Crazy People (Crazy About Everything)

“We are people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

- Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and, now, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which suggests something I've known, and said, for quite a long time:

Your dinner plate ain't a medicine cabinet and your kitchen ain't a church.

I remember being at a party of ad executives, where all that was served was shit I didn't want to eat; until I produced a bag of corn chips which almost brought the whole shindig to a halt. "That's not good for you," a woman explained. I stared at her like she had three eyes. Whether it's avoiding fluoride (by insisting on using toothpaste that, in the words of South Park, "tastes like ass and doesn't fight cavities") or just eating to "stay healthy", the one thing none of these busybodies considered is whether their minds were stable: You know, the idea that being overly-concerned about what someone else consumed is a New Age illness.

All this recent talk about weight is part of the same sickness. I don't think, as I look at Americans, that we're overly fat but that, instead, our culture suffers from anorexia on the brain. Like a bulimic, many people can't look in the mirror - or at each other - without tripping, hard, on the most shallow aspects of ourselves. And they do this, constantly, while also insisting "it's what's on the inside that counts." A bunch of obvious New Age liars.

Why people can't see such rank hypocrisy is beyond me, except to say, many people seem to be naturally cultish "followers" who (once infected with a bogus idea) love trying to tell other people what to do: True Baby Nazis, one and all. And, as Michael Pollan says, it's got to stop.

And the fact they need him to say it - instead of taking it from me - just adds insult to injury. But, coming from me, that should be no surprise:

I've only been speaking as their friend.