A trying week

It's been a trying week. Not personally. (Personally? It's great. Baystate training is chugging along - I love summer training and fall racing. Training logs are always available over at Salty Running.) I mean, if you are in America and you are a woman or a person of colour, I am very very sorry and I feel your emotional exhaustion and disgruntlement and terror and distrust of the environment you live in, as though what you thought was stable (we've advanced rational thinking about gender since the 1950s, the civil rights movement won in the 1960s) was shifting like quicksand beneath your feet.

Anyway, it's Sunday night and time to reset, and here I am drinking coffee and eating ginger molasses cookies from Flour bakery and peaches and cucumbers and that Trader Joe's cheddar cheese with little dark flecks that are supposedly fragments of truffle and thinking about eating and why the h-e-double-hockey-sticks it has to be so complicated.

Go read this fantastic Guardian piece
'How we fell for clean eating'. If you haven't read it yet, go and read it! in its entirety!
The whole tragic piece has so much truth in it, from how people lost their trust in the food system:

"In prosperous countries, large numbers of people – whether they wanted to lose weight or not – became understandably scared of the modern food supply and what it was doing to our bodies: type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease, not to mention a host of other complaints that are influenced by diet, ranging from Alzheimer’s to gout. When mainstream diets start to sicken people, it is unsurprising that many of us should seek other ways of eating to keep ourselves safe from harm. Our collective anxiety around diet was exacerbated by a general impression that mainstream scientific advice on diet – inflated by newspaper headlines – could not be trusted. First these so-called experts tell us to avoid fat, then sugar, and all the while people get less and less healthy. What will these “experts” say next, and why should we believe them? "

To the losing battle of trying to separate the truth from the snake oil:

"The true calamity of clean eating is not that it is entirely false. It is that it contains “a kernel of truth”, as Giles Yeo puts it. “When you strip down all the pseudo babble, they are absolutely right to say that we should eat more vegetables, less refined sugar and less meat,” Yeo said, sipping a black coffee in his office at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, where he spends his days researching the causes of obesity. Yeo agrees with the clean eaters that our environment of cheap, plentiful, sugary, fatty food is a recipe for widespread obesity and ill health. The problem is it’s near impossible to pick out the sensible bits of “clean eating” and ignore the rest. #Eatclean made healthy eating seem like something “expensive, exclusive and difficult to achieve”, as Anthony Warner writes. Whether the term “clean” is used or not, there is a new puritanism about food that has taken root very widely. ..
The real question is how to fight this kind of diet absolutism without bouncing back to a mindless celebration of the modern food environment that is demonstrably making so many people sick..."

And to the systemic inequalities that enable the affluent to indulge in the luxury of 'clean eating' and other nonsense, while leaving everyone else with no other choice:

"Our food system is in desperate need of reform. There’s a danger that, in fighting the nonsense of clean eating, we end up looking like apologists for a commercial food supply that is failing in its basic task of nourishing us. Former orthorexia sufferer Edward L Yuen has argued – in his 2014 book, Beating Orthorexia – that the old advice of “everything in moderation” no longer works in a food environment where eating in the “middle ground” may still leave you with chronic diseases. When portions are supersized and Snickers bars are sold by the metre (something I saw in my local Tesco recently), eating “normally” is not necessarily a balanced option. The answer isn’t yet another perfect diet, but a shift in our idea of what constitutes normal food...
Among the affluent classes who already ate a healthier-than-average diet, the Instagram goddesses created a new model of dietary perfection to aim for. For the rest of the population, however, it simply placed the ideal of healthy food ever further out of reach. Behind the shiny covers of the clean-eating books, there is a harsh form of economic exclusion that says that someone who can’t afford wheatgrass or spirulina can never be truly “well”. "

I'd add one more caveat: even balanced, 'normal' healthy eating is a luxury. It's easier to be balanced about food, with no hang-ups, when society deems your body to be a desirable shape and size, *and* when you have full access to a wide variety of foods. And when you have the ability and time and freedom to move and exercise. Now 'eat food, not too much, mostly plants' begins to look a whole lot more complicated, doesn't it?

Ugh, so what's a sensible individual to do? Is there no way to push back against the tide of fad diets (which by the way, have probably existed as long as there is food, and have always been a luxury for the affluent) and absurd eating 'rules' and a broken food system? Is there no way to fix it?