Context Dependency

This is cheating in the sense that it's a re-post from Always in Transit. Rev. Transit had a really alarming post concerning a movement reported in the New York Times to make contraception impossible to get because it, along with such practices as abortion, devalues sex, making it about pleasure and without consequences:

"Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: 'Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary.' Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage."

Lovely, eh? So I tried to lampoon this with a bit of satire. Mixed results. Either way, I highly recommend the NYT article. Enjoy. Or not.

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I would like to take this opportunity to present some thoughts about the obesity epidemic in the United States. It is high time that our morally bankrupt society comes to terms with its gluttonous self. We need to realize that Americans have long devalued eating. The act by which we take in the substance that gives us life has been debased to a thrice-daily orgy of flavor sensation. Have we forgotten what it means to be given our daily bread and become a bunch of keen-palated, metrosexual, seasoning-fetishizing, crypto-French, grotesquely obese gastronomes? I’ll answer that! We have and it must stop.

Everyone knows that it is not simply the content of the foods available, but also their variety which is driving this mania of mealtime malfeasance. People, in their state of nature sitting in ersatz bistros and roaming the aisles of organic markets, are greedy. They want it all in its diverse splendor. They will eat more if there is more variety and thus contract diabetes and exhibit sloth. They will eat less and be more regimented in their behaviors if when consume edibles; they do so only by the bland necessities of biological imperative.

So, right here and now, I am proposing that the USDA and FDA ban all flavorful and flavor enhancing substances made popular since the end of the Cold War. Chicago’s foie gras ban is a good start, but I think it must be taken much further if we are to curtail the crippling engorgements of our cosmopolitan tastes. Henceforth there shall be a ban on products not limited to, but especially: cardamom, fruit-flavored vinaigrettes (especially raspberry), pomegranate juice, quinoa, non-peanut nut butters, porcini mushrooms, crème fraiche, bruschetta, artificially de-carbified breads and pastas, coconut milk, and anything inspired by the flavors of Indonesia/Java/Sumatra

I thank you for your support and hope you join me in the fight to reclaim the tongue as a secretor of digestive enzymes and not allow it to be whored out as a taste dildo for yuppies, couture hounds, and creative vegans.