Eating, Sin, And Redemption

Laura Miller on our weirdness about food:

There's a crypto-religious element to our oscillation between unrestrained indulgence and penitential asceticism, the same thing that makes us talk about desserts as "sinful." Our eating lives are the sites of overwrought private dramas worthy of the Catholic saints, in which we seek release and then restraint; we gorge, then impractically resolve never to touch butter or pasta again, convincing ourselves that we can achieve the bodies of movie stars if we can only summon enough willpower. It's debatable whether that many of us really want to adopt a sensible eating plan, if it's going to deprive us of all this excitement.