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December 2, 2006
Cause We're All Just Finding Our Way
Jen asks a very sensible question:
I wonder what your goals are when you agree to be a part of a CRON article featured in a magazine? Are you trying to encourage others that might be interested to try CRON? If that is your goal you might want to hightlight the aspects of it that won't turn people away from it. Find the middle ground. I think everyone appreciates excellent food. Why not have a chef prepare the meal or consult with a chef about how to prepare meals in a CRON way that are highly appetizing? I think CR would really benefit from the expertise of chefs helping us CRONers develop some really wonderful recipes. I, for example, much prefer to eat at restaurants that hire chefs as opposed to those that just hire cooks. These aren't even very upscale restaurants but the difference in food taste and preparation is striking between these two groups of restuarants. Secondly, it might be a good idea not to focus so much on weighing food. I know you think this is very important but admit it, does it really matter if you eat 30 or 40 grams of arugula? Since you've been weighing food for awhile I bet you could come pretty close to getting the weight right. Most people don't want to adopt an eating plan that would require such constant monitoring and again if you've weighed food enough before a person could get pretty good at guessing weights. And maybe MR could be persuaded not to lick his plate clean during a visit with the media. Will the 10 calorie difference in intake really matter that much? Just some thoughts. Keep up the really wonderful blog.
Thanks Jen! I appreciate your thoughtful comments, and will answer them in a moment.
Robin answers (and says what I would if I were here):
I believe it would be wrong of April and MR to invite a journalist to dinner to see what the CRON lifestyle is like and then hire a chef to cook some exotic dinner and start acting differently than they normally do. It would just be completely dishonest. If they normally prepare their own meals, weigh their food and lick their plates, that's what they should do when a reporter is present. Otherwise, they're lying to the world. And suppose the reporter found out that they normally do things differently? (In fact, April has already written in her blog that they weigh their food and lick their plates). He would conclude, I'm sure, that April and MR were embarrassed or ashamed of the way they normally live, and I would venture to guess that that's the last thing they would want anyone to think about them.
So we're all wondering: why the heck do I do these media appearances?
Well, first, because people ask me to. Julian Dibbell called me up on July fourth weekend when I was out of my mind with exhaustion from work and asked me to do an interview. I could tell from talking with him that he was serious in his intention to learn about CR. I was happy to help, even though I didn't really have time. (Incidentally,I told him, when we first talked about two weeks before the dinner party, that he was eating too few calories and should start eating more.) I liked Julian, and got to like him more the more we talked and corresponded. He was obviously a person of unusual intelligence, and someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the future. I later found out that my mother had spent the last several years using his earlier works in her "Science, Technology, and Society" courses in an information science master's program, or that Julian is a bit of a cult figure in the world of virtual worlds. He absolutely fits the profile of someone who would take up CR as a serious practice: he's unusually smart, capable of paying attention to detail (he used to work as a copy editor -- no doubt at some point an angry writer said he was *obsessed* with proper usage of the English language!), and much of his career has been about strange fringy trends that turn out to be the next big thing. He seems like the kind of person who is sufficiently curious about the future that he might be willing to go to considerable effort to see it. And he's used to doing things that are weird. I mean, spending an entire year trading in imginary lizard skins? (I note that no one asks him what he's doing for the starving children in Africa.) That makes counting calories look normal, even boring! I was indeed very excited to think that the information in the blog might wind up helping such a person stick around on earth a bit longer, and I selfishly hoped to add him to my list of fascinating people whose company I might enjoy long into the future. I still count him as one of my friends, and will definitely buy him a decent glass of pinot noir the next time I see him... or a Cuba Libre, if he prefers.
You can see why I thought that Julian might be that one in a million person who would (for his own reasons, not just to entertain me) join us on the quest for longer youth and health. That may have led to some confusion on his part, since he could have easily gotten the impression that I/we want to "convert" people in general. I definitely don't do these media appearances in hopes of getting the general public to practice CR. If I did, then Jen's suggestions would make a ton of sense. Jen is correct that if we were aiming to change the eating habits of the public at large, that we should minimize the more strict aspects of our CR practice. But we're not. Robin's right: we don't do these appearances to convert people.
