When it
comes to food, it appears that Americans, collectively, have succumbed to
learned helplessness. They cannot stop the compulsion to diet. Nor can they
stop the compulsion to overeat. The two compulsions feed off one another and
trap American eaters into a vicious cycle. This destructive cycle has
short-circuited people’s metabolisms, brains, and overall attitudes towards
eating.
Having short-circuited
her own relationship with food as an anorexic, Caroline Knapp explains that the
“more you meddle with a hunger, the more taboo and confusing it will become.
Feed the body too little and then too much, feed it erratically, launch that
maddening cycle of deprivation and overcompensation, and the sensation of
physical hunger itself becomes divorced from the body, food loaded with
alternative meanings: symbol of longing, symbol of constraint, form of torture,
form of reward, source of anxiety, source of succor, measure of self-worth.”
How
insidious and ironic it is that dieting contributes to our enslavement to this
vicious cycle, yet the authors of diet books all promise salvation from this
dietary prison. It seems that diet book authors create the mental illness and
then promise the antidote. Freud distrusted religion for the same reason. He
said religion poisoned our souls and then promised to cleanse us from the very
poison it fostered. Likewise, diet book authors, creating the sickness and a feeble
antidote, are the religious hacks of the modern age.
Relying
on pseudo-science and outright fraud, these authors claim to have the Answer to
our dieting woes. In an acute analysis of the fraud and ineptness of diet
books, Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “The Pima Paradox” explains that diet book
authors all claim to have a “Eureka Moment” in which the writer claims that his
or her epiphany is superior to the dietary epiphanies of the competing diet
book authors. In this quasi-religious narrative which borrows liberally from The
Pilgrim’s Progress, the
diet book author shows how he or she was mired in the darkness of misguided
dieting and then through his or her own brilliance, serendipity, or both, found
Gastronomical Truth and has become a self-anointed Dietary Guide.
Of
course, these melodramatic narratives are all a sham as every year hundreds of
diet books written by False Messiahs come and go. Even one of the more enduring
messianic figures, the late Dr. Robert Atkins, peddler of the
low-carb/high-protein diet, faded into dust. His acolytes finally tired of
waking up to a breakfast of pork tenderloin and scrambled eggs and snacking on
protein-enriched pork rinds. The low-carb stores that used to be on every block
of my town are now closed.
This
isn’t to say that there aren’t writers who can’t save us from the insanity of
our eating. They don’t promise Eureka Moments. Nor do they promise dietary
salvation. But they do show a sane approach to eating and as such they are the
Light of the Food Writing World.
The two
writers I am referring to are Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We
Eat More Than We Think, and Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An
Eater’s Manifesto. After throwing out the slew of phony diet books from my
bookshelves, I have relied on Wansink and Pollan, more than anyone else, to
inform my approach to 3,000 Calories a Day.
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