Morality, Yesterday and Today

A relative of mine in her later years has become rabidly anti-religion, especially any religion that teaches standards of sexual morality and/or proselytizes. At the same time, this relative feels it imperative to put multiple videos on my Facebook wall about the China Study and to post that she's gone mostly vegan because of how "horrible" she finds the treatment of livestock. Ironically, she is adamantly pro-choice. I'm pretty sure dismembering an unborn child counts as "horrible" treatment, too. (At 8 months pregnant, I don't buy the "a fetus is not a person" argument, for it's quite clear that I have an unborn baby in me. If she were to stop moving in me, I'd mourn her just as much as if she were to pass away after leaving my uterus. Where the dividing line between a blastocyst and an unborn child is, I would hesitate to say, but I prefer to err on the non-death-dealing side of that line.)

A while back, I read a book claiming that "food is the new sex" in that people in western cultures now feel much more comfortable judging how others eat than they do having a negative opinion concerning others' sexual relations. My relative's behavior supports that thesis. A celebrity example of this cultural shift is Gwyneth Paltrow with her organic, macrobiotic diet evangelism and statements about being OK with adultery.  Tangentially supportive of the thesis is the super-harsh condemnation one sometimes sees of mothers who don't breastfeed, even though a recent sibling study showed that breastfeeding one child but not a sibling is not significantly associated with any comparative long-term health benefits to the breastfed child.

We strive to eat well, and I pay attention to studies that indicate what dietary choices appear to be best. I even breastfeed my kids! But diet is not a religion (yes, I say that as an adherent of the Word of Wisdom), and mere food choices seem a weak substitute for faithful discipleship of God. Our bodies can survive for a long time on diets ranging from Jain ascetism to McDonald's fare everyday, so preaching the need to follow any one restrictive diet doesn't make a lot of sense. Moreover, given the obvious point of sex--making new people, as science-loving dd9 easily understood when we had "the talk"--having opinions about sexual activity in our communities makes more sense given the high human stakes involved than does pronouncing judgment on someone else's choice to eat paleo-style, vegan, or neither.

Ah, baby just kicked me. I guess she likes the apricot jam and PB sandwich I just ate. Not organic but on multi-grain bread, in case you were wondering.