Serving Our Hearth Gods

Having conquered cigarettes, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched a campaign against sugary drinks. The media has made fun of his proposed ban on large soft drinks, mocking his neo-Puritanism. Many of my friends are inclined to shake their heads in disbelief.

I’m not so skeptical. Bloomberg’s proposed regulation shifts us from a Nanny to Schoolmarm State, but that’s what many want. The government pays for treating some of the health problems that arise from widespread obesity. So advocates lobby for intervention and regulation. They want us to shift from treatment to prevention: root causes and all that. The Nanny needs to be less indulgent and more demanding.

This is not a novel idea. Modern ideas of public health were developed more than a hundred years ago, and they led to sanitation requirements, mandatory inoculations, isolation of the contagious, and much more. Obesity has recently become a serious problem, which is why health officials have been advocating for some sort of public response.

And it’s not a surprising idea either. Over the last twenty or thirty years, our upper-middle-class culture has become a servant of health. Professional men and women in New York offer daily sacrifices in countless gyms that are veritable temples consecrated to the body. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have special weekly sections on health. Young parents worry compulsively about the health and safety of their children.

These same people also do unhealthy things. Working seventy hours a week for a high-powered law firm is not good for one’s health. Nor is a work-hard, play-hard mentality that hits the bars. Nor is sexual license.

These contradictions are perhaps inevitable. Our elite culture serves a trinity of hearth gods: Health, Wealth, and Hedonism. We propitiate them all, which requires managing their demands as best we can. Work demands long hours, which cuts into gym time, thus shifting us to lite beer on the weekends. Polytheism is complicated.

Bloomberg’s campaign against sugary drinks is even more likely to succeed because the same elite culture has become fixated on food”which serves both the gods of Health and Hedonism. The rich and powerful are concerned about eating the right kinds of foods grown by the right people in the right way. Restaurants no longer tout their steak according to its USDA grade (prime!); instead, we are informed that it is “grass fed” and “locally sourced.” Eggs come from “cage-free chickens.” Bread is baked with grain grown in a “sustainable” way. And of course as much as possible is stamped “organic.”

This anxious and moralistic approach to food produces the social conditions for imposing exactly the sorts of regulations Bloomberg wants. Elites may talk “choice” and “liberation,” but they don’t hesitate to coerce when they think the gods demand it.

They especially don’t hesitate when they find the behavior and appearance of the lower classes repugnant. I have friends for whom the very thought of eating at McDonald’s makes them feel vaguely sick. And they respond to obesity with visceral recoil, and often moral outrage.

So, yes, we’ll have Bloomberg’s Schoolmarm State, at least when it comes to the fixations of our leadership class, which include food and health. Over the last forty years, an elite-driven anti-smoking campaign turned a widespread pleasure into a highly regulated taboo. Something similar is in our power when it comes to food and eating habits.

Why not sexual mores, norms for family life, and attitudes toward divorce? The success of campaigns in the service of health shows that we can. But, of course, at present we won’t. The hearth god of Hedonism says no.

Yes, but the true God has smashed idols in the past.