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Dispatches from the Diet Wars
Feb. 10th, 2018 05:03 pm
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.
I've been thinking quite a bit of late about the odd state of mind people get into when they evangelize. That's largely been driven by the behavior of some people over the last week on my blog, but of course this isn't the first time, or the thousand and first, that I've encountered it. 
