam, keyloggers for delayed financial fraud or government surveillance, "advanced persistent threats" to compromise infrastructure, maybe in service of transitively compromising other infrastructure.

http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum...

So in the past there was a common expectation that a virus would do something that the user could notice, or else what's the point? Whereas nowadays if someone says "the government is spying on me, my computer displayed a weird security warning message" it tends to reduce the credibility of the claim, because we expect that botnet developers and government hackers are as covert as possible, delaying the moment when victims of compromise would notice anything's wrong for as far as possible, trying to break or obfuscate the link between the attack and its results as much as possible.

So in one sense computers have also gotten more dangerous because there are more powerful and pervasive attackers, but in another sense there may be a trend away from risks of getting any kind of malware whose effects you will notice any time soon.