Food and Drink: Nine things more pleasurable than sex

GOVERNMENTS have always existed primarily to inflict pain and deprive us of pleasure. It is only lately, however, that they have become - pushed by the new missionaries of deprivation and right thinking - positively interfering.

Nothing in our time seems more peculiar than the notion that total freedom should be applied indiscriminately, and with ideological fervour, to two of the lesser aspects of life: with respect to sex and money you can do much as you please, while repression is the model for countless other activities with far less dire consequences, which many of us enjoy more frequently, and actually care a lot more about.

That is why I was interested, at a recent conference in Brussels, to hear that a European survey found that sex came only 10th in the list of 'typical pleasures'. Money, scams and 'market capitalism' didn't rate at all. And ahead of sex were such everyday pleasures as bathing, reading, the telly, a cup of coffee, a chocolate, a drink, a smoke, and so on.

A vast majority of the respondents also thought they had brains enough and will-power enough to make up their own minds about how they wanted to take their pleasures, and that the purported 'health risks' foisted on us really didn't interest them.

Small wonder, given the idiotic vagaries of the health commissars and their fantasy-science in the past few decades over grain diets, fibre diets, fats, contaminants, sundry 'addictions' (eg coffee, chocolate), cholesterol, and the like. If scientists begin to engage in messianic predication instead of objective assessment of risk, why should we trust them at all?

In my own modest contribution to the Brussels deliberations, I pointed out that our troubles all started with food. It was, after all, an apple that Eve extended to Adam, with the results we all know: that we grew ashamed of our nakedness, uneasy in our relations with the opposite sex, in conflict with our children, and forced into work. The ancient Greeks had pondered pleasure and pain, and decided that the one could not be considered without the other. Thus sensible people would seek to increase the former and minimise the latter, and I suggested to my colleagues that we really ought not to follow the advice of the man who advocated suicide as the only certain way to avoid pain]

Certainly food is a major part of the daily pleasure principle. It is so understood as such that it wasn't even considered in the survey. Neither was sleep which, nightmares apart, remains one of the few certain ways we all have to avoid the turmoil of our lives. Sleeping and eating are seldom painful. Neither produces an undesirable result; you may suffer from heartburn from food, or miss an appointment through sleep, but these are as nothing compared with what would happen if you neither ate nor slept.

I am reasonably certain that when we think of pain, we consider it in two forms: acute pain (which I associate with dentists) and daily pain (which is probably stress, disturbance, doubt, anxiety, fear). There is not much we can do about the acute: we live through it or die from what causes it. But there is a lot we can do about the daily. We learn how to cope with it. We balance it with little daily pleasures, and we would like to be left alone to do so, in our own fashion.

Pain, you will remember, was something that Wittgenstein felt he was ill-prepared to consider, for his pain wasn't my pain. So it is with pleasure. To pursue nothing but pleasure, in food as in any other way, leads to excess; indeed, it dims pleasure, requiring ever more unlikely refinements to produce the same satisfaction we can get from bread, cheese and wine.

These pleasures are private. They are sometimes shared, as at a meal, but the pleasure obtained remains stubbornly individual. If that were not true, restaurants would all be alike. And I confess that I do not see what relevance governments and health commissars have to this. I am startled at the extent to which they feel it necessary to tax us for our little sins while themselves indulging in the more mortal kinds of sin: untruth, murder, greed, avarice, accidie, sloth, lust and, above all, pride.