I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.
Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.
After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
Those crackers – gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!
The broccoli, though..that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless….oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.
And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.
I hate myself.
Well, shit.
All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.
That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.
You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.
You’re hardcore now, so you go way past way cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.
Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.
Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in Vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of Vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of Vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.
Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.
You discover that if the women in your family haven’t been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That’s if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won’t, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.
Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.
Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can’t make those healthy.
Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it’s hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost positively have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.
Kale: it’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast.
The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research, dahling…sorry, people like crunchy cornstarch breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.
And by now you’ve learned that the only thing worse than wheat is corn. Everyone can agree on that, too. Corn is making all of America fat. The whole harvest is turned into ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, chicken feed and corn starch and the only people who benefit from all those corn subsidies are evil companies like Cargill.
Also, people around the world are starving because the U.S. grows too much corn. It doesn’t actually make that much sense when you say it like that, but you read it on a blog. And anyway, everyone does agree that corn is Satan’s grain. Unless wheat is.
The only thing to do, really, when you think about it, is to grow all your own food. That’s the only way to get kale that isn’t cornstarch dipped. You’ve read a lot and it is obvious that you can’t trust anything, and you can’t trust anyone and everything is going to kill you and the only possible solution is to have complete and total control over your foodchain from seed to sandwich.
Not that you actually eat sandwiches.
You have a little panic attack at the idea of a sandwich on commercial bread: GMO wheat, HFCS and chemical additive dough conditioners. Some people see Jesus in their toast but you know the only faces in that mix of frankenfood grains and commercial preservatives are Insulin Sensitivity Man and his sidekick, Hormonal Disruption Boy.
It’s okay, though. You don’t need a deli sandwich or a po’boy. You have a saute of Russian Kale and Tuscan Kale and Scotch Kale (because you love international foods). It’s delicious. No, really. You cooked the kale in a half-pound of butter that had more raw culture than a black-tie soiree at Le Bernardin.
You round out your meal with a little piece of rabbit that you raised up and butchered out in the backyard. It’s dusted with all-natural pink Hawaiian high-mineral sea salt that you cashed-in your kid’s college fund to buy and topped with homemade lacto-fermented herb mayonnaise made with coconut oil and lemons from a tropical produce CSA share that helps disadvantaged youth earn money by gleaning urban citrus. The lemons were a bit over-ripe when they arrived to you, but since they were transported by mountain bike from LA to Seattle in order to keep them carbon neutral you can hardly complain.
The rabbit is ok. Maybe a bit bland. Right now you will eat meat, but only meat that you personally raise because you saw that PETA thing about industrial beef production and you can’t support that. Besides, those cows eat corn. Which is obscene because cows are supposed to eat grass. Ironically, everyone knows that a lawn is a complete waste in a neighborhood – that’s where urban gardens should go. In other words, the only good grass is grass that cows are eating. You wonder if your HOA will let you graze a cow in the common area.
In the meantime, you are looking for a farmer who raises beef in a way you can support and you have so far visited 14 ranches in the tri-state area. You have burned 476 gallons of gas driving your 17-mpg SUV around to interview farmers but, sadly, have yet to find a ranch where the cattle feed exclusively on organic homegrown kale.
Until you do, you allow yourself a small piece of rabbit once a month. You need to stretch your supply of ethical meat after that terrible incident with the mother rabbit who nursed her kibble and ate her kits. After that, deep down, you aren’t really sure you have the stomach for a lot more backyard meat-rabbit raising.
So you eat a lot of homegrown kale for awhile. Your seasoning is mostly self-satisfaction and your drink is mostly fear of all the other food lurking everywhere that is trying to kill you.
Eventually your doctor tells you that the incredible pain you’ve been experiencing is kidney stones caused by the high oxalic acid in the kale. You are instructed to cut out all dark leafy greens from your diet, including kale, beet greens, spinach, and swiss chard and eat a ton of low-fat dairy.
Your doctor recommends that new healthy yogurt with the probiotics. She thinks it’s called Activa.
Love this! Great writing!
Thank you so much for this article. I can remember a similar journey when I first started researching (and the kind of tailspin I still have to talk myself through sometimes) “healthy eating”. Sometimes, it’s nice to just laugh about this. Thanks for the perspective.
agree 🙂
After talking about my food fears on Facebook after reading Michael Pollan’s book, I was sent to read this post, and haven’t laughed so much in days.
Best article I’ve read in a long time. The story of my life.