The way I figure it is that about one in a million people will be interested in CR, and will have the discipline and intelligence it takes to actually do it, responsibly. If that person finds out about CR from an article about us, does his or her own research, and comes to a decision that CR is the right choice to reach his or her goals, then that's a good thing. Without the CR Society and media exposure, many people who actually practice CR (safely and responsibly) would have missed out on a chance to live healthier in the short term, more youthfully in the medium term, and, we hope, longer in the long term.
I think it's important that in these appearances we dispel typical myths about CR that are a) just plain false and b) might discourage someone who is *actually interested* from researching the topic further. For instance, the myth that people on CR are miserable. We're not. No one I know who practices CR is miserable. Lots of people I know who don't are. There probably are a few miserable CR practitioners, but I suspect that the percentage is lower than in the general population. For people who think they personally would be miserable without shortribs and goose fat, they should not attempt CR. We're not trying to change them. We want to make information available to those who might, of their own free will, do their own research and incorporate it into their lives as they see fit.
I emphasize that my partner and I have a satisfying sex life because another prevalent myth is that CR means giving up sex. I've gotten attacked for this a lot lately, which I find downright bizarre (I am building a file of "things that are downright bizarre") because last time I checked, it wasn't all that scandalous in 2006 to enjoy a satisfying sex life with the person you live with, own a house with, and plan to spend the rest of your life with. That's pretty sugar-free vanilla, dudes.
It's essential when we do these appearances that we drive home the point that CR doesn't work without adequate nutrition. That's why we don't skim over the software or the food scales. We don't want people to just cut calories, without adequate nutrition, and think they're extending their lives. To do CR responsibly, with any hope of youth-extending benefits, you have to pay much more attention than your average person to getting your RDAs. Most people are malnourished... even those who think they are eating "healthy" diets are usually deficient in calcium, some B vitamins, fiber, and vitamin D (unless they supplement or walk around naked all day in southern California.) If you're going to restrict calories, you have to learn about nutrition and monitor it. If we were to pretend that it doesn't matter, we'd not only be dishonest, we'd be negligent.
CR is a very individual thing. There are as many CR diets as there are CR practitioners. To do serious CR, the kind that has a chance of not just preventing an early heart attack but actually adding years to your youth and health takes a great deal of discipline, knowledge, and the willingness to sacrifice things that most people think are essential to the good life. There have been very few people who I've thought would be able, much less willing, to take on such a task. I have no interest in getting the vast majority of people to practice CR... it won't do me any good if they do. But there have been a few people whose presence on earth I thought was so valuable that I wanted to preserve them, personally, in young body and brain, for as long as possible. Call that selfish if you want -- I feel that my life would be diminished by their absence. Even so, I respect their decisions to value other things over their own health and longevity.
That one in a million human being, the one who is interested in seeing the future that lies beyond a normal lifespan and is willing to change in order to do so -- that's the person for whom we do these media appearances. We hope that person will learn enough information to spark a quest for more, and that he or she will do his or her own research to determine if CR, and what level of CR, is worth investing effort. That person should have the information about the only intervention known to extend lifespan in mammals. And armed with that information, that person can make his or her own decisions about whether or not CR is worth pursuing.
I've been surprised at the amount of hate that has been focused at us as a result of these media appearances. It's quite amazing that people find our way of life, which is really not so unusual at all, so threatening that they will waste their time writing us nasty letters. They seem to be simultaneously angry that CR, in their opinion, would cause people to be miserable, while being equally angry that we're actually not miserable. They accuse us of encouraging people to starve themselves to death, while they also complain that the very things that keep us healthy, like using nutritional software to monitor our nutrition and measuring our food (you don't know how much calcium is in your kale if you don't know how much kale you're eating!) are somehow pathological. Here is a case in point:
Interesting that you only seem to allow comments from those who agree with you. There is nothing wrong with moderate and responsible self-control, but there is something wrong when the control becomes an obsession, especially from a former anorexic. Yes, you tell us that the CR goal is not to disappear, and you claim you're measuring everything correctly to the tenth of an ounce (how's that for obsession?). However, it's still the same sort of self-control that indicates there's something pathological going on. It's not a matter of "we don't ask those who eat cheeseburgers what good they're doing in the world", it's that you and your cohorts flirt with the media and glorify a possibly-dangerous fad that can result in people accidentally starving themselves to death, yet are unable to come up with a real justification for it, apart from "I've decided (from basically conjecture, with no scientific evidence on humans) that this might possibly make me live a few extra years so I can fuck my boyfriend more". Uh, sure. Feel free to do what you want by centering your life around weighing arugula and fucking, but don't forget, there are plenty of ways you can die that diet has nothing to do with.
