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.
Great article, but what’s wrong with Mark Knopfler music? The guy’s a musical genius. 😉
Mark Knopfler rocks! 🙂
I am actually crying right now I’m laughing so hard. This is brilliant. Way to rep the 206. Or the 425. Or the 253. Whichever part of Seattle/Greater Seattle you happen to be repping.
Best. EVER. You took the words right out of my mouth, along with the (snorted) last mouthful of organic quinoa in kefir I was having for a snack. I need a Mars Bar after all that laughing.
Keep rocking!
Hahahaha Brilliant!
This sums it all up… I’m just glad that I’m immune to it all.
DEATH to corn! LOL! I will NEVER touch that stuff. I guess it’s a GREAT thing that I have had an aversion to corn ever since I was little, never thought it tasted good AT ALL.
This is a GREAT post though. I love when I catch “healthy eaters” not actually being healthy! The look on their face when I set them straight – priceless.
Are you a kind person? Do you understand pain?
This was honestly the most hilarious, fabulous post I’ve read all year. You are clearly an awesome person with great taste – translation for ‘we have the same blog theme’.
Seriously, I adored this. Thanks for the laughs and look forward to checking out the rest of your blog now, Alexx 🙂
Super hilarious and great read; thanks Erica for blogging so compelling on this and other food subjects.
Ha! Love it! 🙂 Food can definitely become an expression of unresolved fear and other issues, especially power and control issues. But mostly, I’m laughing my head off and am quite entertained!
AMAZING post — can’t wait to share. 🙂
This is hysterical and AWESOME. We really have been there.
I was laughing out loud reading this! Thank you so very much for adding humor to my day. Sad, but true, it is often very difficult to navigate our way through whatever is “healthy eating”. I often comment on how difficult it is to eat healthy, and this hit so many of the dilemmas associated with our choices!
Did you mention foods high in oxalates like celery, carrots, and chocolate? Those of us who can’t break down oxalates can’t eat those!
This was GREAT. Love your blog, writing style and content. I was a chef for 15 years, now I’m a small farmy homesteader…I went Primal last year, I’ve been down this entire road, I raise chickens instead of rabbits…it was a bloody first slaughter last year…:-( and I even had the kidney stones from eating too many beet greens and damn swiss chard! I can so relate. ACccccckkkk! But sometimes I just drink too much wine and melt un fermented cheese over flat bread (of course it’s with Einkorn flour!) and think I’m keeping myself sane. But wonder if I should just hit the drive thru to keep my levels of toxic topped up. Great essay.
GREAT post! Nutrition is not that easy…. I find that I learn more things as I go. it’s been 3 years now and I am still learning!
This is one the best written pieces of satire I’ve read in years. My daughter and her husband encouraged me to try the FOK way of eating and I’ve been plant strong since Feb. 1. I’m 73 and have had RA for over 40 years so I’ve tried a bunch of stuff. Reading the comments makes me smile wryly, and I’m sure you can see that being diagnosed with any disease can also bring out hundreds of recommendations for cures so that you’re just as bewildered as people that want to eat healthy and safely. My daughter and I often chuckle over the contradictory suggestions we see on food sites.
Since I became plant strong I’ve lost 25 lbs. and feel much better. I will not claim a cure or even a discovery, except for a new recipe or two, I love the experimentation and cooking for myself–keep it simple and it doesn’t have to cost and arm and a leg or take hours of preparation. Thank you for your wisdom and terrific sense of humor.
Thanks, Sharon.
I’m about the same age, also lost a lot of weight with those wonderful plants, feel generally great, and love to experiment w/ food.
And Love This Blog and all the personalities. Thanks, Erica; I’ll be sharing this as soon as I can stop laughing and reading!
Very, very funny – will pass this along to our community garden group. A nice piece to keep in mind when the next food fad preacher comes to town. One correction that is needed – kale is actually LOW in oxalic acid. As a kidney stone sufferer, I’ve found several sources of data on the oxalic content of different kinds of vegetables. (e.g. http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/Other/oxalic.html) While some greens are very high (spinach, chard) kale seems to be very low.
