I never thought it would come to this, but I'm about to write a column on dieting. Yes, it's personal. Having been diagnosed with every illness known to medical science -- well, not every illness, because just like the lead character in Jerome K. Jerome's classic Three Men in a Boat, I don't suffer from Housemaid's Knee -- my doctors have recently advised me to watch what I'm eating.
It sounded easy -- I mean, who eats with his eyes closed, anyway? I always looked at my food, and if I liked what I saw, I ate it. Sometimes I ate what I saw even if I didn't particularly like it, just to be polite. Or to avoid looking fussy.
That, it was explained to me, is the very opposite of watching what you eat on a diet. When you're on a diet, you look at your food, and when you like what you see, you don't eat it. You banish it, eradicate it, put a hex on it. You send it into outer space, burn it, pulp it, donate it to Osama bin Laden. The last place you put it is in your mouth.
For appetizing foodstuff, here's the basic drill. First, render it harmless by incantations of mediaeval magic available from your nutritionist (e.g. "Begone, Satanic salami...", etc.). Next, put on heavy industrial gloves and remove it from the kitchen counter, place it in a lead container, and deposit it into the crater of the nearest volcano. Place a sign saying "Danger: Tasty food" at the lip of the crater. Notifying CSIS (or MI5 in England) is optional; stricter dieticians recommend it.
Having disposed of the good stuff, lay in a supply of the barely edible -- say, reams of Swiss chard or celery sticks in tofu dip. At home we used to call them "longevity dishes," not because they helped those who ate them to live long, but because my father predicted a long shelf life for them in the pantry. I can still picture him tasting an uninspired dish, then putting down his spoon and remarking: "Ah, delicious caraway seed soup! Well, it'll have a long life."
Dieting is going on a regimen of longevity dishes. The quest is to cleanse your palate of every entertaining morsel and substitute soporific snacks, so that when you feel hungry, instead of raiding the fridge, you promptly fall asleep. A truthful diet book would call itself From Yearning to Yawning: A Diner's Journey, but don't look for it in bookstores. Truth and diets don't mix.
Of a bewildering array of books offering themselves as roadmaps to the Nirvana of healthy eating, one stands out in user-friendliness. Written by my ex-brother-in-law, a slim Englishman named Rick Gallop, The G.I. Diet has become a runaway bestseller because even nutritional illiterates (or insurgents) like me can follow it. Rick used to be the head cheese (note: don't even think about it as a snack) at the Heart and Stroke Foundation, until he decided that we should all become slim Englishmen. To help us accomplish this, he proceeded to colour-code all food-items in the world (or all we're likely to find in our neighbourhood supermarket or restaurant.)
Rick's diet makes managing weight as easy as crossing at a traffic light. Eat green foods and lose, eat red foods and gain, eat yellow foods and stay the same. Well, there's more to it, I suppose -- G.I. stands for "glycemic index," and all that -- but if the reader only remembers green=go and red=stop, (s)he'll be able to wear those favourite pants again in a few months.
The great contemporary dream is to die fit as a fiddle, at the right weight and in perfectly good health. It is, of course, more readily available to some cultures than others. People who like tasty birds like the French (duck) or the Germans (goose) find the lofty fashion statement of a narrow coffin harder to achieve than people who prefer taste-free birds like the English (turkey.)
Currently the developed world is in a culinary transition phase from the duck-culture of haute cuisine to the turkey-culture of the nutritionally correct. Writers like my ex-in-law, who can use the word "delicious" with reference to skim-milk decaf cappuccino seriously and without irony, are in the vanguard of our epoch-making transition from a tasty to a taste-free existence.
I'm with him all the way. Let's march to our graves in emaciated elegance, with plenty of good cholesterol and just the right amount of blood sugar. Bring on the tofu, the Swiss chard, the papaya, the Yosenabi casseroles, and don't forget the Sumashi wan, an elegy in blandness, the superb clear soup of Japan.
© 2006 George Jonas
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