Now here's what I don't get. There's quite a bit of evidence that CR extends life in mammals, but don't take my word for it, do the research yourself. Should we surpress that information because someone, somewhere, might go against every recommendation we make about taking care to monitor nutrition, not lose weight too fast, get regular blood tests and physicals (and enter the results in our ongoing medical study so as to gather more data for future generations) and BEING HEALTHY (remember that we told Julian to up his calories, and that I even fed him an extra strawberry parfait on the spot!) and might use us as an excuse to starve themselves to death? I wonder if this same person thinks that the information that red wine has health benefits should be surpressed because someone, somewhere might drink too much and become an alcoholic or drive off a bridge. Shouldn't people be able to get the information and make their own choices?
Here is something on which we have tons of scientific evidence: the standard American diet is killing people. Obesity is among the main risk factors for heart disease and diabetes, and 65% of the American population is overweight. Half of those are clinically obese The chances of becoming overweight or obese in our nation are considerably higher than the chances of becoming anorexic (you might note that even among adolescent girls, the portion of the population most likely to suffer from eating disorders, the incidence of anorexia nervosa is between 0.5% and 1%, and all eating disorders put together affect 1-4% of young women. And that's just young women -- among the general population, the odds go even lower.) 65% of Americans are overweight or obese! That means that the overweight outnumber the non-overweight 2 to 1! Yet do we attack The Food Network, donut shops, or magazine columnists who glorify goose fat? Sure, in "moderation," all those foods that are dangerous in large doses can be fine for an occasional treat. But Americans aren't eating these foods in moderation -- they're eating them in amounts that we are absolutely sure are detrimental to both short term and long term health. Yet I don't write in demanding that Rebecca Traister be eaten by wolves for glorifying unhealthy eating. What if someone, upon reading her descriptions of foods very high in saturated fats, goes on a binge and has a heart attack a few hours later? After all, studies suggest that if you already have significant pre-existing atherosclerosis, eating even a single high-saturated-fat, calorie-laden meal sets up conditions that greatly increase your risk of a attack in the next few hours. Should we blame Rebecca? Of course not! People should be able to read her column and make their own decisions.
And they should be able to read an article about CR, or a blog, and make their own decisions. Take responsiblity for their own choices.
And as for flirting with the media: that wasn't flirting. I was being nice.
Here is the truth at the heart of the matter: people who put energy into eating a lower calorie, higher nutrient density diet are not the enemy. Others may have some pretty emotional reactions to descriptions (whether accurate or not) or our diet and lifestyle. Their feelings are their own - we have very little power over them. It won't make Rebecca happier if I eat a cheeseburger, and it won't extend my life if she trades in goose fat for kale. We're all trying to live our lives to the best of our ability in ways that make us happy. I have found that cutting down others, especially publicly, is a lot like eating high calorie, high sugar crap: it may feel good for a minute, but pretty soon, it feels awful. So I try, as much as I can, to take the high road with critics, even when I find them irrational or just plain scary. We provide information, and we take some heat in the process. For those who find the information useful, I'm glad to have been there for you. For others, why not read something else?
Tuesday night I got the kind of phone call that we all dread: a co-worker of my mother's left me a message that my mom had gotten suddenly very sick at work. It wasn't clear to me from the message whether they had taken her to the hospital or not, but it was obvious that I needed to come quick. I was relieved when I got her on the phone that she was home and okay, but she needed someone to stay with her so I dropped the meeting I had scheduled for 7:30 pm into a co-worker's lap (thank you Susan!) and hit the PA Turnpike heading as fast as I safely could towards my mom's house, an hour and a half away.
