FREE US FROM FREE FORM
T here’s a good reason why the phrase “the best thing since glutenfree sliced bread” has never caught on. Despite its name, the free-form (not from) diet is not a performance art installation in a meth-lab-chic Woodstock gallery, although it may be just as pretentious. Free form is an eating plan devoid of dairy, gluten or sugar. Children also have a name for this diet: “Yuck.”
Free-form diet sheets used to be published in medical journals under chapter headings like “special diet food”, which sounds as delicious and stubborn as confit of rubber glove. But not any more. Today you can cruise into your preferred artisanal coffee joint and order an iced-half-caff-ristretto-venti-fourpump-sugar-free-cinnamon-dolce-soyskinny-latte, right before your spouse divorces you.
Twenty years ago you would have had to ferret free-form food ingredients such as soy milk from the back of the pharmacy, alongside humanities students looking for leprosy ointment, and accountants crunching the price parity of their favourite IBS medication.
In specific medical circumstances — and these do exist — a free-form diet forms part of the treatment regime for nutritional and autoimmune diseases. Nowadays, however, free-form food is big mainstream business. Swept away by the tsunami of faddism created by paleo, Tim Noakes, everything-intolerant pop culture and the ghost of Doctor Atkins, more and more otherwise perfectly functional adults are abandoning whole food groups despite having no medically diagnosed nutrition-related issue.
We spent our childhoods suffering the endless clucking of our parents as they struggled to convince us to finish our food. We’ll be damned if we let them go to their graves with that victory intact. If they’d known this is where things would go, I wonder if they would have given us the gift of life at all. I can’t see the benefit of bringing a child into a world where I have no manipulative leverage over it. “Johnny, eat your potatoes.” “No.” “Johnny, eat your potatoes, or no pudding.” “Sugar is poison!” You can’t see my stage notes, but I have the kid flipping the table and cutting grandpa with a butter knife at that point.
That’s a world gone topsy-turvy, friends. Yet I fear we’re already there. Consider one of the world’s most famous children, Miley Cyrus. In April 2012, Cyrus tweeted: “Everyone should try no-gluten for a week. The change in your skin, physical and mental health is amazing.” Shortly thereafter, she cut off her hair, broke up with her fiancé, risked unsupervised physical contact with Robin Thicke via twerking, and acquiesced to a photo shoot with the world’s creepiest uncle, Terry Richardson. I’m not saying there’s a causal link. But eating a rice cake is easily the worst of her behaviour.
I don’t know about you, but I often dream that I am waiting for Keith Floyd to revive me to consciousness by pouring a bottle of his favourite port over my face with his left hand, while holding a fat wedge of full-flour chocolate cake lashed with cream under my nose with his right.
This is the man who once urged us to create “plates or pictures of sunshine that taste of happiness and love”.
How does one do that without all the colours?