By Alexandra Le Tellier, Los Angeles Times
Whenever my mom is planning a family dinner, she always does the rounds before grocery shopping to see what dietary restrictions we’re currently imposing on ourselves. “Eating disorders,” she calls them.
Many people today try to avoid gluten due to dietary restrictions or health concerns. Muffins baked with Betty Crocker Gluten Free All-Purpose Rice Flour yield a cake-like texture that one tester called gummy. (Bill Hogan/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images)
We’re an annoying bunch, I realize, but it’s not like she doesn’t fit right in. My brother recently made us a delicious dinner, but he had to tweak the menu because my mom wanted to stay away from gluten. That’s not because she’s allergic to wheat protein but because she’s allergic to gaining weight. If she puts on one pound, she breaks out into hives.
Which is to say, our diets are very L.A. Where else — besides Gwyneth Paltrow’s house — would you find people en masse who turn up their noses at store-bought apple juice but easily fork over $8+ for a fresh-pressed version at the hipster juice bar? Calories are calories and apple juice is apple juice. And yet, I’m an absolute sucker. My favorite L.A. attraction is the neon Kombucha sign I pass on my way home from work.
In Sunday’s Op-Ed pages, David Sax, author of “The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue,“ gave Angelenos a little ribbing, chronicling his last visit to L.A. by what his friends would and wouldn’t eat. These are my people, I thought as I read it. But then came Sax’s reality check:
“There are few cities that can compete with Los Angeles for the sheer energy its residents pour into health and diet trends. This town is the world leader in anxiety over what you should, and shouldn’t, be eating. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Having spent the last few years studying the evolution of various food trends, it’s become clear no food trend is more powerful, and potentially dangerous, than one that targets health and diet,” Sax wrote. “Health food trends continue to grow because they are a cash cow.”
He’s right, of course. Take, for example, the low-fat food craze that pedaled processed meals with less than 3 grams of fat but a ton of high-fructose corn syrup, thereby turning us into (fatter) sugar addicts. As Jacques Peretti explained in an illuminating 2012 article for the Guardian:
Read the full article by Alexandra Le Tellier from Los Angeles Times.