While I was driving, I thought a lot about how precious the lives of those we love are to us, and how, selfishly or not, we would do most anything to save them. I thought about my mom's own 70 pound journey from obesity to healthy weight, and how that has dramatically decreased her odds of dying of a heart attack or stroke. I thought about my partner's mother's 40 pound weight loss, also done by focusing on healthy foods and cutting empty calories, and how much joy that has brought all of us. And I thought about my readers, especially the ones who write in and say that the support they get from the blog helps them stand their ground when it comes to taking care of themselves. I thought about how Julian's article brought so many new readers to the blog who are having fun improving their own health, and how grateful I am to have Julian himself in our lives -- even if his editor (Adam) hates my cooking and his book is sold out in every bookstore that I go into (yes, I could order it on Amazon, but I am irrationally unwilling to commit to the three day wait that would involve, and the bookstore that had it on hold for me before Thanksgiving sold it! Grrrr!) And even about Rebecca, looking forward to feasting with her family over the holidays. We're all on the same team here: we may make different choices, but in the end, we want as much health and happiness for ourselves and our families as we can reasonably secure. Our definitions of health and happiness vary, but we're all after the same thing. The enemy is death and disease -- let's work together to fight them.
As I was having all these no doubt stress-induced warm and fuzzy feelings, racing down the turnpike to take care of my mom, I flipped through the radio stations and briefly landed on an old song that was overplayed to the point of being painful to listen to in the eighties, but that I hadn't heard in about twenty years. Extra points to the reader who can identify the quote (no fair googling!):
You can count on it brother
'Cause we're all just finding our way
Travelling through time
People got to keep pushing on
No matter how many dreams slip away
Posted by april at December 2, 2006 8:33 PM
Comments
Bravo!
You are an inspiration to us all. I totally agree, people should be able to make their own decisions and take personal responsibility for the state of their lives and their health rather than trying to project their own dissatisfaction on to others.
Keep on doing CR, April! And keep on posting! Some of us, at least, want to see that far-away future right along with you, and be healthy and young in mind and body when we get there :)
Posted by: gregg m. at December 2, 2006 4:29 PM
I can almost sing the melody of the song in my head, yet I can't place it, it's on the tip of my tongue. Please tell me, or I won't be able to sleep.
What a wonderful entry Aprilitamu! No wonder you're a union organizer. You certainly have a gift of making yourself understood in a passionate way that encourages other people to take it up too.
Almost like a very strong preacher, only definitely funnier and much more liberating.
Posted by: istanbulwitchy at December 2, 2006 4:45 PM
A good reality check from the olden days is at :
http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/foodration.html
I remember eating whale meat and suchlike in those WW2 days in the UK. The article is long - 9 pages - but brought back many wonderful memories.
Peg D
PS People were healthier during rationing in the UK.
Posted by: Peg Diamond at December 2, 2006 4:49 PM
A good reality check from the olden days is at :
http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/foodration.html
I remember eating whale meat and suchlike in those WW2 days in the UK. The article is long - 9 pages - but brought back many wonderful memories.
Peg D
PS People were healthier during rationing in the UK.
Posted by: Peg Diamond at December 2, 2006 5:06 PM
I really love the way you write!! You made a lot of good points. One thing that stuck me as I was reading; PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. A phrase that seems to be lacking in America. Thanks so much for keeping the blog going and for being such a positive figure in the CR community!
Posted by: Carolyn at December 2, 2006 5:07 PM
Bravo indeed! My only gripe is with the media, which:
A. Almost always has some quote about how this is way too hard for the average person to do. Let each person make that decision. "Hard", IMO, is actually a statement about the lack of infrastructure to support measuring food and getting its values. There was a time when it was WAY to hard, in fact impossible, to use a credit card. Then there was a time when if was inconvenient because so few outlets had credit card readers. Then it became easy. We are at the inconvenient stage with CR. There is software, there is data, there are websites. But even without having stuff like simple scanning devices built into cell phones and codes on every menu, it is only difficult, not nearly impossible, to track nutrition
B. The media focus on people like yourself who are at the "extreme" in the sense of doing CR really, really well, and hence follow some practices that seem odd to the average person. This might discourage people who could profit from adopting CR at a less rigorous level. This is not your problem. I think what you do is great.
Keep up the good work!
Bob
Posted by: Bob at December 2, 2006 5:28 PM
In general, you and Michael present a pretty attractive picture of CR. But there are a few things that will always "bother" people. The exactness level that you strive for seems unnecessary to me - and intimidating to normal people. It's not really going to matter if you eat 1047 calories one day and 1053 the next. In fact, lettuce leaves will not all have the same calorie levels by weight, depending on how much sun and water they got - so even if you think you are eating 1047 - it might be 1053. So, the precision seems like a charming and quirky personal thing - that has little to do with success at CR. You can be "honest" and lick your plates and measure each thing for interviews. But, really, you can do good CR without licking your plate or measuring every little thing - and you shouldn't leave the impression that this is required behavior.
