An Open Letter to Dietary Weirdos

Dear Dietary Weirdos:

Go away.

What is a Dietary Weirdo?  To me, a Dietary Weirdo is someone who claims to adhere to a chosen non-average food regime but who is actually talking bullshit because they eat whatever they want whenever they feel like it, yet still feel compelled to tell you all about their “special diet”.

This does not include people who genuinely have constraints on their diets, even voluntary ones.  Let me just say straight up that I absolutely respect that.   I’ve had my share of friends with celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, Type I peanut allergies, hellish-fart-inducing lactose intolerances, and strict but polite preferences like vegetarianism.  Disclosure:  I myself refused to eat poultry or red meat for ten years, and I stuck to that policy with minimal fuss. 

No, it’s the people who PRETEND to have restrictions that piss me off.   I’ve found that these people fit into two broad categories.

Type I:
Those who are holier-than-thou and preachy about their diets because they are so SMART and SPECIAL and they are bent on showing everyone else how SMART and SPECIAL they are.  You can recognize these people from their upwardly-tilted noses down which they look at you when they converse, and by their not-so-subtle assumption that they know more than you about any given topic and therefore do not have to listen to you at all, ever.  Their dietary restrictions will be something that we can all agree is high profile and well-meaning, like vegetarianism, veganism, or strictly organic, and will originally be based on a very admirable environmental-sustainability concern for food production.   However, these people will have hijacked the this idea for use in demonstrating that they are clearly better than you. 

This type will tell you about their diet at every opportunity, being sure to criticize yours as much as possible in the process.  Remember, the goal is self-aggrandizement, not actual progress toward sustainability.  A conversation might go something like:

You: “I’m going to go get myself a sandwich.”

Dietary Weirdo: “You do know that they use rare African ferret eyeballs to produce plastic wrap for sandwiches?

You: “Oh?  Well, I’ll look out for one that’s in a box.”

Dietary Weirdo: “They also burn critically endangered Galapagos jumping spider gonads to toast the seeds in multigrain bread.”

You: “I see… I’ll get white bread this time.”

Dietary Weirdo: “By the way, the carbon footprint of white bread is greater than for driving your Toyota for a year at 120 miles per hour.”

You: “Thanks for letting me know.  I’ll probably get tuna on whole wheat then.”

Dietary Weirdo: “There is no such thing as dolphin-safe tuna.  YOU’RE PROBABLY EATING DOLPHINS.  That's just so uncouth.  And I can’t believe you would even eat something with as many food-miles as whole wheat has.  Haven’t you heard of the micropolyviscosity metanutrient glycosylanethylamine problem?”

You: “Actually no, but I’ll Google it later… what are you having for lunch?”

Dietary Weirdo: “Home-pickled pine twigs hand-gathered in my own backyard, raw organically grown pubic hair, and wood-fire-toasted lice humanely combed from wild Canadian moose.”

This is all well and good, but what you will soon note is that 70% of the time, this person will not follow his or her own rules.  Often you will come upon this person happily and un-ironically devouring a greasy pile of factory-farmed processed sausage seasoned with child-labor tears.  This often occurs when:

• they are vaguely cranky or tired
• they are being lazy
• just for the hell of it because fuck you, I eat responsibly-sourced moose lice and pubic hair sometimes so I can eat whatever I want right now and still be better than you.

I once had a boss at work who was inordinately pleased with himself for being a vegetarian.  Whenever the topic of eating meat came up, he would launch into a lecture on its carbon footprint (I agreed), its nitrate pollution (also agreed), its unhealthiness (I’m on board for a lot of that), and its general unsustainability and unsuitability as a staple diet (yup, I’m with that too).  Then he would come in to work with a hangover and go across the street for a bacon-double-cheeseburger at Burger King.

 

Pictured: Vegetarian lunch of champions

And yet he still felt it was okay to look down his carefully-upturned nose at anyone who came in with a ham sandwich.

Finally, these people also include the ones who refuse to buy Prairie Hayseed Happy Barn Home Chicken Sausage from the corner corporate supermarket, but will buy exactly the same brand from the locally-run health-food store—because somehow being sold from the hippie shop makes the sausage cleaner.  More disclosure:  THIS HAS BEEN ME.

Type II:

The second category of Dietary Weirdo includes those who are in some way neurotic about their food.  They are controlled by every latest health food fad and jerked around by every piece of psychosomatic bull crap.  Instead of being environmentalists, these are hypochondriacs who are convinced they have vague and sinister intolerances or allergies that insidiously ruin their lives.  They might read some article in Cosmo about how someone somewhere is lactose intolerant and decide I MUST STOP DRINKING MILK FOREVER STARTING RIGHT NOW because obviously OH MY GOD I PROBABLY HAVE THAT.  Then they hear that sodium is really bad for you so they cut out salt entirely.  (Woe betide you if are a dinner guest at this home.)  Then they read a rumor on the Internet that fluoride added to tap water could cause cancer of the reticulochondromyopatellarhepatiformis or some other made-up organ and refuse to drink anything but bottled water ever again.  You can recognize this type of Weirdo by their obsessive reading of alarmist health magazines (but never a scientific journal) and their constant prodding and poking of their various parts while wearing a worried expression.

