Not too many, I think, if I believe what people around me
say. On a regular basis I hear all kinds of stuff that leads me to the
conclusion that chocolate in any form cannot be resisted. Nor can pastries,
cookies, ice cream, cake, pie, potatoes, corn chips, pizza, and grilled cheese.
Or wine. (Don’t get me started on wine.) And this, by the way, is not the
complete list. It seems that each of us has a litany of foods that we are
powerless against. If they are in the house, we must eat them. Period.
Funny, but we don’t say the same thing about other foods. No
one appears to have any difficulty whatsoever resisting broccoli, Brussels
sprouts, cauliflower, spinach or peas. In fact, these items can only be eaten if they are drenched in a
magic elixir such as butter, bacon fat or melted cheddar cheese. Sometimes I
think the resistibility factor of any specific food is inversely proportional to
how healthy it is – that which kills us must be eaten, that which heals us must
be shunned. It’s the law.
Well, I don’t buy that we are as powerless as we claim to
be. Most people I know are pretty stubborn about what they do and don’t want,
so I think the average Joe (or Joanne!) is capable of resisting anything, for
no other reason than because they can. Consider this: if I were to tell you
that you must eat an entire apple
pie – every day – and you had no say in the matter, would you submit to my demand?
My guess is that the majority of people would refuse to comply. Not because they
don’t like apple pie, but because you’re not the boss of them!
Gadzooks! Why didn’t I think of this before? For decades, nutritional
experts have been advising us that we shouldn’t eat the foods that are bad for
us. Which of course just makes us more determined to eat them. But, if we
harness the power of reverse psychology… Do you see? We tell everyone that they
must eat ice cream at every meal. And
not a puny scoop, but something on the order of Ben & Jerry’s Vermonster, a
20-scoop Sundae Goliath that has achieved near-mythic status. What you say, you’re
craving a salad? Verboten!
Ah, wishful thinking.
Yet the truth is that you are the decider. Only you decide whether you or the Kit Kat bar is
in control. If you think you have no choice in the matter, it is because you have
become accustomed to surrendering your power, not because a candy bar is
miraculously walking across the room and jumping into your mouth. With a simple
locking of the lips, the outcome could easily go the other way. This might
sound like heresy in the Land of the Baconator, but trust me, it can be done.
Here’s another quote that I like, from American food theorist
Ann Wigmore: “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form
of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”
Medicine or poison? Poison or medicine? Hey, you’re the
decider.
Sandy, one of the things I love about what you do here is that your posts provide a kind of empowering education in the on-going food war we all fight with our baser selves. If someone is allergic to, say, strawberries and would get very sick from eating them, they'd probably be very good at not eating strawberries even if they liked their taste and mouth-feel. We need to better understand certain foods are that kind of toxin to us, and that a long-term poison is still a poison. It's about education and information, not about new food laws. From Adam and Eve to prohibition, it's a basic human principle: tell them they can't have it, and they'll want it.
ReplyDeleteBen
Adam and Eve only had to resist an apple! Can you imagine what would have happened if there had been a Red Robin in Paradise?
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