This made my day. Ironic and informative and hilarious at the same time. (And I really needed the laughter today, so thank you!) Definitely will be following your blog from now on.
I know people like that. They can be so self righteoud and obnoxious. However, the thing that pisses me off the most is that these trendy types drive up the.cost.for thos of us who actually HAVE allergies and conditions.
That was the longest Activa ad. ever!
I could not stop laughing. Great blog post, have been sharing it like a mad woman with family and friends.
OK so in my case, I solved a bunch of health problems after doing all that scary internet research and neurochemist/nutritionist visits, and it didn’t make me hate myself, it made me hate whatever had changed the food situation somewhere between my great-great-grandparents’ time and my my own generation. After watching family and friends re-learning how to shop, cook, eat etc, after every other treatment for their nasty sicknesses totally failed, and having the same experience in my own life, what am I supposed to be getting from this article? I like the food culture humor, we can all appreciate a bit of that, but really, that stuff IS poison and if it were easy to avoid, we wouldn’t have this whole paranoia around it. We’d just be like “oh yeah, it’s an apple” and have the attitude that you rightly say we should have about food. That’s what we want to be able to do – just shop, eat and cook normally without having to check every single label against a constantly-changing list of neurotoxins etc. It wasn’t our idea to get all crazy about it. Food went crazy on us.
Oh my gosh-I about peed myself. This is my life!!
What a great post!! All I have to say is fear is the best marketing tool ever!! Please keep shopping at Whole Foods and the like so my portfolio continues to grow….so I can continue to give money to my favorite charities, educate my children and support my local business owners:). This list could go on and on….not saying its right or wrong….just saying folks need to think things through more often. That would certainly save us all some unnecessary anger in the world.
Just my two cents….now I have to run and check on my steak before the kale gets to fried.
I just had a colonoscopy, so I get to start over because I’m completely empty…and I mean completely! So, what should I…mmm…Peppermint Patties hiding in the freezer…mmm-m-m!
Hmmm–Chocolate=lots of antioxidants. Mint=no bad breath. And a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. What’s not to love?? Plus being so cold will take more calories to warm it to body temp equaling fewer net calories to feel guilty about. Nope. No down side.
This came at such a great time for me. I have felt exactly like this. I am spinning out of control just trying to eat healthy. Finally I have thrown up my hands and cried uncle. I am back to listening to my gut and trusting my instinct. Thanks for this.
Whoever wrote this is grossly misinformed and is leading you all to believe things that just arent true.
Im not even going to get into all the lies because sometimes there is no point arguing with an idiot. All I am going to say is look up this information yourselves from real sources (public universities, USDA, etc.). This site is just propaganda.
– signed a person who owns a farm, has a Bachelors of Science in Animal & Poultry Science, Masters of Science in Plant Science, and works for public university in agriculture research
All that, but no sense of humor. So very sad.
yeah cause the USDA and the FDA and everyone else really have our best interests in mind…
Haha well said Stacie!
GREAT blog post! I think you are seriously inside my head! lmao Kale it is!!
Wow… Has eating in the U.S become so complicated? I wonder if it’s really that bad to live this healthy and happy in my small third world country.
This was an awesome article!
You forgot to mention water, though!
They tell you to drink reverse osmosis water. But, that will kill you because it’s acidic and the WHO says you need calcium and magnesium. You can’t use a filter because then the fluoride and chloramine will kill you. You can’t use distillation because that’s as bad as reverse osmosis.
The only option is to find a natural spring, but then you’ve got to drive for 3 days to get to it, and then you die from the BPA in the “enviro friendly” plastic jugs you bought at the health food store to carry the water. And, then, the CA authorities come around and force the hot spring resort to add chloramine to the water anyway.
so true… and now my armpits stink from the misuse of non organic lime juice and the sweat of fear Im going to die of some frame of food poisoning! haha.. this was very good, I shared it all over the place.
I could recognise myself all the way, that is so funny. But someone have to explain me why some people are disgusted and insulted by this. I don’t get it.
Because food has stopped being food. Having read almost all of the comments its my opinion that food is the new theology. And like any theology there are heretics, saviors, false idols, and something that can be called “The One True Way”.
Great read. Being a dietitian I loved you’re mockery on all the extremists. I find them all to have control issues. Very few of their fears about common foods are actually founded by any studies or research. It’s basically a hobby they have found to look down upon other people who eat what they consider to be “toxic” foods.
