This summer, my friend James asked me a most astounding question. We were eating frozen yogurt outside Temptations when he said: "Is frozen yogurt better for you than ice cream?"

It was a revelation. James has never considered food in any terms more complicated than hungry, full, yum, yuck. I--and, I would venture to say, most of my female friends--have had as confused and complex a relationship with food as with many a human being.

When I was six years old I knew that ice cream was somehow connected to the undesirable roundness of my post-toddler tummy. And since the fifth grade, when my family switched to frozen yogurt on the occasion of my parents' first cholesterol tests, I've been aware of the less "fattening" alternatives. I don't mean that I was obsessing about these things as early as that. That was a later phase, starting around the seventh grade. Only that I've been semi-consciously stockpiling health information for most of my life. It's gotten to the point that it's as natural and ostensibly integral to my conception of the way the world works as, say, the speed limits on the major roads around my house.

And here's James, 19 years old, very knowledgeable and intelligent and who's been able to live his whole life without ever encountering this information. He eats when he's hungry, and if he feels like a roast beef sandwich at midnight, he hesitates not to consume the 350 calories, but only to spend the $3.50. He has never distracted himself in class by adding up the day's calories, and he's never spent two or 15 or 100 minutes regretting his dessert--feeling with a visceral certainty that belies all nutritional science that the second peanut butter cookie has gone directly and instantaneously to his thighs.