Dispatches from the Diet Wars

[ecosophia]

So last week's blog post about my macrobiotic days, back in my misspent youth, has continued to attract a steady stream of diet enthusiasts of various kinds, nearly all of them convinced that it's their job to tell me that I'm the wrongest wrong that ever wronged, or something tolerably close to that. I had somebody insisting at the top of his keyboard that I'm "an amazingly horrible person" because I disagree with his vegan dietary notions -- clearly I need to work on my evil cackle.  I had someone else try twice to post a long screed about how the ketogenic diet really is the one true diet that everybody ought to eat. I had a follower of yet another eccentric American diet guru, I forget his name, trying to promote some other dietary theory -- and I've had several other people on this week's post, which is about ethics, trying to figure out how to shoehorn yet more adulation for Saint Weston A. Price and his one true holy nutritional theory into the blog. In its own giddy way it's been quite entertaining, and it's also a good measure of just how impressively neurotic people in today's America have become about the simple process of keeping yourself fed. 

I'm really tempted to keep feeding the frenzy, so to speak, by writing more about diet. No doubt it's a character flaw, but when people reliably go all ranty-pants about an issue, especially when there are thirty-one flavors of ranty-pants and they're all on display at once, I have a hard time not poking fun at them in the hope that sooner or later they'll figure out just how unimpressive they look to the rest of us -- well, or if that fails, then simply encouraging those who aren't caught up in the food fight to remember that they're not alone. 

Feeding yourself really is a simple process. It doesn't require reading books or following somebody's complicated nutritional theory; it's simply a matter of paying attention to what foods make you feel healthy and eating those fairly often, while noticing which foods make you feel unhealthy and avoiding those -- unless you like them enough that you're good with the aftereffects, in which case bon appetit. No matter what you eat or don't eat, you're going to get sick on occasion; no matter what you eat or don't eat, you're going to die sooner or later; what you eat or don't eat has some influence on how healthy you are and how soon you die, but it's far from the only factor at work, you know, and in many cases it's not even close to the most important.

It's nobody else's business, by the way, what you eat or how healthy you are, and it's none of your business what other people eat and how healthy they are. Yes, I know that saying those words makes me an amazingly horrible person. Nya ha ha, or what have you.

Oh, and if you don't want to do things the way I've suggested, and would rather take your dietary theories out of a book? By all means do so. Just please remember that everyone else in the world doesn't need to be told that your favorite dietary theory is the One True Way for everyone...because it isn't, no matter how hard you want it to be. 

Comments

[auntlili]

You bad, bad Archdruid. You have forced me to look up Weston A. Price and his foundation. Unlike yourself, I don't mind listening to people talk, however heatedly, about their nutritional theories because I love crackpot cookery as much as I love crockpot cookery. I well remember the day I first came across Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator -- no I'm not being vulgar -- who advocated chewing every mouthful of food 100 times. He carried a small sample of his own faeces in a jar to prove to anyone who cared to cooperate that if you ate this way your sh*t would not stink. Now I'm being vulgar. You're a historian of ideas -- how can you not relish this stuff?

Anyway, the foundation's principle sponsors appear to be food and supplement producers, and if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it is -- like an increasing number of non-profits -- a thinly disguised cross-marketing scheme and a way to get research dollars to cooperative institutions without having the interested producer's name attached. No half-clad demonstrations of manly strength and endurance, no vials of petrified poo. Flim flam just isn't what it used to be. Alas.

[ecosophia]

AuntLili, you've just succeeded in proving to me that the vegan movement has achieved maturity and a sense of humor about food -- an stage of enlightenment the followers of most diet theories never seem to attain -- and I will therefore make an effort from now on to aim my occasional diet-related pot shots at other targets. Thank you.

As for diet flim-flam, I'm happy to read about it when I'm in a mood for psychoceramic factory seconds, but I dislike it when people make a sustained effort to hijack a conversation and turn it into a venue for their proselytizing. I dislike it even more when they Just. Will. Not. Shut. Up. About. It. So Weston A. Price and his groupies will be laboring under the threat of the almighty ban hammer from here on in, because I'm a curmudgeonly middle-aged git and my patience is wearing thin.

[(Anonymous)]

If you haven't already encuntered him, JMG, I should introduce you to Rhode Island's own legendary and delightful Professor of Psychoceramics, Josiah S. Carberry:

library.brown.edu/hay/carberry.php

and

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry

-- Robert Mathiesen

[ecosophia]

Good heavens. No, I had no idea. I'll have to insert some references to his papers into a novel or two.. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

It's worth noting that lectures are still being announced which Professor Carberry may (or may not) show up to deliver. By now he must be well over a century old, which leads one to wonder just what sort of an Older One or Elder Being he might be behind the genial professorial mask that he wears in public. Hmmm ...

-- Robert Mathiesen

[ecosophia]

...or if he was a good friend of young Charles Dexter Ward, and picked up a few tricks from Ward's friend Dr. Allen. Clearly Brown University needs to sprout a Carberry Hall when I get to work revising The Weird of Hali: Providence later this year...

[auntlili]

Aw, you're very kind. From one curmudgeonly middle-aged git to another, thank you.

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome!