The war on wellness? I’ll meet you in the middle.
As a food writer over the last few years, I’ve frequently found myself torn between two camps: the ‘rahh, hands off our pints and pies!’ brigade, and the people standing on a chair to Instagram their buddha bowl. I run from one to the other, greedy for pastry and pious for wholegrains. I am Rachel Green with her two surprise parties; the messy fun one and the one where Monica’s losing her shit over the pen lids.
This isn’t a defence of ‘wellness’, I promise. I am far too much of a dirty glutton to buy into in the clean eating creed. I eat butter like it’s cheese, and cheese like it’s a wodge of corner shop Battenberg. I don’t believe berries will cure me of cancer or that birch sap floods my cells better than plain eau de tap — but, sue me, I do sometimes like a vegan chickpea blondie. I regularly partake of kale. I’ve turned frozen bananas into ice cream and carrots into noodles and I’ve eaten an almond butter protein glow ball in public, without trying to hide it in a Gregg’s bag or anything. I am at least 72% sure what to do with tempeh. I am an equal opportunities greedy person.
Scoff if you must, but first consider this: almost every food we love today was thought of as alien and pretentious on these shores at one time or other. Pasta. Olive oil. Bananas. Potatoes. Cheesecake. Pizza. Chicken tikka. Garlic, even! For years after WW2, our favourite fragrant allium was dismissed by many as ‘foreign muck’. These days we’d barely start a meal with it; in your Nan’s day, a cheeky clove in your hotpot was almost cause for an emergency parish council meeting.
Even in the two decades since my idea of gourmet nirvana was a Findus Crispy Pancake, the parameters of familiar, everyday food have expanded like a good elastic waistband. Tell me, how much hummus did you eat in the 90s? Or chorizo? Or chicken katsu curry? Balsamic vinegar. Sweet potatoes. Nice bread that doesn’t taste like wadding. We made room for them in our hearts and cupboards, and I genuinely believe we can do the same for matcha almond lattes without selling our souls to the Hemsley sisters.
So while I’m thrilled for the anti-sugar shillers to be unmasked as frauds if it means I can have a fourth Hobnob, I don’t think beans and quinoa are the bad guys any more than Ben & Jerry.
Every nutritionist will tell you variety is the only real answer (they probably have it taped now, IT Crowd-style, to save their voices) — so why would we want to limit the vast and beautiful universe of possible things to put in our bellies? Think of the first brave soul who looked at the dangly bits on a cow and thought “I’m squeezing them, and drinking whatever comes out!” For every paleo salad that tastes of dust and sadness, there might be a black bean brownie to set your world alight. Maybe.
And while the #eatclean gurus might be misguided, misinformed, in many cases far, far from healthy, it doesn’t mean they discredit the whole business of wanting to feel… well, well. A bit better. We can cry “WELLNESS IS BULLSHIT!”, but then what — retreat back to sickness? ‘Vaping is bollocks, let’s all smoke instead’? How quickly does contempt for chia seeds become that UKIP couple off Katherine Tate, fuming at the grapes in their brie baguette?
Truth is, moderation applies as much to our attitude as it does to our diet. A spoonful of cynicism helps the bee pollen go down. But you knew that. We all did, we’re not idiots. It’s just that moderation doesn’t shift diet books or fuel trend reports. There’s no cash to be made from common sense.
No. Instead the wide-eyed devotion of the wellness clan is shot down by the snark of the cynics, which will be dismissed as bitter and short-sighted by the optimists, who in turn will be trampled by the cynics again when there’s a new fad to rage against. It’s just angry turtles, all the way down. And so we end up with a maddening back-and-forth, both camps racing breathless from one side to the other to piss on each others’ bonfires, and all the time dancing around the obvious conclusion: that the middle is the sensible place to be.
Ahh, the middle. The lovely, cosy middle. The middle isn’t sexy or dynamic or radical. It doesn’t promise to change anything overnight, or even much at all, but the middle will see you right in the end. In this, as in so many of life’s debates, people want the answer to be one or the other when in fact it is neither, and both.
Reject some fads, embrace some. Expand your horizons, but don’t swear off the basics. Think, but don’t obsess. Find patterns and habits that work for you, but don’t go all rigid and cultish about it. Do some, but not too much. Chill out. But not too much.
Everything is slower in the middle. Just a gentle plod towards the finish line: a life lived happily, and healthy-ish. Try kombucha one day, have a baked potato the size of your head the next. See if coconut oil does for your cooking what garlic did for our grandmothers’ — or not. Decide exactly how much you like avocado, and eat it in proportionate amounts. Have a bash at feeling a little bit better. Take everything with a pinch of salt, but not too much. Have fun, but not too much. Have a pie.
This essay was originally published in the email newsletter Schmancy!, by Lauren Bravo and Daisy Buchanan. Sign up here.
