Is Food the New Sex? (2009)

I have an autobiographical essay by someone written in around 2001. It says X about something that happened in the 1960s. I have a paper written by the same person in 1964. It says not X.

That's evidence that people's memory fades or changes over time. Of course that's well known. For example, "Not only are our memories faulty (anyone who has uncovered old diaries knows that), but more importantly Schiller says our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by.", from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-right/201307/your-m... .

I have printed menu suggestions, restaurant menus, and pictures and movies from the 1950s which say that "meat and two veg" was far more common than just potatoes.

Certainly it's not indicative of anyone's specific diet. Certainly it may be true for the OP's history. But if the only "fresh" vegetable on a typical dinner was potato, why are there so many non-potatoes vegetables in those pictures of 1950s grocery stores?

Recall too that the original essay discusses a hypothetical diet of the 1950s, and a comparison to a hypothetical one now. There are not that many vegetarians now for the modern example to be representative of a general modern trend, and I pointed out that vegetarianism was also part of general culture of the 1950s. The essay is therefore an artificially constructed and I argue essentially meaningless comparison.

Here's a perhaps atypical diary entry from 1954 for a farewell dinner, http://annbkennedy.blogspot.se/2013/04/june-29-30-1954-farew...:

> Long menu in courses--celery, etc., soup, then small lobsters with rice, filet mignon, gr. beans, mushrooms, then asparagus salad, peach melba, coffee & fruit.

That's yet another piece of evidence that says that many people ate dinner with fresh vegetables other than potato.

(To be fair, in winter it would be hard to get fresh veg. But the essay is using fresh veg as a proxy for food surplus, and it's better to look at food surplus directly. Otherwise it makes no sense to say that King Louis XIV of France, deprived of fresh peas in winter, is somehow food impoverished.)

For an individual, sure. For a society, no, that's not a strawman at all.

There have always been people at the top of Maslow's hierarchy. I gave as an example the aristocracy of the 1600s.

I gave as another example JFK, whose many affairs were well known, but never tut-tutted as much as, say, the teenager in high school who suddenly had to visit with family out of state for 8 months.

One of my stereotypes is that that conservatives tend to not analyze history as an oppressive patriarchy where social structures are set up to reinforce certain discriminatory behavior.

Do you disagree with that characterization of most conservative analysis?

I think it's an important factor. I quoted another essay which goes into why those are important factors. Since the essay did not address them (that I could tell), I thought it was lacking.

Food has often been treated that as a status symbol. Being overweight was historically an indication of wealth. The poor could not afford much food, and were sometimes prohibited from certain foods.

Caligula famously threw a banquet once consisting of thousands of flamingo tongues, camel heels, and roast ostrich. Quoting from http://archive.archaeology.org/0111/abstracts/romans.html :

> Eating well was not just a daily ritual, it was a philosophy and a way of life in Imperial Rome. Your reputation and acceptance in the upper echelons of society was often determined by your abilities as a generous host and as a connoisseur.

"Healthy eating", as the essay observes, has a long history in the US. Kellogg started the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the 1860s. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium, Kellogg "encouraged a low-fat, low-protein diet with an emphasis on whole grains, fiber-rich foods, and most importantly, nuts. Kellogg also recommended a daily intake of fresh air, exercise, and the importance of hygiene. Many of the theories of John Harvey Kellogg were later published in his book The Road to Wellness."

> Battle Creek utilised information as known at that time to provide nutritional requirements for health and well-being relative to each person's requirements. Food required careful prescriptive preparation, with care also taken to ensure appetiveness and palatability were recognised. The diet lists included "scores of special dishes and hundreds of special food preparations, each of which has been carefully studied in relation to its nutritive and therapeutic properties", with the diet lists used "by the physicians in arranging the diet prescriptions of individual patients".

You may know Kellogg better as the producer of corn flakes.

Diet was also used as social distinction. As a clear example, Italian Americans brought with them a love of garlic, which wasn't popular in the US. A xenophobic slur was to call someone of Italian food heritage a "garlic eater." See http://www.billszone.com/fanzone/archive/index.php/t-224620.... for an example:

> In 1960 "we had become truly one nation and one people"?!?!? Really??? You want to tell that to the millions of blacks under Jim Crow laws...government sanctioned institutional RACISM. Holy Jesus! Pat has now lost any semblance of that honesty I gave him.

> Then he distorts history, leaving out the rank "racism" that the Irish...German...Italians...Poles...Jews and "other Eastern Europeans" suffered when they came to this country. My God...I felt first hand the prejudice and rank hatred directed toward Italians we'll into the 80's. Most notably, by the father of a woman I was seeing. He was a WASP, and he left no doubt that my Italian heritage made me a low life. He derisively called me "garlic eater" and let it be known that his daughter was too good for a Dago like me.

I can understand that one might seek sterile meat after a bad experience, but unless they went CSI on everywhere they were for the time around the incident they cannot know exactly what the source of the poisoning was. It might have been a doorknob at work that was contaminated by someone who didn't wash their hands and had contaminated fecal matter on their hands. Deciding henceforth to only eat sterile meat would not solve that problem.