On their own, these concerns might be legitimate and your average Type II views them as well-founded.  But it’s the constant changing of these fad diets and the poorly–informed way they’re implemented that piss me off.  One week it will be no dairy.  The next week it will be no red meat.  The week after, it will be no animal-derived saturated fats.  The following week, it will be animal-derived fats, but no peanut oil.  Then maybe dairy will be okay after all.  Whole wheat is good but white is not.  Oh no wait, actually both are bad.  Eat oats. 

Another problem with these people is that they generally don’t know what the hell they’re doing when they implement these restrictions.  I had a friend swear up and down to me that her life got so much better when she stopped eating bread, because she’d been feeling really ill before and it was definitely because of gluten intolerance, and now she was so much healthier and more energetic.  At the time she visited me, I was a bit of a moron about what gluten-free meant, so I stupidly selected a pasta recipe with vegetarian, gluten-based, sausage to cook for her because I didn’t know any better.  She devoured it happily and without irony, apparently lacking the insight that—surprise!—pasta is also made from wheat.

This type knows all kinds of factoids about the ailments they are convinced they have, and will tell you about them in great detail.  If you are sucked into this discussion, be prepared to hear a lot about their pooping habits.  They will also insist on the most dire-sounding labels for their conditions, like calling things syndromes or allergies instead of intolerances or irritations.   It may get to the point where diet replaces horoscope in being blamed for everything that happens during their day.

So why do both types annoy me so much?

It's because at heart, true Dietary Weirdness in either type is a way to say, "LOOK AT ME!" without mind to hypocrisy or inconsistency.  I could hardly blame you for being confused about what to eat.  There are mountains of information, misinformation, and changing recommendations that are out there in the world.  Oh dear, you poor Weirdo.  I'm sure the truth is that you annoy me disproportionately because I'm secretly terrified of becoming you by accident.  Why?  A personal timeline of my own confused food learning curve:

 

Insidious cholesterol bombs?

1986:  Mum tells me never to eat more than two eggs per week, because otherwise I would get heart disease when I was Daddy's age.

 1990: Everyone says we should never eat butter again and we switch to some greasy and gross-tasting bright yellow creepy stuff.

Funny, I totally can.

1996: I decide to be a vegetarian because you know, animals are nice and stuff.

1997: Everyone says eat only whole wheat because processed white stuff is bad for you.

1998: I try veganism and realize that in suburban soccer towns, you can’t find anything to eat except air unless you get your whole family on board.

2001: I learn about overfishing, agricultural runoff to estuaries and creepy algal blooms.  Should I never eat fish again?

2002: I hear about trans fat for the first time.  Now what do I put on toast?                                

                                

2003: Mum gets colon cancer (she’s fine now) and decides FIBER 4-EVER!

2004: I see gluten-free cake in a café for the first time and wonder what the hell that’s about.  Also, I see the word “halal” appearing everywhere and assume it's some sort of improvement on factory spam-meat.

2005:  Everyone says, "You know what, actually, eat butter because that greasy yellow creepy stuff is actually worse.  Just do it minimally, because, you know, fat and stuff."

Go ahead, grab a spoon.

2008: I give up being a strict vegetarian for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being a carnivorous boyfriend and nonexistent blood iron.

2009: I learn that halal is actually horrifying, and that eggs are probably perfectly fine.

2010: Whole Health Source starts in about how what you SHOULD be eating is tons of butter and you know what, fiber is pointless and probably no good at all.*

And then there is all this stuff:

Everyone has heard the Cheerios story from a couple of years ago--how Cheerios claimed to lower cholesterol until finally the FDA said, you can't prove that!  Stop pretending to be medicine!

I never even realized people got so concerned about when and how often they pooped until Activia started running these ads.

Ooooh, soy!  Soy is good for you, right?  Duh: even if it is soy, it's still chocolate milk, fool!

Hel-lo, this is not health food either.  Even if it's not actually a potato chip, that doesn't mean it can't be greasy and salty.  "Multigrain" is not a synonym for "so healthy I can eat the whole bag."

Who could be consistent in dietary philosophy with all that and more getting thrown about?  I don’t even know what to eat anymore.  This barrage of recommendations is turning me into a combined Type I/Type II Dietary Weirdo, I’m sure.

So, my dear Dietary Weirdo, you may annoy the crap out of me, but I can only blame you insofar as you use this situation to be egocentric.  Type I’s, I’m very sorry that your admirable environmentalism has given you an excuse to be a prick.  Type II’s, I wish you I could help you be less neurotic.  Truthfully, we as a scientific society should GET IT THE HELL TOGETHER and give some consistent, 100% data-backed recommendations to give you some peace.  Then again, a few hundred women’s health magazines would go bankrupt and you, poor soul, would have to find something else to be neurotic about.

So, Dietary Weirdos, if you will give up your hypocritical superiority  complex and/or egocentric hypochondria, I promise to forgive you.  Maybe we should together write a letter to the food industry.  It could go something like:

Maybe it will make a difference and maybe in this lifetime you Dietary Weirdos can be cured of your weirdness, and I won’t have to put up with you anymore.  I won’t hold my breath though.

                Love,

                Anna

*This completely inaccurate representation of Stephan Guyenet’s excellent literature reviews of nutritional science has been bitchified for comic purposes and probably bears little resemblence to the original.