Excellent Erica. Laughed so much. But sadly – you do realise that the from the outside looking over at the US all most people here can detect is consumerism, gullible fads gripping the nation and very little of the practical real life and common sense you write about every day. And every day young Australia is slipping closer and closer to the plastic supermarket falseness.
Keep it up Erica – America needs you! We all need your reminder that food and health need to be simple again . Thankyou great post.
This was sooooo great – Laughter is our best medicine! Thanks again….
So I’m looking for some lacto-fremented tears of a virgin. My health food store sales person told me they are on the shelf next to the hens teeth, but I can’t find them….I really enjoyed the article, and plan to cut back on eating kale as soon as I finish the 53 pounds I already have.
Hmmmmm……I’ll probably die of cancer no matter how healthly I eat – genetics you know. But, I feel way better eating just a bit of wild salmon, vegies & grains. Lost a bunch of weight too. No heart attacks for me. Yet moderation in all things like my Momma said is probably the best bet with an occasional indulgence of wine, chocolate, butter and so on. As a daughter of a chef and having worked in catering it’s obvious there is no boring food just boring cooks. This whole foodie movement is some sort of trendy joke. BTW rabbits are pets not food or hey why not serve up your cat or dog on the barbeque?
This is an absolutely hilarious post! This is my introduction to this site. Great leadership in healthy eating! Growing your own food really is the best solution. Next best thing would be learning to be more conscious of your food choices and caring about the impact your choices make on the earth and yourself. Much easier to make better choices when you eat more whole foods, in my opinion as a fitness and nutrition professional:
http://www.vivianlaw.ca/whats-healthy-to-eat/
Great post and hilarious ! With so much information floating around, it find very hard to make food choices these days 🙂
This is one of the funniest takes on orthorexia I have ever read. Keep up the great work.
LMAO!! Erica, you have managed to make me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants. My husband even laughed. Even funnier, I just posted about food additives today…Anal gland secretions of a beaver! Gross!
Hilarious! 1 more thing. Even growing your food in your yard isn’t safe. Have you tested your soil for those pesky pesticides? Some places were farms way back.
TOO FUNNY! Thanks for sharing. People do go well off the deep end.Trying to keep up with the latest information. I was just reading a post about a young woman who was doing just this! she was driving herself crazy trying to keep up with it all. This was real life for her. Until she ended up in the hostpital because the stress of it all. I prefer to listen to my own innnervoice instead of the overcommercialized voices that we hear all around us. Buy this, do this, be like this, and it goes on and on……. LISTEN TO YOUR OWN INNERVOICE! YOU KNOW INSIDE WHAT IT IS YOU NEED TO DO!
Excellent post! Funny, slightly depressing, and true at the same time.
Ah… the apparent futility of it all!
I’m new to your blog. I love your content, and writing style. Looking forward to reading more!
If I may add my 2 cents… a lot of people who are on a journey to be truly healthy have gone through a period of fear because they think everything they eat is going to kill them. I know I have! Hopefully we can all get to a place of starting wherever we can, but then seek to improve with each passing week, or month, or year. And to be at peace. You will be at peace when you find balance, knowing that you are doing your part in making the world a little better, but also knowing that there is no perfect solution. Those with more education, resources, and time (lol) may end up living more sustainably, while those who just can’t do it all, shouldn’t be expected to. In any case, imagine if everyone did just a little bit!
Anyway, LOVED this piece. So well written!
This is just brilliant and hilarious!
Thank you for expressing my feelings with such eloquence. I am only 23, and I am still impervious to the effects of gluten, and drinking beer when I’m hungry because there is no food in my mini fridge. Despite the ~10 cigarettes a day, I can run, climb and mountain bike farther and faster than most of my peers – in the rare case of wanting to. Additionally I have not worked-out since I was seventeen, but somehow maintain muscle and tone that I built when I was that old. I also happened to be a student at the Culinary Institute of America, and stress has been proven to cause obesity and a myriad of other ailments.
