Now Presenting...The 100 Mile Food Crank Diet!

I was thinking early this morning (well, early for me) about the latest round of fallout from my recent venture into the diet wars. You guessed it; I put up another post here talking about how the devotees of various evangelical food cults were taking my comments about how there's no one diet that's right for everyone as an opportunity to post long screeds about how their diet is right for everyone, without any sense of irony, and a bunch of devotees of evangelical food cults took that comment as yet another opportunity to post long screeds about how their diet is right for everyone. It's rather weird, to be frank. I've begun to wonder if they're not actually human beings, but animatronic Disney mannequins who lurch through their scripted-in-advance routines the moment somebody pushes the little button. 

One side effect of all this, though, is that I've been reminded just how many competing food cranks, living and posthumous, are out there. It seems to me that there's a certain unfairness in the way that some food cranks get all the attention -- I'm looking at you, Weston A. Price -- and others, like poor Bernarr McFadden, are all but forgotten today. With that in mind, and also in an attempt to further the cause of relocalization, I'd like to proclaim the One True Diet for everybody...

The 100 Mile Food Crank Diet!!!

It's quite simple, really. You're allowed to eat the foods prescribed by the food crank of your choice, provided that you live within 100 miles of the place where said food crank lives, or lived, or is presently buried. So Weston A. Price is the man if you live within 100 miles of Cleveland; otherwise, you've got to find a different food crank to follow. Since there have been so many of them over the three and a half centuries since the first diet book saw print, this should not be a problem. Those of my readers who live in New York or Los Angeles are of course inordinately blessed, since both cities have had bumper crops of food cranks for a very long time, but the rest of us aren't left out in the cold; here in East Providence, for example, I'm well within range of the generations of food cranks who have lived and thrived in Boston. (The macrobiotic writer I followed most closely when I was into that diet back in my 20s, Michio Kushi, lived in a Boston suburb, so I'm set if I ever get tired of a normal, healthy diet.) 

So if you want to pile into a fad diet theory, dear reader, all you have to do is look through the annals of dietary crackpottery to find some preacher of nutritional salvation who lives, or lived, or is buried within a hundred miles of your kitchen, and you're good to go. I don't advise taking this as far as becoming a food crank locavore, though; living diet gurus tend to object if you show up and try to cook and eat them, while dead ones are very dry and tough...