That I don’t really want to hear about food or nutrition, pretty much ever, and certainly not as a way to welcome in 2018. Courtesy of the New York Times’ T Magazine this week:
To usher in the new year, we asked creative people to share the homemade recipes they count on to detox, cleanse — and refresh.
Please. When you start describing breakfast in terms better suited to a moist towelette, and when the breakfast product itself comes out looking…well, let’s not even go there. I mean, check out the before and after food photos and tell me I’m wrong.
The fashion-slash-yoga world tends to be convinced that cleanses and detox schemes are legitimate. Physiologists, internists and RDs with board certifications tend to disagree.
Juicing, while obviously ultra-fashionable (still? boggles the mind), actually removes all the fiber, concentrates the sugars, and makes you wonder, given the thinness and the (frankly hideous) color of the stuff in the goblet in the right-hand “after” photo, whether it wouldn’t have been more genuinely nutritious, tastier, satisfying and visually appealing at the same time just to make some chunky vegetable soup–with garlic and herbs, not this sweet swill–and just wash and eat the apple with the peel. Because of course it would.
Another article in the series shows the breakfast for a conceptual artist who includes “human bacteria” and Teva sandals in her exhibitions (why? and I mean, are you really tempted to follow her food conceits after reading that?)–a bowl with about 10 hazelnuts and a dusting of chia seeds, not exactly a meal, and on the side a shotglass of something that is admittedly a much better green than the first interviewee’s due to dark leafy greens rather than celery and carrots, but would still be better left unjuiced, lightly cooked in stirfry or soup form, and without any sweet stuff in it. And preferably with a hit of garlic.
No major calories in this kind of breakfast, and perhaps we should be grateful that they don’t throw in any bacon or its variants with the veg, but really. Those breakfasts look pretty bleak and cold and less balanced than they ought to be, whether green or not-such-a-good-green.
Why the “detox” label? Why the crash-style diet drinkies? Why an article series–not even just one ill-judged gush piece–on food that doesn’t really look or taste all that good or deliver that much actual nutrition as given in the recipes, and frankly isn’t necessary if you actually eat things like vegetable soup or broccoli and other greens as part of your regular meals? Is the NYT readership really that into these things? Are they in it for the post-holiday self-castigation value?
None of the women interviewed (and of course they are all women, at least so far) are particularly unfit or overweight or heavily broken out or anything, and none of them look ill or hung over. Raises the question: just how badly did these people really eat during the holidays?
You’d think from the tone of the articles that these artists had all been rolling around in crappy green and red sugar cookies of increasing staleness and chugging quarts of full-on eggnog all December just for something to do. It’s the only way the articles even begin to justify themselves.
Filed under: Food Magazines, Food Politics, nutrition, Oddities, unappetizing | Tagged: Food Politics, healthy diet, nutrition |
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