Regardless of my suicidal lifestyle, I have fun. I enjoy picking cherry tomatoes and eating the dirt-covered suckers right there in the garden, I eat hot chilies raw right from the plant, I can’t stand ketchup or pancakes, or waffles; I do whatever makes me feel good.
My greatest aspiration is to die with a belly full of happy beer bubbles. I hope this happens before I get too old and rickety to pick those cherry tomatoes.
P.S. I hate conventional tomatoes because they taste like fucking Styrofoam and make me go into a rage.
Except for the smokes you sound like our kinda people. One piece of advice, my fellow soon-to-be-culinary-school survivor: try homebrewing. Vine ripened heirloom cherry tomatoes are to conventional as homebrew is to almost all commercial beer. Plus you can save a bunch of money. So you’ll die with suds in your belly AND a twenty in your pocket. And it’s fun.
I love you. This is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Gonna share it.
The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater – great blog post! Thought it hilarious and had to share on my Facebook page, thanks
I genuinely LOL’d… this is me every day, battling with the dire consequence of my foodie existance 😛 Not only that, it summarises the thought patterns of all my health concious friends – moral of the story; we’re all gonna die from something!
Im sharing this like crazy!
ah so true and so funny… finally a light hearted look at the trials of becoming a mung bean…. not tha its a bad thing I just think you hit the nail on the head with your article…. you gotta laugh at yourself sometimes right??? Its good for you!!! 😉
So…. there I am on my bathroom floor, peacefully retaining my morning detoxifying coffee enema brewed with organic Gerson-approved coffee, prior to making my pastured-duck-egg-and-raw-goat-cheddar-cheese omelette cooked in home-made ghee… checking my email from the Weston A Price Foundation yahoo group I belong to… and there’s a link to this blog post. With curiosity and always ready to learn more on the internet, I click through and begin to read…
… and that is when I discover that laughing out loud repeatedly is incompatible with retaining a coffee enema.
hahahahahahahahahha!
hahahahahahahahahha!
hahahahahahahahahha!
Been there-done that 🙂
sharing…….
many thanks for lightening my day
You need your own blog. Seriously. I’d read it.
That was an awesome post! A great thing to read while devouring a plate of brownies. Of course they were gluten-free brownies. Sigh. I’m always amazed by people who tell me wheat is evil and wasn’t even a food before 2,000 years ago. And they tell me that with a straight face while drinking an energy drink. Because of course those were food 2,000 years ago. The only time wheat sucks is if you can’t digest it and it gives you bad stomach problems. So for all those people who can eat wheat (or could if they weren’t psyching themselves out) my god – go eat that po-boy for me!
Hilarious article. It’s why ‘hoodsteading came to be!
Even Ramen is nutritious as long as you cook it in 3 day bone broth! I figure it counteracts whatever gmo wheat paste and MSG they taint it with. 😉
Healthy food comes from a healthy knowledge base, not wealthy income waste!
Julie, google “what happens to ramen in your stomach” and watch the video. You may not feel the same way after that.
…I think you missed the humor the previous poster was using.
Throw young family members you need to feed and here the mess begins!
Have you ever tried to feed them sprouts for lunch?
How about when they sit at school next to their friends with Lunchables?
Or just sandwich? Mommy, it is just a sandwich?
It is an illusion we gain control over the future with healthy eating. There chances for healthy life are going up, but there is no guarantees.
SPOT ON.
and
Thank you for saying it. I have a friend who is so paralyzed by everything she puts into her mouth or on her body, her life is pretty sad, and very frustrating for her.
She needs to lighten up, but if I say anything, she won’t want to hear it. I think she likes telling everyone she meets that she is allergic to this, or sensitive to that… which isn’t exactly true as I’ve seen her eat all of these things. My heart goes out to people who truly ARE allergic.
Enjoyed your post!