I feel some responsibility when I am interviewing to present a "doable" picture of CR, since I think it would be good for everyone to eat better and eat less.
Posted by: Little MR at December 2, 2006 8:20 PM
I am so sorry to hear about your mother, what a good daughter you are, to wrap her like a mummy and make her think of "warm thoughts"
yum, vodka and cranberry juice, what a nice excuse for me to indulge!
and I don't understand people's hostility towards cron,
or people's hostility towards healthy eating habits, or just being thin in general.
but I have really notice a "hostile trend" these days, towards being thin, and towards people who make healthy and wise eating choices.
Now, here is a generalization of my own: Why are fat people who gorge at fast-food chains and eat gak so hostile? I would never attack them for their choices, so why do they attack us?
Posted by: sheila at December 2, 2006 9:05 PM
You have "balls of steel" to keep on blogging when you are getting so much ignorant flack from people with no clue what they're talking about.
Don't let the bastards grind you down!
Fantastic writing. Well done !
Posted by: Lindsay at December 2, 2006 11:58 PM
Hi Mary!
At your level of CR, you're right, MR's level of precision is unnecessary. But you're not trying to take your calories as low (proportionally) as he is, so being sure that you're not overestimating or underestimating is less important to you. Also, you may have a better sense of spatial relationships than we do. I honestly can not look at a plate of anything and know how much it is. I am also terrible at parallell parking! So I used tools -- or I drive around the block looking for a larger parking space. It's not some sort of personality quirk, it's an adaptation to a much more intense CR practice than yours (or than mine used to be, though I have gotten more serious in the last year.) Your goals are different from ours, so our methods are different. Makes perfect sense to me.
Before I started measuring precisely, I frequently overestimated my calories, leading to excess hunger and probably to missing essential nutrients. I still eat out, and there's no way to know what's in restaurant food, but I find that as long as my quotidian diet is carefully optimized, I do pretty well. I definitely feel better now that I'm not going wildly under or over my average on a daily basis.
There is so much evidence in the literature of nutrition that people who don't weigh and measure their food consistently guess very, very wrong. This doesn't much matter if the goal is just to lose weight or do a moderate version of CR. But if you're taking calories lower, it makes a lot of sense to be more careful. Better to be safe -- that's just responsible. Especially if you can't tell six ounces from four, or parallell park a Geo Prizm.
a
Posted by: April at December 3, 2006 6:22 AM
Great post April. I was pretty upset about what I perceived to be some personal attacks on the list against you and MJR but didn't post cuz, well you can't change people, not that way and not online.
I thought your and MJR's part in the article was great and needed no defense so I was as stunned as you folks must have been when the attacks came flying. Don't ad-libbers lick the plate when the food is good? And the thing about sex, as Brian said, the word is harsh but in the phrase and context you used, I really can't think of any better way to have put it.
And lastly, what is up with this moaning everyone does about weighing food? You say you used to overestimate calories but I think most folks underestimate - the only way one can know is to weigh. Are washing and chopping a hassle? A bit but we've integrated them into part of what we consider normal. With a little scale on the kitchen table, weighing has become normal for me (sometimes I guess the weight beforehand and I am *always* wrong and usually low).
And for me, who doesn't cook very well but instead slavishly follows the recipes of my culinary betters (like you :), having a recipe with weights makes it much easier to do. So the weighing makes things *easier* for me. I also think that it needs to be emphasized that a lot of the formulation of meals can be done once or twice (with the software), perfected in terms of nutrients, calories, etc., and then just repeated. For my main 4 meals, I have the ingredients and weights on 3x5 cards. So I can make a meal fast without tweaking software. To track my meals, I can go to the software and plug in one of several *already* defined salad_mon or steamedveg_mon, _tues, etc. meals or recipes (the electronic version of my 3x5's), making any updates due to variations that were due to lack of an ingredient. So the weighing is seldom a problem and there are lots of ways to organize things so the process is easy. As Bob pointed out above, part of the problem is that we don't have a healthy infrastructure. Wouldn't it be great if vending machines had healthy foods instead of candy, and the calories and weights were listed.
