I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.
However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)
I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:
Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”
But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.
According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.
What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.
As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”
I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.
Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:
I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.
By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)
And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.
In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?
I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.
There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.
Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”
Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”
It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?
Have a great weekend, all.
alex said on May 29, 2025 at 3:54 pm
Anyone who would willingly marry Stephen Miller is probably used to being passed by, so getting passed around might just put a little spring into her step.
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Julie Robinson said on May 29, 2025 at 3:57 pm
Ooh, is she going to take the kids and live in Elon’s special compound?
I’m so over the MAHA people. Because of food restrictions, we make almost all our own meals, and they’re pretty healthy. But today I’ve spent every minute up until now navigating health appointments/financial arrangements/another HVAC repair for three eldsters, and I’ll be damned if anyone gets in the way of my dish of ice cream tonight. Full fat.
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jcburns said on May 29, 2025 at 4:44 pm
Yeegads, now I have Nancy and Alan’s breakfast conversation—a detailed analysis of Republicans’ bed habits and choices—in my brain. We’re living in painful times.
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Deborah said on May 29, 2025 at 5:12 pm
A thruple including Steven Miller is disgusting to think about.
Getting healthier via diet isn’t wrong obviously, it’s something to keep in mind, just not get obsessed with. I can’t imagine keeping a food intake diary but I suppose if you’re inspired to do it, it can’t hurt. I have never been one to have a hard time going four or more hours without eating something, I go through phases but sometimes I have to remind myself to eat. We usually eat 2 meals a day, breakfast and dinner, I only eat lunch if I’m invited out.
But I will say lately I’ve been unable to resist those buckets of caramels they have at some checkout counters, I can’t not purchase 2 or 3 pieces whenever I see them at Walgreens or where ever, and I start eating them before I get out of the store.
The farmers market in Santa Fe offers double for people with SNAP. They can buy produce etc that costs half as much the regular price, which I think is a really good deal. The farmers market here is fantastic, beats other ones I’ve been to by a mile.
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Sherri said on May 29, 2025 at 6:37 pm
Looks like that big MAHA report may have been generated with ChatGPT or the like, complete with fake citations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/well/maha-report-citations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K08.3AVh.kAxjOLpGrB2e&smid=url-share
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David C said on May 29, 2025 at 6:42 pm
Isn’t Miller part Jewish? I understand the Mrs. is just as much a piece of work as he is, so finding someone “whiter” would probably add up.
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Sherri said on May 29, 2025 at 7:02 pm
Imagine all the horrors that would have ensued had a member of a Democratic cabinet said “We want America to be more like New York than Florida.” You know, prosperous, lower crime, more people insured, healthier, diverse. We would hear endlessly about how Democrats look down on “normal Americans” and hate the working class.
But Scott Bessent, the current Treasury Secretary, can go on Fox News and say “We want American to be more like Florida than New York,” and nobody bats an eye. Florida has a lower per capita income, higher murder rate, fewer people with health insurance, forced birth, unfriendly to LGBTQ+, unfriendly to education, and I’m hard pressed to think of any way in which I’d prefer Florida to New York.
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susan said on May 29, 2025 at 8:12 pm
David C — Stephen “PeeWee Goering” Miller’s own family has renounced him and his fascist ways. His uncle called him an immigration hypocrite, and doesn’t understand how he became so radicalized in that direction. And well, yeah, he certainly knows from his ancestry of Jewish “shtetl of subsistence farmers” in Belarus.
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ROGirl said on May 30, 2025 at 6:04 am
I don’t eat pork products any more because of the commercial industry practices, not out of religious beliefs. I probably shouldn’t eat chicken or turkey for the same reasons, but I haven’t eliminated meat completely.
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Jeff Gill said on May 30, 2025 at 7:52 am
Because of my peculiar research interests, I’ve spent a great deal of time reading the work of Dr. James H. Salisbury, who once lived here in my neck of the woods, and who developed the basis of what is now known as Salisbury steak. There’s both a touching side & a wackadoodle side to this story, just with his predecessor Rev. Sylvester Graham. Graham and his crackers and dietary prescriptions just before the Civil War, and Salisbury’s diet of “scraped beef patties” & hot water (in quantity) in the decades after it were all examples of the profitability of scrupulosity in the Nineteenth Century, and I do mean profitable.
All of which is to say none of this is new, and even the ascendancy of it isn’t unprecedented. It’s just a question of how long it will take for the reaction to set in, and where the pendulum will swing back to.
And while I’m less than a year out of the attendance game with the juvenile court, I have the perspective of pre-smartphone life for school age kids, and the whole journey to and through COVID, and I’ll still say the biggest change for youth mental & social development is the wreckage of their sleep schedules, and the general state of sleep deprivation most of them stagger through the day in. Sugar? Yeah, I guess it’s a problem; lack of soluble fiber? Okay, more wouldn’t hurt. Processed food? I’ll listen, up to a point. But the underlying issue in whatever symptom you’re talking about is getting no more than six hours of sleep more nights than not for most middle & high school kids. That’s my issue, based on wide experience over three decades, and I don’t hear MAHA talking about it hardly at all.
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Dexter Friend said on May 30, 2025 at 8:00 am
Deborah’s comment made me grin, as I recalled my nights as a young man panning hot caramel from giant hoppers into long pans and stacking the pans onto pallets and then into tempering ovens. This was at Kraft Foods in Kendallville, Indiana in 1968.
