cover image Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and Morality

Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and Morality

Jeremy Iggers. Basic Books, $23 (202pp) ISBN 978-0-465-07805-9

According to Iggers, Americans are eating more but enjoying it less, racked with guilt over environmental destruction and animal welfare and consumed by anxieties over body image and weight. In an entertaining, occasionally provocative look at our eating habits, this Minneapolis-St. Paul Tribune ethics columnist/restaurant reviewer samples the ""postmodern food world,"" where marketing messages surrounding the food we eat meld with the eating experience. He finds that, in our fragmented, mobile, TV-oriented society, in which satisfactory interpersonal relationships are rare, we invest food with tremendous emotional power and symbolic significance. Further, we eroticize food, even as eating, like sex, is becoming an increasingly solitary pursuit. To overcome food anxieties and eating disorders, Iggers urges us to eat mindfully and ethically, for instance by saying grace, by making food a tool of community or by choosing organic and vegetarian foods. (Aug.)