William Saletan in Slate:
If only we could manage food the way we’ve managed sex. Sex, like eating, is fun, and for good reason. Food nurtures us to maturity and keeps us alive so we can procreate and raise children. Sex passes on our genes. If food and sex weren’t fun, you wouldn’t be here. But in the age of abundance, these appetites are out of sync. Infant and juvenile mortality have plummeted. You don’t need to get pregnant all the time to raise enough kids. You’ll end up with too many if you let nature take its course. So we invented birth control.
The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don’t get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.
Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?
More here.