Peony,

Good comment!

The way I look at it is like any other material pleasure: food is good. It is something that we need, and we were given the ability to distinguish between the good/beautiful and the bad/ugly. That ability is a gift from God, as part and parcel of the glory of being human. Further adding to the splendor of creation, and man, the apex of creation, is that God chose to take on human flesh in order to save us from a damnation we brought on upon ourselves.

Where we get into problems is when we overly elevate our appreciation of the created to the point where we fail to distinguish between the created and the Creator, and when we fail to recognize the good and beautiful as gifts from God, and that includes the gift of health. Certainly eating to the point of gravely injuring our health (deep fried ice cream every day, on the one hand, and starving ourselves out of vanity on the other) or our ability to properly provide for our families and to do works of charity is in the realm of serious sin (gluttony).

Likewise thinking that our food choices can make us virtuous, outside of the realm of penance (an example: abstaining from meat or wine as a particular penance for ourselves is fine, but thinking that we are somehow virtuous for being vegetarians or teetotalers, or even worse, thinking that anyone who doesn't follow suit is a sinner for it, or any other imposing of our penances on others, is sinful - Pride as well as Gluttony). It is for this reason that St. Francis required his friars to eat what was put in front of them.

Certainly fasts are an important part of life, and the Church in her wisdom, mandates a certain amount of fasting. But she also gives us feasts.

One year Christmas fell on a Friday and the friars asked St. Francis if they should eat meat. "Brothers, on the feast of the Nativity we shall feast on meat, so that even the walls are smeared with its grease."

We should love animals, even more than plants, but we should distinguish between them and humans, and should remember that Jesus himself told St. Peter to eat not only meat, but even things like pigs and rabbits.

As for the two extremes in our culture, both are fraught with problems:

On the one hand you have the factory farmed tasteless crap that masquerades as food. While the neocon free-market fetishists pretend that this is all some great egalitarian thing, it is nothing of the sort. It is a deliberate misuse of God's bounty to make money at the expense of the common good. When crap food pushes out real food from the market, the consumers have been cooperating with evil. Simply saying that that is what the market wants is a cop-out.

On the other hand you have these food snobs (many of whom aren't really that good at distinguishing the things they think they can), who insist on organic even when they really don't know what the legal definition is and when they pass up a perfectly fine item for one that is posing as something healthful and fair-traded.

Now, I tend to buy almost exclusively small-farmed, organic, seasonal produce, because I want the best ingredients, which best reflect the beauty of creation, and to support small family farms, because farming is a hard way to make a living, and when a farmer takes care to produce the very best, I want to reward that. I don't care two figs about pesticide residue. People have been eating pesticide residues for decades and living longer. However, when a small farmer goes strictly organic (and not just the minimal requirements that many of the large organic farms do), they are required to make some growing choices that improve the quality of the food. By staying strictly seasonal (and I don't care two figs about the carbon footprint of my food), I get the very best at a very reasonable cost. An out of season tomato, flown in from who knows where, not only tastes bland and has a terrible texture, but it usually costs way too much for my budget. I eat the very best tomatoes and pay $2 a pound max.

The term foodie is obnoxious, but it is useful, in that a real foodie is one who knows a lot about food and has an interest in it and an appreciation for it, as part of creation and as part of man's art. When it becomes an obsession and takes more than its due attention, it becomes problematic.

Is there a set formula? No. Like smoking, drinking, or many things, it depends on the person. Some folks, because they need to get over their food obsessions, probably should strive for simple and humble meals, just as some folks should not touch a drop of liquor and some folks should not even take a puff of a cigarette. For other people (and I like to think that I am in this category), it is one of life's legitimate pleasures.

A good test is if one can go to the house of a typical Anglo and eat what is put in front of them and enjoy the meal, even though it tends a little towards the bland side. If one has problems eating, one may have a problem. If one makes faces and complains and otherwise carries on like a three year old, then one definitely has a problem and should consider a penance of some sort.

This is overly long, and should probably be a separate post, but it is a good topic, and I have already typed up my response. I hope the conversation continues from here.

Tangentially related... may I suggest a post?

I would love to hear your take on where the golden mean is when it comes to the appreciation of food. Certainly we should appreciate it and pay attention to what we eat; we shouldn't shovel it in like the rats, or eat cardboard like the stuff that Skinner was licensing. (I loved the fact that the first thing the kitchen staff did under the new ownership was to burn the cardboard stand-ups.)

But when does a healthy and necessary appreciation turn into fastidiousness, silliness, and the gluttony of delicacy? There's something about the word "foodie" that makes my skin crawl.

Your comments also extend to good government. Without checks and balances we are at the mercy of the oligachy.