Rolling in dough
‘Clean eating’ is out and beautiful bread is finally being welcomed back into the fold
In no particular order, things I have been irrationally terrified of during my life include: boa constrictors, crocodiles, tsunamis, the walking dead, white bread, spaghetti and a tray of brownies left unattended.
Just as fairy tales bewitch toddlers with monsters under the bed, so too has wellness, sleek progeny of the diet-industrial complex, ensured that women (and some men) are petrified of real sugar, full-fat milk or any white food. I pity those who suffered through years of egg-white omelettes when cholesterol was the demon du jour. My grandmother still carries artificial sweetener in her purse.
My particular list of once-fearsome foods won’t surprise anyone who remembers the moment just over a decade ago when gluten unseated Satan as the source of all evil.
A dangerous allergen for some, but an unfortunate diet trend for many more, gluten was just the tip of the iceberg. At some point in the past 10 years, wellness stopped being about adding good foods in (wheat grass, fibre, nutrition) and switched to being about cutting out “bad” foods. Elimination diets, excluding specific ingredients, proliferated. Everybody cleansed, everybody detoxed. Food became a minefield, and dinner parties a nightmare. Someone was always avoiding gluten, dairy, wheat, sugar, nightshades or pineapple.
We called this reincarnation of fad dieting “clean eating,” and it helped to make food the second-biggest sector in the wellness industry, valued at
C$1.1 trillion and trailing only anti-aging.
Juice cleanses promised to rid your body of toxins you didn’t know you had, targeting flaws you couldn’t see. They were also expensive ways to starve. Then there was the 30-day “reset” diet I tried, which forbade sugar, alcohol, grains, legumes, soy and dairy. Try thinking about anything other than food when you’re figuring out what you can eat besides eggs.
Other incarnations include the Paleo diet, which encouraged followers to eat only foods that were available to cavemen, known for their good health and long lifespans.
We waged war on food, and on ourselves, all in the name of feeling better. Yet many of these clean-eating trends were masks for what they had in common: culturally sanctioned disordered eating.
But recently, I have sensed a profound shift. Clean eating is out of fashion, and, in a comeback more surprising than Martha Stewart’s, bread is cool again.
Real bread. Crusty, leavened rye, sourdough, wheat and country white have left the domain of hipsterdom and re-entered the mainstream. It is a popular middle-class pursuit to keep your own vile sourdough starter and bake hard-earned loaves on Saturday mornings. After nine years of rapid proliferation, the number of gluten-free products launched in 2018 fell by almost 40 per cent from 2017.
The unlikely resurrection of gluten’s strongest ally has ushered in a host of other calorific companions. People eat real sugar again, and real butter. This is good, because salted butter is the secret meaning of life.
If I were to summarize the months I spent at chef school in Paris, it would be this: high heat, most of the time, and finish with butter. Food is one of the greatest joys we have. It is damaging to assign it a moral value — good and evil.
In a telling indicator of a turning tide, in New York the opening of a “clean” Chinese restaurant called Lucky Lee’s, which boasted food that was not “too oily. Or salty” went down like a lead balloon. Founded by a wellness blogger, it opened last April and closed in December.
Trends are by definition cyclic, as evidenced by the surprising resurrection of mom jeans and crocheted bikinis. But I have another theory about the triumphant return of real food.
If the world is warming, continents are ablaze with unstoppable wildfires and liberal democracy is going up in smoke, who has the energy to care about carbs? You might as well have a cookie. Probably two. After the 2016 presidential election, there was a running joke about the “Trump 15” — the number of pounds people who opposed his campaign gained comforting themselves with food.
I’m not sorry to see the back of the war on food. The wellness industry seems to be evolving in more progressive ways, encouraging people to take time for themselves, to focus on mental health and relationships. Millennials have revived the home-cooked dinner party, which can be read as an attempt at an antidote to our increasing atomization.
However, the rebranding of wellness has also broadened its scope. Suddenly people who prided themselves on never being sucked into a trendy fixation with caveman cleanses are obsessing over how many steps they take every day or how many mornings in a row they have meditated with their mindfulness app.
Yet I am optimistic about one particular dietary trend from the 1990s that is regaining ground: “Intuitive eating.” This is a philosophy that encourages people to eat what they want when they’re hungry, and stop when they’re full. Like we did as children, before we were taught that food was something to be afraid of.
The wellness industry will catch up, no doubt. But hopefully bread can stay top dog for another few hundred years. Let the boomers be the only ones who add Splenda to their coffee and tea. We have real monsters to fight.
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