Morals Surrounding Food and Sex

The New York Times "Ideas" blog links today to a paper authored by someone at the Hoover institution. The paper argues, according to the Times, that we are getting

... a “transvaluation” of values in which food is freighted with taboos, but sex much less so.

I guess the idea is that at one time sex had lots of rules about it and food was a matter of taste (forgive the pun), now sex is a matter of taste (do whatever you want) and food has all sorts of rules about it.

For me, though, an interesting part of the article is the account of how some vegetarians have adopted some of the moralizing language of the past to stigmatize non-vegetarians. In the question of moral progress, it's important to have an account of how conceptual change occurs in moral schemas. It can be a counterexample to a theory of moral judgment, if that theory cannot allow for moral progress, or if it is too conservative, or conserving, of existing morays. In the future, a account of how a conceptual change was achieved in relation to vegetarianism will make an interesting ethnography.