Day 19: Food Rules.

I have a friend that I’m pretty sure is a something-rexic.

Not anorexic, because her problem isn’t that she eats too little food, exactly. It’s more that she has extremely rigid rules around food. If she’s put in a situation where she may have to eat something she’s decided she can’t eat or else go hungry, she becomes extremely anxious and agitated. Ask her about food, and her reaction is practically compulsive: she’ll start listing all the reasons you’re either killing yourself or getting fat by eating a whole laundry list of common edibles.

In a sense, all this obsessive devotion has paid off; she’s at her lightest weight in probably 25 years. But it’s also hard to watch, because there’s this constant terror behind her eyes, as if accidentally eating a kidney bean (one of the many forbidden foods) would undo all of her good work and suck every fat molecule she’s shed back into her body instantly.

I definitely get the attraction of hard-and-fast rules, especially in something like dieting where it’s much easier to move through the many, many days and weeks it takes to reach a goal when you’re “all or nothing”. I once heard a saying that went, “100% is easier than 90%”, and I’ve found that to be true in many situations involving long-term goals. It’s much simpler to obey a set of immovable rules than to make the right decisions, thinkingly, 5 or 6 times a day.

But as I think about all the rules I’ve heard (and, sadly, followed for periods of time) around various foodstuffs and the supposed dangers thereof, I fear that if I tried create a set of “safe” foods, I’d be REALLY limited in what I could eat.

Needless to say, all foods process beyond simple cutting, cooking, spicing, and pureeing would be on the chopping block right off.

There would, of course, be no sugar, flour, potatoes, or rice—every low-carb diet from Sugar Busters to Atkins proscribes these.

There would also be no whole grains or lentils; the Paleo movement claims that eating these makes really gross (and improbable) stuff happen in your body. I’ll wait while you look up what that is.

I couldn’t eat dairy, soy, or tree nuts; they’re all supposed allergens that cause my immune system to rebel and me to swell up like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, according to Whole 30 and some other diets. Alcohol is also out on Whole 30, plus, a study came out last week saying that even moderate alcohol intake shrinks the brain, and no one wants that.

Most fruits are out; they’re high on the glycemic index. Apples and similarly high-fiber but low sugar fruits would be OK except, of course, if they were treated with pesticides or were GMOs. The GMO thing eliminates a LOT of common vegetables, too, and as we know “organic” doesn’t actually have a legal meaning, so it’s basically not safe to trust anything in the produce section.

Oils are a minefield, too. Obviously animal fats are out; in fact, I think the new rule is that any fat that’s solid at room temperature is basically the Foam & Fill of arterial circulation. Except coconut oil, which is so amazing I’m supposed to put it in my coffee in the morning. Olive oil used to be good for me, but only extra-virgin, and the big scandal is that most EVOO sold in the U.S. is actually just sort-of-slutty olive oil tinted green.

Red meat is out unless it’s humane, organic, and grass fed (not grass finished; apparently being on a feedlot at any time during their lives makes cows, sheep, and pigs poisonous). Both chicken and eggs have to have been free range (not cage free, that just means they’re confined to a really big prison instead of a little one), not treated with hormones or anti-biotics, and humanely slaughtered, as if there was such  thing. You know what, let’s just eliminate all poultry; it bothers me that it now has to be handled like toxic waste in the kitchen thanks to salmonella. I remember the days when we didn’t have to clean everything the chicken liquid touched with bleach. Until those days return, I probably shouldn’t have it in the house.

For animal protein, that leaves fish. But not all fish; farmed fish are nothing but scale-covered bags of disease and pollution. The yummy top-of-foodchain fish like tuna, salmon, and mackeral are full of so much mercury that tyou can take your temperature with them. Dolphins, sharks, and octopuses (yes, that’s the correct plural, look it up) are off limits for being too cute, too persecuted, and too smart, in that order. Cod, red snapper, and sea bass, the filet mignon of the ocean, are all overfished. Sardines are OK, though.

So what does that leave me? Well, I guess that in a complete reversal of thousands of years of human progress in the form of specialization, the safest thing to do is to eat what I grow myself, plus some sardines. Sadly, I live I a sort of northern climate, and my yard is really shaded, so I either need to move, cut down the trees and the neighbor’s house, or eat a lot of mushrooms. But without butter or onions, because my Ayurvedic Practitioner tells me that I’m Kapha, and need to avoid alliums.

Except that I positively refuse to give up my coffee. Yeeeeeesssss, I’ll only buy fair trade. Wait, it has to be made with water, which I can’t get out of my tap because of the deadly lead and chloroflorocarbons, and I can’t get out of a bottle because of BHA and the horrible environmental impact.

Whatevs.

There’s probably a little truth to a lot of the ‘banned foods’ logic. But the real bottom line is, human beings are the most successful animal on earth (if one ignores ants) partly because we learned to eat anything and everything that was thrown our way. I mean, seriously, who was the first person who looked at an oyster or an artichoke and thought, “Yum!”? Someone hungry, that’s who. Barring actual genetic variations like lactose intolerance or diseases like diabetes, I imagine that most people can thrive on a diet that includes just about anything, as long as it’s varied and not too heavy on any one group.

Plus, where’s the fun in such a limited palate? Flat out refusing to eat any food, all the time, for any reason other than not liking it, is like getting the 120 pack of Crayolas and then throwing away all the colors except Cerulean and Cornflower. It just leaves you with the blues.

I hope my friend finds a better space with food, where she’s not so wrapped around the axle about putting the “wrong” thing in her mouth. Such strict rules are maybe OK for the short term, but it seems to me like a tough, and sad, way to live a whole life.

Personally, I’m going for the whole range of food experience, just not all at one sitting. We were given the gift of being able to eat just about anything. I hate to think about not opening it.