I work as a butcher at our local Harris Teeter, and I hear EVERY new food fad from a dozen customers a week. I want to print this out, and hand it to everyone who tries to talk to me about whatever particular food-obsession they happen to have, and tell them to read it before we say another word. Thanks!
That was absolutely hilarious. Thanks for sharing. I’m struggling with severe food intolerances and trying to find a healthy way to eat, that allows me something besides kale. To those who didn’t see the sarcasm, please try to lighten up. This was meant to be funny and IMHO it succeeded admirably.
One flaw in the domino effect-kale is actually low in oxalic acid, in contrast to chard and beet greens. However, I get the absurdity/parody aspect of this whole conversation.
Very fucking funny!!!! There’s nowhere
To run
And the moral of the story iiiiiiiis…. Everything in moderation.^^
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This pretty much has covered my food “journey” up until now.
So yes, there is a good amount of satire in your post. However, your readers seem to be an unhappy mix. The humor isn’t really in pointing fingers at people who care about their food supply or even in making jokes about the food chain, it’s in recognizing ourselves (human nature) in the dilemma and being able to laugh at what we find. This post is about the frustration of trying to eat nutritious, unadulterated foods and the extremes to which people are willing to go to get what they want, whether it’s clean organically grown veggies and fruits or dead animals on their plates. I’ll opt for local organically grown fruits and veggies whenever possible and leave the processed, pre-packaged, preserved stuff with all the additives on the shelves. I’d also like to follow “Live and let Live” when it comes to my fellow humans as well as the animals.
Interesting blog, but just an continuous rant from what I can see. What is your point (conclusion)? What are you really trying to say?
brilliant. i am going to reread this to myself and snicker the next time someone tells me about the evils of gluten or grains or dairy or meat. there is no point having an actual conversation with such people, though.
then i will eat a lovely baguette with a load of brie and pate. yum.
p.s. the best way to cook rabbit: make a rillette, braised in duck fat with prunes. yum.
Switch your pate for bacon. My circle of mom friends favorite breakfast while we turn all our children loose in the back yard to run, and we sit and talk. We drink buckets of coffee and eat brie and bacon on big chunks of crunchy, yummy baguette!
Interesting! And super funny! My dear mother would do the Inuit diet in a New York minute. I happen to think its simple environmental/industrial pollution that is causing an increase of auto-immune diseases, and because the nervous system is a very complex part of the body different people respond to this poisoning in different ways.
Because of that different diets and heath plans address divergent aspects of a root condition, and different body types will respond differently – sometimes positively, sometimes not – to modifications in diet, supplements and physical activity.
My thought is this – experiment until you find something that works. Then stick with it. If it does not work for a friend or loved one have the grace to let them experiment (or not) until they find something that works for them. In the meantime holy internet food wars are – in the Buddhist sense – unhelpful.
I’m going to eat 3 bunnies for every commenter that says eating animals is wrong.
And in support of YOU, I’m going to eat 3 chocolate-covered marshmallow Easter Bunnies!
Thanks for this post. I have been thinking this for quite some time; about how hard it is to just eat anymore. What is right one day is supposedly proven wrong the next and so on and so on. I wonder sometimes if the “stress” of eating right is what is actually causing all these problems? Just a thought…thanks for your post!
What an insightful, funny, and delightfully accurate article. I’ve had all of the same thoughts about what is ethical and healthy to eat and if you drill down into every food item, you will find some reason not to eat it. I was pretty close to becoming a Jane but came to my senses; beets are off limits.
Food should be enjoyed and celebrated. When eaten with purpose to feed the body and mind then perfection is achieved. Food is a medicine and just like any medicine, you should consciously eat what will do you the most good. Eating guilt free is difficult to do now days and anything you can grow yourself or buy locally is an excellent way to benefit everyone and enjoy food Karma.
Bon Appetit
I love this blog post for many reasons.
1. I raised rabbits for 5 years, as part of my 4-H and FFA experience. It was a huge tool for me not only learning to respect the animals we eat, but to grow as a person and young professional. Rabbit is a highly underutilized source of protein. While I can’t raise them anymore (I now live in a high rise apartment in a city) I still enjoy eating them and see great value in their potential for our well-being.
