Confessions of a gluten eater

The line between genuine medical dietary restraints and euphemistically-expressed dieting has never been blurrier: Refinery29 - straying from fashion once again - has a slideshow up profiling eight members of the fashion site's staff who have gone off gluten. Some did so for health reasons, others for quasi-health reasons, and only one admits to having gone gluten-free to lose weight, which, unsurprisingly, can work. But even she tosses in some genuine health concerns. Another begins with a very serious discussion of how a friend's cancer diagnosis inspired her to change her own eating habits, then adds (this is a fashion blog, after all) that her skin now "has a luminous glow to it."

There's no inherent reason why a healthier diet wouldn't make you look and feel better, but one senses that if it turned out the secret to longevity meant dull skin and gaining 15 pounds, there'd be fewer takers. One senses this precisely because the "health" concerns expressed in a fashion-writing context tend to be very pick-and-choose, like the actress referenced here earlier, who admits to drinking and smoking, yet freaks out if her skin products aren't "natural."

So on the one hand, if an office I don't work at decides to encourage disordered eating in the name of "health," this falls into the category of not my problem. Last I checked, my own diet of pasta, pasta, and a side order of extra pasta was actually encouraged for grad students, and because we can hardly afford to eat out/order in, but for whichever cultural reasons don't go in for fast food (though we do supplement the pasta with fresh produce and tiny bits of expensive cheese), we end up no less svelte (although decidedly less luminous) than the fashionistas. But on the other...

This morning's loot.

There are really two objections to this sort of thing. The first is that (as at least one Refinery29 commenter notes) conflating the glorified low-carb diets that already-thin women use to lose five pounds with celiac disease, which sounds like a pretty massive pain in the neck, is offensive to those suffering from that condition. The maybe-persuasive counterargument is that even those who won't die if they eat gluten feel healthier (and so much less bloated, aka thinner, although some insist - in vain, I'd say - that it's not about weight) if they cut out carbs, I mean gluten. I mean, who knows. Maybe? Is it terrible that when I read that gluten-free may reduce migraines, my thought was that I'll stick with migraines, Advil, and pasta? And maybe there is a subset of women (including those in the slideshow, or not) who really do only care about their health insofar as doing so is compatible with Fashion. At least they're eating vegetables and slathering on sunscreen, right?

The other objection, and the one for which there isn't any obvious counterargument, is that you hardly see men deciding to cut out some utterly normal ingredient, just to see what that does (i.e. whether restricting what you eat will make you lose weight, which it will.) Not never - remember Mark Bittman's lactose concerns? - but as a rule, this kind of worrying-about-it involves women who were never going to be fat to begin with wasting vast amounts of time and energy on being a size two rather than a size four, 120 pounds rather than 125. It's not that the ideal would be men and women alike worrying like this - ideal would be neither. But seeing as it's almost entirely women being held back by this behavior, this is a feminist concern.

More pickitarianism

Brian Moylan admits he hates cheese. Because it's Gawker, the commenters are a) uniformly anonymous, and b) expected to shun sincerity, so lots admit that they too hate cheese, or bananas, or chocolate, or (a popular one) puppies. Most have no qualms with confessing to pickiness, but it is still very much a confession. But it doesn't take long for the predictable response to pop up:

Really ? really? You're not able to take a piece of Cheddar off a Burger, or a sandwich or pick the cheese out of a salad ? Now consider for a second people with real problems, like Diabetics (Type1), which cannot eat sugar which is hidden in all kinds of foods, or people with peanut allergies, where it's enough to have been processed on the same assembly line as other products. And these people go to the hospital/die when they eat those things, and you're complaining about the taste of cheese ? There are always people with bigger issues than yourself, and the people who complain about sugar or peanuts, should think about people in Somalia where water is not a given.

 And!

This article would have been a great place to talk about the billions of Lactose intolerant people who don't get to choose if they like cheese or not. It'd bee cool to talk about people who have food allergies that might kill them like peanuts or shellfish. Or other digestion allergies like being allergic to gluten. I get indignent anger towards food products that sicken you (Im looking at you mayo) but at least you have the choice to eat them or not. It wont kill you or make you sick. If you were starving and all you had was cheese you probably wouldn't die. Just saying.

And, as was inevitable.

*****

Pickiness of a different stripe: Dan Savage's latest terrain (just when you think he's covered it all!) is the world of certain bisexuals (see also the latest podcast) who claim that they are only romantically attracted to members of the opposite sex, but only physically so to members of the same. Sounds like yet another newly-announced category that sounds odd at first but what can we do but accept whatever consenting adults come up with... or is it more like "ex-gay," without the proselytizing bit? Certainly with the podcast complaint, from a (ex-?) Mormon 21-year-old guy thinking of marrying his overweight female best friend, a woman only attracted to gay men, because, although he's exclusively attracted to men, he feels he gets along better with women... certainly this guy is gay and.... a special kind of closeted that he may well prefer to remain with his entire life, but closeted nonetheless.

*****

Not that I'd know it from here in the woods with the scientists, but it's apparently Fashion Week again in NY, offering up opportunities to think NYFW means something isn't safe for work (and maybe it isn't!), and, just as reliably, the usual hubbub over how thin and young the models are. I think I've already explained why it is I think models look like that in the first place, so instead of repeating myself, I'll direct you to the CW reality show, "Remodeled," of which I've seen two partial episodes.

"Remodeled" is about a guy - in no way modelesque himself - whose personality is identical to the bad mohel from the "bris" episode of "Seinfeld," the one who coulda been a butcher like his brothah, but who is in fact a do-you-know-who-I-am modeling agent. The premise, which makes about as much sense as "ANTM," is that there are evidently agencies across the U.S. that aspire to represent high-fashion models, and dude will help them reach this goal.

Anyway. One agency, in Orlando, had made the serious error of representing models who were old. How old? 20, 23, and in one horrifying, decrepit case, 28. I can't remember now if dude was throwing a fit because the models weren't 15 or because they weren't 16, but either way, it would seem that the issue is less the difference between allowing 15-year-olds versus 16-year-olds on the runways, and more that in this industry, 17 is over the hill. So dude helps them go out into the streets to scout "kids" (this is the word he repeats incessantly - "kids" - because some of the models are male), and what they're looking for, with the women, is the youngest, thinnest, tallest they can find. (One who was 5'8" and a half had some nerve, daring to think she could enter that profession.)

Even if, in some implausible best-case scenario, models had to be 18, had organized for their rights in some capacity, there still wouldn't be many 'hags' of 22 or 'cows' of 120 lbs. on the runways, and thus from the consumer (of stuff, of media images) end, things would be about the same.