Nobody cared if we pinched off a plug of this delicious candy once in a while. It was so good I had no appetite for baloney or burgers for lunch break that I lost 30 pounds over the winter and was fit to quit the factory to venture out to play baseball full time. Another perk: we could fill our little white hats with chocolate covered almonds every night. That was my weight-loss diet. Breakfast, two eggs fried in a shot of Pam spray, one cuppa joe. Then a little caramel hunk in the afternoon at work. A few choco-almonds after work. 30 pounds fell off my frame quickly.
Now I eat a little better. Last night, burnt ends , butter-garlic seasoned rice, double serving of fresh steamed broccoli. And a diet root beer.
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nancy said on May 30, 2025 at 8:36 am
Jeff, that’s a good observation that honestly hadn’t occurred to me. Our smartphone rule for Kate was: Off and on the kitchen table by 10 p.m. People have told me horror stories about kids who secretly play video games well into the night, and for that reason alone I’m glad we had a girl and not a boy. I can’t imagine.
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Julie Robinson said on May 30, 2025 at 8:51 am
Yup. Pre-smart phone, we’d wake up to our son playing on the computer in the middle of the night. Passwords, removing the keyboard, even unplugging wifi router; he found ways around them all. Those games are like crack. I do not want to relive his high school years.
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SusanG said on May 30, 2025 at 9:43 am
When Musk burst onto the scene, my first thought was he’s the new Rudy Giuliani. Sure enough, he’s heading into a downward spiral of broke-ass. In a few years, he’ll be spotted buying hair dye at Walmart. Trump knows how to pick ‘em.
I have mixed feelings about Alice. Saw her speak at Indianapolis Museum of Art. She started out singing/songey, hippy/dippy, but about half way through the lecture, she stood at the podium with ram-rod posture and looked at her audience steely-eyed and said “I didn’t create a restaurant, I created an industry.” I’m hoping she, and Mark Bitman will use their influence and moral superiority to support vaccines and debunk RFK Jr.s belief in the miasma theory.
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Jeff Gill said on May 30, 2025 at 9:50 am
For years, with male students called in to talk to me about attendance issues, as they sat down I’d reach out, shake their hand, and as we did ask “Call of Duty or World or Warcraft?” Rarely did I get anything other than “uh, [one or the other].” Our conversations were constructive from there.
Since 2015 or so that stopped working, darn it. Too many options to stay online and chatting/killing with your friends from Singapore or Assam. It’s broadening, in a weird way. The kids would often admit they’d checked out the geography just to see where their friends were playing from (and what time zone they were in).
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Mark P said on May 30, 2025 at 10:28 am
All the dietary hooraw is one of our modern versions of snake oil. One of the physicians I occasionally run across and listen to because of his anti-RFK rants supported the Mediterranean diet to help prevent dementia. He gave an impressive percent reduction in risk. That sounds great, but when you actually look it up, there are studies that support the proposition, and studies that show no effect. So, who the hell knows. My guess is that there are confounding factors that haven’t been identified, or a mild effect. You have probably seen, or I might have mentioned, that the “blue zones” where people live extraordinarily long lives, almost certainly don’t exist. It turns out some of the very old people either lied about their ages, or don’t really even know how old they are. But some people tried to make an industry out of the stories.
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Heather said on May 30, 2025 at 11:19 am
As I recall, one common characteristic about those blue zones is that the people there enjoyed very strong social safety nets—not just affordable health care and the ability to not work a demanding job in their old age, but strong communities that provided comfort and camaraderie. That’s just as important to staying healthy as good food.
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MarkH said on May 30, 2025 at 11:51 am
David C. and Susan — It’s not Goering as the correct comparison. It’s Goebbels. The social sites (X, threads, Blue Sky) are ripe with memes of photo comparisons that prove Miller is a direct descendant, as if his character wouldn’t be a clue. I tried to post a link here yesterday of the sample pics, but something sent it into moderation oblivion. The physical resemblance is downright spooky/scary.
Also – what Jeff Gill said @10.
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susan said on May 30, 2025 at 12:44 pm
ooph, you’re right. It IS Goebbels! I get those names mixed up, but the images are stark.
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Jeff Borden said on May 30, 2025 at 1:35 pm
While I generally eat healthy –I try to eat fruit at every meal and enjoy unsalted nuts as a snack– I much prefer the philosophy of Anthony Bourbain, who declared, “Your body isn’t a temple. It’s an amusement park.” Damn, I wish he were still around. He’d have a field day with Brain Worm Bobby and his fellow goofball.
It’s hard to worry about shit like a food intake diary when our HHS is canceling bird flu vaccine development and attacking coronavirus vaccines for anyone under 65. These fuckers are going to get a lot of people killed.
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Sherri said on May 30, 2025 at 1:45 pm
Brain Worm Bobby and Dr Oz don’t want a bird flu vaccine, but they want to “save” a bunch of ostriches in Canada from being killed because they’re part of a flock exposed to bird flu. They think they should be kept safe and studied.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/world/canada/ostriches-avian-flu-rfk-jr-dr-oz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.8AJh.BjdJyCmeCso7&smid=url-share
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