Deirdre Macken
You know that adage, you are what you eat? These days, you are what you don’t eat. And you let everyone know exactly who you are by what you don’t eat.
Take permeate. Not that anyone does take it any more. For a while, it was only Tiger mums who could claim permeate-free milkshakes or even permeate-free consciousness. Now we’re all going to clear our systems of moggy milk. Phew.
Sucking up permeate is as bad as tucking into ketamine. You want to steer clear of that if you’re an additive-free person. Also melamine, tartrazine, calcium peroxide, monosodium glutamate and clenbuterol. You still eat clenbuterol? You and the hogs of China, maybe.
Many of us are gluten-free these days. We don’t eat wheat or other gluten grains, possibly because we have an ancient digestive tract. Or maybe we’re just over Tip Top. Gluten-free people visit health food stores a lot but they’re lost when they visit France.
Being gluten-free means you steer clear of a lot of processed foods. So you become processed-free (doesn’t sound snappy, does it). How about factory-free? Whatever, it means you abide by Michael Pollan’s edict that you shouldn’t eat anything with more than five ingredients. Or anything that’s processed with machinery bigger than an Oskar Mini.
Vegans don’t eat anything. Well, nothing you’d recognise away from a soy farm. They don’t eat meat, seafood, chickens, eggs or dairy products. They eat only stuff with roots and leaves and their choice helps rebalance the climate. When they die, they don’t decay. But they don’t die often.
Some Hollywood people don’t eat cooked food. They eat raw. Not in the raw (you’re thinking of Jennifer Aniston, aren’t you) but raw food. Raw food isn’t too hard to eat if you’re a vegan but it’s more of a challenge if you eat pigs and chicken. Then you become a triple-O user.
More people are giving up sugar. They are sugar-free people. In particular, they hate fructose (which might be the cause of the global obesity epidemic) but they also shun glucose, sucrose, palm sugar, corn syrup, saccharine and honey. That’s right, no honey, even in herbal tea.
Some people are geographic in their food snobbery. They won’t eat anything that comes out of China, except if it’s Chinese takeaway from up the road. Others don’t eat anything out of their neighbourhood, they are otherwise known as locavores.
Tasmanians won’t eat anything from the mainland and a lot of people are suss about eating stuff from the United States. Oh, that’s right, they don’t eat food from the US because they are GM-free. That sounds like MSG-free but it’s really genetically modified free. And the US is getting all its bees in a twist because more and more grain is GM but no one knows exactly how much. So GM-free people stick with Tasmanian food, where bees still fly free.
More discerning foodies are choosy about what period their food came from. They are the anthropologists of dietary choices.
Some won’t eat food that was discovered after the agrarian period – that’s roughly 4000 years BC (glutens are very period-minded).
But most epoch eaters are paleos. They eat stuff that cavemen ate. This means lots of raw meat, berries, root stock and honey. Obviously, they get sick of carpaccio. But they’re really excited when they spot bison on the menu. Time-conscious consumers also get into conniptions about the time of day. They schedule food around a 24-hour cycle of don’ts. They don’t eat carbs after lunch; they don’t eat fruit after breakfast and no matter what the time of day, they don’t mix carbs with protein. They run an apartheid system in their digestive tract.
Hipsters only eat food that they find. Otherwise known as dumpster-divers, they are a modern incarnation of people who only eat what they shoot themselves or only eat roadkill that they’ve run over in their own car.
Ethical eaters source their food from brands they approve. They eat nothing from Coke, Nestlé, Maccas, NASA or, basically, any company that does not sign on with Fair Trade, Cruelty-Free, Truefood, PETA, Fair Labor or Dolphin-Free.
Now, we realise that if you’re a special person, we haven’t found your no-go preference. We haven’t, for instance, covered those who only eat seasonal or those who only eat slow food. We know that some of you think potatoes are poison. We realise that many of you are more knowledgeable about the wandering habits of your chickens than the whereabouts of your children.
But we’re sure you’ll let us know.
dmacken@afr.com.au
defloured daily 