I plan to do a series of posts on some of the fad diets floating around out there, many of them on celebrity websites, but today I want to write in more general terms about what guides the food choices that many people make. Let me say a couple of things first:
1. Making choices is better than not making choices. If you just eat what’s in front of you without thinking, snacking on the candy bowl at the office, always getting the soft drink/chips/cookie combo with your sandwich for lunch, cleaning out the popcorn bowl as you sit in front of the TV, that’s just mindless eating. At least if you’ve decided to follow some strict regimen you’re paying attention.2. You’re a free agent and can decide what you think is best for you. As the inimitable Ann Hodgman says in her peerless cookbook Beat That!, “I’m not the boss of you.” If you honestly believe that you’re better off with a gluten-free, vegan diet, well, I can’t force you to change your mind, and I wouldn’t want to do that anyway. (Maybe persuade you?)
Everybody got that? Okay. Now I want you to envision a pyramid or a triangle, something like the illustration for this post. The tippy-top part, the pointy part, is pretty small, and it represents food choices that are forced on those with real health issues related to food: allergies, intolerances, and diseases. Depending on the severity of these problems, ingesting the wrong food can be fatal, either on the spot or slowly. We all know about people going into anaphylactic shock because of exposure to peanuts, or shellfish, or some other food allergen, and their need for a shot of epinephrine so they’re not going to suffocate because of throat swelling. Celiac disease, the real thing, an autoimmune condition in which the small intestine becomes inflamed because of contact with gluten, can cause severe malnutrition and even death by starvation if untreated. So these things are no joke. If you need to refuse something because you’re not sure whether or not it has a forbidden ingredient, and you perhaps think your host doesn’t take such things seriously, you never have to apologize for turning the item down. Figure out an all-purpose phrase you can use and practice it in front of a mirror if need be.
On to the middle section of the pyramid, which I have labeled the “conscience and conviction” area. Here’s where many perfectly reasonable people come to rest, and I wouldn’t argue with them for a second. So there might be the person from an observant Jewish background who has become a Christian but who wants his/her family to feel comfortable coming for a meal and so still keeps kosher. (Maintaining a true kosher kitchen is no small matter, as it requires not just the exclusion of dairy and meat products in the same meal but the separation of milk and meat dishes, silverware, utensils, pots and pans and even, as much as possible, preparation areas.) There might be a person who is genuinely troubled to contemplate that chicken breast on the plate and to realize that a living creature had to die to put it there. Or who is genuinely troubled at the conditions in an industrial feeding lot or a slaughterhouse. As a Christian myself, I recognize the importance of conscience; the New Testament book of Romans says, “Blessed are those who don’t feel guilty for doing something they have decided is right.” (NLT) If at some point you change your mind, then fine. But don’t violate your conscience in the meantime. And again, as above, you don’t need to make apologies for your choices, and you don’t need to get drawn into arguments. Just smile and change the subject.
But now we get to the third section of the pyramid, the biggest one to my mind and the murkiest: food choices governed by adoption of what I call a “fad” diet. You’re not following a vegan diet because you don’t want to kill animals and pollute the planet; you’re following it because you think that it’s somehow “cleaner.” You’re going keto, or paleo, or gluten-free. You will ingest certain fats and no others. Coconut oil only, please! You’ll eat exclusively during a certain window of time, thus following the “intermittent fasting” routine. You’ll cut significant items from your diet because you’ve been told that you’re “sensitive” to them. (An awful lot of quotation marks here, I know.) Here’s where so much food choice reasoning goes completely off the rails. It’s the old “drunk on a horse” problem: human beings tend to go to extremes. There’s also the problem of wanting to be told what to do by an authority, which these days is often just a celebrity. And, perhaps the biggest push for climbing onto a certain bandwagon: Human beings want drama. We think that making a big announcement and a big change all at once is the way to go. The new path will open up in front of us and we’ll stay on it forever after. Start out with a bang!
Alas, folks. Such things tend to have very little staying power. It’s just like any other area of life: “slow and steady wins the race.” You want your kids to start cleaning up their rooms? Having a big family meeting, setting up huge charts, getting everyone all excited—those things don’t last. Being consistent, making small sustainable changes, building on those changes—those things do. I was listening to one of the podcasts I follow, “Best of Both Worlds,” on Tuesday and one of the hosts, Laura Vanderkam, was talking about their family rules about the mudroom: no shoes, boots or backpacks go out of that room and all homework goes right back into the backpack as soon as it’s done. The other host, Sarah Hart-Unger, wisely observed that establishing that rule probably took some time, to which Laura replied, “Probably about 18 months! We had to consistently remind the kids. But they know that if they can’t find their shoes or backpacks on a school morning they’re going to be late.” (Or words to that effect—I didn’t go back and re-listen.)
So it is with food. Remember the infamous “pantry purges”? You were supposed to go home and throw out everything in your kitchen that was “unhealthy.” While lots of junk got thrown out, lots of resentment also got generated from the rest of the family. How much better to just start a few good habits, to just not buy a new bag of potato chips (my generic equivalent for all junk food) when the old one runs out, to just encourage the kids to have some apple slices with peanut butter when they come home from school instead of cookies (which you conveniently forgot to bake).
Well, that’s enough for today. Up next week: reviews of the keto and paleo diets. See you then!