发帖
雷达卡
How to diet: don’t try too hard （701 words）
By Bee Wilson
-----------------------------------------------------
In this wintry season of resolutions, it is not enough any more for a plate of food to be good. For many in the grip of this or that diet philosophy, every meal must aspire to be immaculately balanced: protein-boosted and containing a full rainbow of vegetables. But perfect is the enemy of the good, as the philosopher Voltaire said. A cold, unseasoned “wellness bowl” of quinoa, sliced tofu, avocado and sprouted mung beans may be irreproachably balanced. But it isn’t half as enjoyable to eat as the kind of hearty dinner that considers flavour first and nutrition after, whether that’s a plate of eggs Florentine with toast or a dish of smoky-rich black dhal with fluffy white rice.
If a balanced diet is so healthy, why does the pursuit of it drive so many of us nuts? As an overweight and self-loathing teenager, I was a sucker for the perfect diet. But my projects for flawless eating would start with carrots and hope before ending, a few days later, in pastries and despair. In the name of “balance” (which is often a synonym for thinness), otherwise sensible people do crazy things, like force down a vat of green juiced slime in order to tick off three of their five-a-day in one go. There are even those now who swear that not-eating might be a more balanced form of nutrition than eating. Huel is a strange milkshake-like meal replacement made from oats, pea protein and a bunch of other stuff (the American equivalent is Soylent), which advertises itself as “nutritionally complete food”. The implication is that proper food — the tasty stuff that we spear with a fork — is woefully incomplete.
The idea of eating for the sake of balance could always look a little unhinged. As the food writer MFK Fisher complained in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, there was a tendency in mid-20th century America for “meal-balancing”. This meant combining “a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods” in a single meal, purely for the sake of covering your nutritional bases. Fisher found it “stupid” that so many Americans felt they needed to start the day with a monotonous gamut of juice, coffee, hot or cold cereal, “eggs and cured pork in any of about four ways”, lest they might be lacking in anything.
Now, if anything, our idea of balanced eating is even more counterproductive. It’s become less about how many nutritious foods you can cram on a plate and more about how many things you can cut out. Many people — influenced by clean-eating gurus — have become convinced that there is such a thing as an absolutely good or absolutely bad food. Entire food groups — from carbohydrates to dairy — are expunged from the diet in the name of balance and glow, as if the tiniest nibble of bagel might set you off kilter. This is a dangerous kind of balance to pursue.
Such paranoid reactions are to be expected, however, in a food supply which has itself become colossally unbalanced, mostly because it is drowning in sweetness. You try to buy a “healthy” snack only to discover that your “protein bar” is basically a brownie with pretensions. Given we live in a world in which sugar is present in 80 per cent of all supermarket foods and newsagents push you to buy a 200g slab of chocolate when all you wanted was a magazine, it’s time to take balance back in our own hands.
***
We must each find our own equilibrium when it comes to food. MFK Fisher wisely said that we should aim to “balance the day, not each meal in the day”. A balanced diet might mean spinach and chickpea soup for lunch but spaghetti and clams with a delicious salad for dinner. Real balance means navigating the bewildering food environment we live in and still finding a way to eat with gusto and joy. It means staying on an even keel — not starving, not bingeing — and ignoring any voices that promise you a perfect diet. It means worrying less about the balance of proteins to carbs in your body and more about the balance of oil to vinegar in your vinaigrette.
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
京公网安备 11010802022788号
