Lucy Mangan
A new Cold War... no time for clean eating
For its followers, clean-eating is a weight-loss diet by another name
With the news that Ella Mills – the high priestess of the wellness and clean-eating crusade that has dominated the hearts, minds, stomachs and Instagram feeds of women of a certain age and class for the past half-decade – has closed two of her three Deliciously Ella cafés in London, a hope stirs in my breast. Might I start getting decently fed in friends’ houses again?
It has been a testing time for those of us who did not fall under the spell cast by the coven who took over the culinary world with blogs, television series and cookbooks, and advised us all to start knocking back gallons of Nutribulleted smoothies, spiralise courgettes as an alternative to pasta, granulate cauliflower to replace rice, pretend whipped and frozen avocado was genuine ice cream and imbibe only milk that had never seen a cow. This was all piled on gluten-free toast and sprinkled with so many seeds that I found myself channelling John Hurt in The Elephant Man: “I am not a budgie! I am human! And in need of a hamburger!”
The Hemsley sisters’ The Art of Eating Well advised readers on how to go grain-free. Saskia Gregsonwilliams hymned the advantages of going wheat, meat and dairy-free. Natasha Corbett, author of Honestly Healthy, advocated an alkaline diet, and Mills’s own blog and books are based on the gluten, sugar, meat, dairy and alcohol-free regime she devised for herself after being diagnosed with a heart condition. They and their followers have created a wellness industry – chia seeds, matcha powder and milk squeezed from increasingly unlikely sources do not come cheap – worth an estimated £3trillion. Those who did not dive in, however, became increasingly enraged. Clean-eating, specifically, and the wellness industry, generally, are infuriating. It is all assertions, feelings and individuals’ beliefs, wrapped round an (organic, unhusked) grain of truth – that we, as a society, need to try to step away from the processed food that encourages obesity and heart disease – mixed with a bit of yoga here, eastern mysticism and holistic whatever there; a syncretic pseudo-religion with sleek bowel movements instead of salvation at its heart.
None of its high-profile proponents is a qualified dietician. The world they and their satellites and acolytes have built was post-fact before Trump. It is a world in which honey and dates are approved, but fruit – yes, fruit – can be cut out because of all the sugar it contains; a world in which butter, a substance that has been bringing calories and joy to humans since the dawn of our history without any noticeable detriment to our health, is bad; a world in which salt must be the “mineral-rich” pink-hued Himalayan kind. Above all, it is a world in which this sentence – from Madeleine Shaw’s Ready, Steady, Glow – is meant to be digestible. “Lettuce,” she writes earnestly, “makes a great alternative to bread.” The wellness guru’s apocalyptic visions of distended guts trying to absorb glutenated carbs is nothing to the mental contortions the uninitiated reader must go through to take this in. And it is the psychical rather than physical effects of clean eating and the surrounding coconut-oil-is-the-new-chrism nonsense that most makes me hope that the closure of Ella’s cafés foretells the end of the industry. Although it has always purported to be simply a way of making people more conscious of the dietary choices they make, for many of their followers, clean eating has always been a weight-loss diet by any other name.
“Wellness” simply substituted “slim” as the stated goal. But its audience, mainly women, all primed and adept at decoding euphemisms for what we are not supposed to (and, occasionally, genuinely shouldn’t) want, knew what it was and what it meant. It gave a veneer of modernity and acceptability to the age-old process of putting fewer calories and less of the stuff you wanted in your mouth, in order to thin your thighs. And, as with any diet plan but especially one that advocates cutting out entire food groups and asserts the goodness/badness of particular properties without much in the way of scientific backing, it played effectively into the fears of people already prone to disordered eating.
The cracks were beginning to show in the wellness cult before Ella’s cafés were shuttered, but it is probably background forces that will, ultimately, bring down the clean-eating gods. The energy, expense and wide-eyed belief it requires are a function of a calm, well-ordered and affluent society, which also allows the luxury of pomegranate-scattering selfindulgence. In a spiralised twist of fate, it may be that Brexit, Trump, a new Cold War looming and assorted other horrors have given us some real perspective back. Eat inorganically, drink anything but coldpressed wheatgrass, for tomorrow there’s every chance something will kill us much quicker than cancer.