Anyhow thanks for posting the link to your blog to the list - it's a very good post.
adam
Posted by: Adam at December 3, 2006 10:02 PM
Hi April - I have a question for you/MR - I don't know where else to go with it! I'm trying to pay more attention to getting enough nutrients, and like you used to be, I'm used to cooking without fat - so I just add some oil at the end. The question is, what is the minimum amount of gat I need to absorb the fat-soluable vitamins? I generally eat a couple cups of veggies at once. Is a tsp of oil enough? Half a tsp? A tablespoon? I just have no idea. Thanks for any help you can give me!
Posted by: Emily at December 4, 2006 3:51 AM
I just keep coming back to this same issue over and over... WHAT'S SO WEIRD ABOUT WEIGHING FOOD? I can not understand why people think that is strange. I walk past a cooking school every day on my way to work and they have kitchen scales. How are you supposed to reliably produce wonderful meals if you're eyeballing major ingredients? Sure weighing food helps me keep track of how much I eat, but it also has improved my cooking.
Posted by: thatgirljj at December 4, 2006 9:56 AM
Well, one could certainly ask why we bother with medicines that extend life, couldn't we? I mean, why should we allow diabetics to inject insulin? What are they going to do for the world with their extended lives? This is just an example of how a CRONer could turn the arguments around to look at the science of medicine -- medicine that trades one problem for another. Statins lowers cholesterol with negative side effects to the muscules (and the heart is a muscle!) and the liver!
I think a valid question to pose re: CRON would be a question about the future of the planet if there was a fullscale CRON movement amongst the youth of our nation. How would this effect jobs, social security, healthcare, etc.? Again, I state that I am not CRON; I am not being negative, but in light of the idiotic questions and comments to which you have been subjected, I would like to see a few that actually encourage real thought about the future of the economy, etc. if a large percentage of future generations were CRON.
Posted by: Gina at December 4, 2006 10:14 AM
April - Best wishes to you and your mom. ali
Posted by: Ali at December 4, 2006 8:02 PM
I don't understand why the articles all make a big deal about measuring food. You have to measure if you want to follow most recipes, especially when baking, so most people have at least minimal equipment to measure by volume if not always by weight (unless outside the US where recipe amounts are more usually given in weight). As to the day-to-day, well, I follow the packages. Bought a 70g bag of arugula this morning, ate half. Simple enough for a child to figure out. Thank you for standing up for yourself, April!
Posted by: Brooke at December 5, 2006 4:07 AM
April,
Thanks for posting your thoughts on my comments. You have an interesting perspective and I appreciate your taking the time to explain it. You explained that your target audience is the one and a million person who might be interested in practicing CR in its most extreme form. If the article was read by 3 million readers, you hoped to reach three of them. I would suggest that maybe one in a thousand people, might be interested in practicing some form of CR so maybe 3,000 people fitting this category would read your article. I think if moderate CR was represented in the article, more of these 3,000 people potentially interested in CR would feel encouraged to try it. And, who knows, once they mastered moderate CR they might then try extreme CR.
--Jen
Posted by: Jen at December 5, 2006 8:47 AM
All:
Thou hast no right but to do thy Will.
Jen says,
I think everyone appreciates excellent food. Why not have a chef prepare the meal or consult with a chef about how to prepare meals in a CRON way that are highly appetizing? I think CR would really benefit from the expertise of chefs helping us CRONers develop some really wonderful recipes.
I know that she meant no disrespect, but I can tell you from both experience and Julian's actual article that to hire a chef for these events would put us well beyond the point of diminishing returns. April is an amazing cook -- creative, nutrition-conscious, fast-fast-fast,but also absolutely delectable (and the food is good, too >:-) ). She has fuzed her trained-to-the-point-of-instinctive grasp of what's good with the discipline of scales and nutrition software, and the product is CR food that will keep you lovin' every minute of it while simultaneously giving you more minutes in which to love it.
But don't take my word for it: read Julian's article on CR:
April has set the salad course: ... arugula ... dressed with lemon juice and cushioning a couple of scallops sautéed in garlic, white wine, and cilantro. We begin to eat, and I experience a minor culinary epiphany: Mildly sickened by the taste of scallops for most of my adulthood and afflicted, for as long as I can remember, by an aversion to cilantro that borders on the emetic, I find myself now tucking into April Smith’s cilantro-infused scallops-and-arugula salad as if it were the best salad I have ever tasted. And I’ll be goddamned if it isn’t...