2. A a recovered bulimic, we place too much pressure on what others think would be right or “healthy” for us and not enough on what our bodies tell us or our healthcare professionals think. Myself and others who have experienced eating disorders know how much emotional baggage can be attached to our food decisions, even if folks who haven’t had an eating disorder haven’t realized that yet. I actually wrote a blog post about how complicated food choices are on blog, here: http://kellymrivard.com/2013/05/22/food-is-complicated/
3. As a communicator in the agriculture industry, I love seeing not only a tongue-in-cheek take on food decision-making, but also a sort of unspoken call for rationality and level-headedness. The global agriculture structure has to look forward to feeding up to 9 billion people within the next 40 years. If America, as one of the most productive countries in the world, changes its food production tendencies based on hype diets and fads rather than a sustainable approach to meeting those needs, then we are all going to be in a tight spot soon.
I loved this post. Thanks so much for having a witty approach to a divisive and emotionally-charged issue! Best wishes, and keep up the great work!
I thought I was the only one… thanks for the great read.
http://diameterofasquare.com/searching/kale-and-ginger/
I am a very low income disabled senior citizen, yet I manage to have a healthy diet that avoids extremes. A $5 bread maker allows me to make non-GMO whole wheat flour I buy at Walmart into a loaf to which I’ve added wheat bran and olive oil. As near as I can tell, I’m not allergic to wheat. I buy the best produce I can afford, very little of which is organic. I do garden a little, hunt and fish.
I think one saving grace in my life is fresh water from a sand point well I drove down just 25 feet myself. I also do spend money on a bunch of different vitamins, minerals and herbs. All of that being said, I probably only spend about $5 a day on food. Oh yeah, I get fresh eggs from a lady minister in the nearby town. During summer I go to farmer’s markets.
Sure, a person can go nuts trying to follow one fad after another. Here is the *IMPORTANT TRUTH* ===>> I am better off making my best effort at eating well than just saying to hell with it all and eating the heavily processed, well advertised crap I see on TV. It seems to me that this article is written specifically to discourage people from learning anything at all about nutrition. Maybe that wasn’t the intent of the author. From the “About” section of this website it seems like it is a well intentioned effort.
But, as a first read by a person who wants to just learn a little bit about healthy eating, it seems as if it would be very discouraging. It isn’t my first read. I go back to Adelle Davis and “Eat Right to Keep Fit”. I follow Gary Null, and I know I’ll never come up to his standards, which are extremely extreme LOL. Here is a link to my blog, in which I tell some of my personal story. If the administrators of this site don’t like this link, I won’t be upset at all if that part of this comment is deleted. https://www.facebook.com/groups/285643794789905/doc/306910742663210/
hah funny article, definately makes you have a second look at a lot of diet fads. I think the real trick to eating healthy is to make your own food and have a little bit of everything. We eat grains in moderation (not nearly as much as the food guide suggests, which is an insane quantitiy), and the grains we do eat are fermeted by a sourdough culture, which makes gluten and other wheat by-products easier to absorb. This is doubly true for whole-grains. Not to mention sourdough just rocks my socks, and is probably one of the tastiest treats in the world. NOMNOMNOM. We avoid processed sugar, but eat fruit. We don’t eat dairy, because it gives us the runs. I think the trick to eating right is eating real food. Real food is food you make yourself from fresh ingredients. If a scientist with a degree in biochemistry was required to make it (i.e anything in a box) it isn’t real food.
/Rant
Another thing you might want to include…all of the time people spend watching TV (or researching insane diet fads) could have been spent cooking real honest to good food. Anyone that tells me “I don’t have enough time to eat properly” is full of shit. If they can watch 3 hours of TV a night, they have enough time to cook a good meal and go for a walk. /Rant
I have an aunt who has “leaky gut”. All that she has done is put her digestive system through the wringer over the past 15 years with the completely ridiculous cycling of foods to the point where she brings her own meals to people’s houses when invited over. And what does she eat? Beets. Sweet potatoes. Maybe some meat. Yet she always eats Beef and Broccoli at a local chinese place, which when I eat, I get the shits within 20 minutes…
Thank you for the hilarious, and absolutely true to life article. I enjoyed it so much!
glenda
This blog is hilarious… but seriously, there is a ton of information on both sides of every argument out there on if something is healthy or not. It’s funny that even growing things in your own backyard you see criticism on how to do that organically, “don’t use fertilizers”, “don’t use plastic containers”, etc.
For me the main point is to first define for yourself what you are okay with, then be aware of what you are putting in your system. If you want organic, you don’t need to throw out everything, just start somewhere and don’t over-research it.
Take a look at more ideas on my site at http://www.mycontainergardeningideas.com
Thanks for the article