On "Healthy" Eaters

I've noticed that some of the strongest pushback to Engine 2 has been from "healthy" eaters rather than red-meat homers. The typical response from the McDonald's/Taco Bell crowd is, "Yes, you're right, I should eat better. But I'm not going to." My dad (Joe), perhaps realizing how far beyond food salvation he was, had this to say, showing particular concern for his prized "Joe Burgers," a tasty concoction of greasy beef, slow-cooked chili, oil-slathered onions, and mayonnaised buns:

I took a look at this diet. How do you make a Joe Burger as a veggie burger? What about the chili? I've been working on my homemade cinnamon rolls with butter creme icing. You know I love ice cream. This weekend I fixed country fried steak, mashed potatoes, gravy and homemade biscuits. That doesn't include the Joe Burgers, chili, home fries, sweet tea and the lemon icebox pie. Would I have to give that up?

I'm planning a Super Bowl party with a pulled pork butt, Dreamland BBQ Sauce, Brunswick Stew, potato salad, baked beans topped with bacon, cole slaw, sweet tea and some chocolate pies for dessert. How do I replace this? Now I love veggies, pinto beans, turnip greens, but you gotta season them with some bacon drippings, sugar and salt and serve some good Mexican cornbread with 'em to really make 'em good. Who wants to live to be 100?

So from the unpretentious crowd, the response is something like, "Your diet may be all well and good, but it's not for me." From self-proclaimed healthy eaters, the reaction has been more visceral.

I think we should all step back at this point and recognize one thing, which I realized after thoughtful conversations with a much older friend: eating, for lack of a better word, is personal. The diets that we choose for ourselves are intertwined with who we are as people. You share meals with your friends and family; a special occasion merits a special meal; celebratory news is met with celebratory food. Especially in law school, I can recall instances where I got dessert with my lunchtime sandwich upon achieving one thing or another (and thus being given more things to achieve; law school is a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie). Point being, though: meals cut straight down to, and are marbled within, the tissue of our person.

So when you announce to friends and family that you are drastically changing your diet -- empirical research shows that your diet is likely to track that of your friends and family -- it can be an indirect dig on the food habits and choices that they themselves make. And since food cuts straight down to the tissue of their person, it can be a dig on who they are as people.

And then you've got these so-called healthy people. They not only subconsciously identify with their food (as we all do), but they've actively chosen to make their diets a part of their persona and identity. A conversation with a healthy eater (HE) might go like this:

You: Who are you?
HE: I'm someone who cares about what I put into my body.
You: Sure -- who doesn't?
HE: Well, most people. Most people sit in their dim, gray cubicles watching the flavorless minutes that are their lives tick by on the clock, shove horrifying foods down their throats at lunch, grab a pack of nutrient-free Doritos and a Coca-Cola for an afternoon snack, and then head home in their average cars to kiss their average wives and ignore the desperate pleadings of their average children (suffering from childhood obesity) to toss a ball around their grassless front yard because they are too tired and too overweight and too careless to be bothered by anything other than "What's coming on TV tonight?" and "What are we going to eat while we watch it?" Then they laugh when they watch the stupid little people tell their stupid little jokes and then they fall into their dumb little catatonic comas because they have once again feed-tubed way too much artificially flavored piles of junk into their fat, disgusting bodies.

So these healthy eaters differentiate themselves from the world by the virtue of their being healthy. (And we all differentiate ourselves in some way: excepting people who are running for office, who honestly appraises himself as just one of the masses? So it's not to unfairly single out healthy eaters, but this is a blog about a diet, and healthy eaters distinguish themselves based on their diets.)

And so when you tell these healthy eaters -- implicitly or explicitly, remember, because people interpret food decisions departing from their own as inherently condemnatory -- that perhaps they aren't eating the best diet they could be, you get . . . a reaction. There is knee-jerk skepticism. There is disbelief. There is shock and insecurity, and yes, there is bed-wetting. You may not realize it, but a war has begun and you are the unwitting aggressor. In a biting, gnashing-of-teeth sort of way, what you have said has cut to the core.

But for football fans out there, you know that the best defense is a good offense. (That's not true but this little gem of idiot sports announcers works to advance the narrative here.) And so what are these champions of healthy eating to do? They go on the offensive. They point out that raw nuts have saturated fat. They contend that olive oil can be good for you. They postulate that oils help us in the absorbing of nutrients. They venture that fish really aren't that bad. Wildly thrashing about, they footnote the "latest" medical studies in a "journal" that is "gaining respect among 'health groups,'" and these studies hint that there might not be a direct correlation between food cholesterol ingested and blood cholesterol realized, and thus their unhealthy consumption of eggs is rationalized. QED. They say, more frequently and more loudly than anything else in this rumbling echo chamber of questionable dietary advice that is the United States of America in the year 2010, that Engine 2 can't possibly be right -- can't possibly -- because in order for that to be true (and, really, it can't actually be true), in order for Engine 2 to make holistic, all-things-considered, NPR-in-the-mornings-while-listening-to-jazz-and-slicing-fresh-fruits sense, they would have to be wrong. And if they're wrong on their diet, then they're wrong as people. And that just can't be the case.