Paul McGlothin sits to my right before an empty place setting [because he's fasting], nursing his water and praising the food on the table almost as if it were on its way to his own mouth instead of everybody else’s. “Looks great! Smells great!”...
April brings the main course: a medley of asparagus tips, shiitake mushrooms, and ... Quorn ...
“Delicious,” says Don, digging in.
“Delicious,” I agree, lifting a forkful to my mouth.
“Not bad,” concedes Adam, surprising us all...
For dessert, we get a CR-perfect parfait: organic strawberries, nonfat ricotta, flaxseed oil, and hazelnuts. It’s very good, and it’s gone too fast, and as long as we’re rewriting the book on table manners here, I can’t see the harm in scooping out the last bits of ricotta with my fingers.
The clincher, at the end, is when Adam privately declares that “that was probably the blandest-tasting meal I’ve had since, like, ever.” Julian, as part of his rationalization for dropping CR, decides that he has it right, and that the rest of us are just in such CR-induced flavor enhancement that we are transmuting the low-Calorie equivalent of plain instant mashed potatoes into the Food of the Gods: "by any objective standard, the food is lousy, but believe me: Starve yourself long enough and even a tofu-coffee-macadamia-nut-and-flaxseed smoothie becomes ambrosia." Leaving aside the obvious question of whether one couldn't well make such a smoothie into something quite tasty, or of what exactly would be wrong with being under this alleged delusion if it were true, there's a much more profound question: how exactly could the Gate of the Sun make a "bland" product from such powerful tastes as arugula, lemon juice, and scallops sautéed in garlic, white wine, and cilantro?
No, the obvious conclusion -- as many AL eaters at April's table can confirm, and as has been the lived experience of my Mom, who does not suffer bland food for any cause whatsoever and whose shedding of 40 lbs was initiated and sustained by putting April's recipes on her table -- is that April's food is heavenly, and that objective reporters will agree and report the same. Adam, it appears, is a culinary Philistine, and no involvement of a chef not accustomed to building menus around saturated fat, sugar, pasta, and salt is going to create something that would satisfy his degraded palate.
Love is the law, love under will.
-MR
Posted by: MR at December 5, 2006 6:31 PM
I've been reading your blog since I stumbled across the New York magazine article. Though I'm not really interested in serious CR, I am committed to keeping myself from becoming one of the 2/3 of Americans who are overweight and at higher risk for disease and premature death. Making sure I keep that commitment seems to become harder each year, and I have to thank you for the tools I've picked up from your site. Who knew a veggie and egg whites breakfast could keep you satisfied for so long on so few calories?!?
What I really want to say is that I think you're spending far too many of those extra hours of life that CR is giving you worrying about and/or responding to critics and haters. Anyone who dares to do something bold, something groundbreaking, something daring, inevitably gets attacked by the multitudes of those who are not doing anything daring and are threatened by your initiative. You remind them that they could be doing more with their lives, in whatever is important to them, and it makes them defensive.
As I said, I started reading your blog to get tips to keep my weight down. I keep reading it because you are a quality person who I identify with on many levels. You seem to be a caretaker type, as I am. We both work in progressive politics (I currently work for a national gay and lesbian organization, but have worked for choice and labor orgs in the past) and are dedicated to making the world better. And we're both in committed relationships. What you are doing, both with CR and with your union organizing, needs NO justification to those who attack you. Spending time defending yourself is time you don't get to enjoy the things that are really important to you. For yourself, I really suggest you stop doing it.
Just my two cents. I'll leave you with two quotes. One from a man I used to work for...another person who did something bold and was widely criticized for it. Another from a man who bodly dared to do something different, just as you do. I hope you find them as fortifiying in the face of attacks as I have:
"Above all, remember this - that anyone can laugh at an idea. That anyone can criticize (your efforts). That anyone can call you stupid. And when they do, who is the more fortunate being? The one laughing, or the one learning? We will live with the courage to be laughed at. History remembers courage. There are no monuments to critics." - Dan Pallotta
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Posted by: Sam at December 6, 2006 10:59 PM