Food and faith

While heading to the UAA bookstore recently, I stopped to pick up an issue of the Catholic Anchor, the Anchorage Archdiocese's newpaper. In it, I read a column from George Weigel, a conservative Catholic commentator whose prose is rich and engaging.
His commentary was essentially a friendly backslap to Mary Eberstadt, who recently penned an essay called "Food the New Sex?" about how we used to be willing to make moral judgments about people's sexual habits, but now we are uncomfortable doing so. What happens "behind closed doors" is really none of our business. But what we eat, well that's a perfectly reasonable topic on which to pass moral judgments. So we criticize others who eat at McDonald's and personally avoid eating swordfish since it's been overfished.
He writes: "Sex once involved taboos, transmitted by culture and powerfully enforced by society. Food is now taboo-ridden among upscale young people, while life for many American 30-somethings is a sexual free-fire zone. In that zone, moral judgments are not only eliminated but actively proscribed by strong taboos: 'Why are you so judgmental?' 'Why are you imposing your values on others?' Violate those taboos, and you risk the kind of ostracism once visited upon Hester Prynne."
He then goes on to say that it's a good thing that America's culinary landscape has improved so much in the last several decades. "But better cooking and a deepened respect for the culinary arts are one thing; misplaced moral judgments are another. If Whole Foods is a culture's answer to the demise of the Sixth Commandment, that culture is suffering from moral indigestion."
The problem with Weigel's argument is that he misses the point entirely about why food is a perfectly appropriate topic to pass moral judgment. How most of us get our food — through a massive system that depends on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, monoculture and highly processed end products — very much affects people's lives. Industrial farming tends to put small farmers out of business, it tends to pollute the air and water, it tends to make the suffering of animals a legitimate means to the end, it tends to ignore the very real health consequences of eating a lot of processed foods. If those aren't areas in which people should be passing judgment, I don't know what's left.