From Michael Specter’s “Against the Grain: Should You Go Gluten-Free?“:
For many people, avoiding gluten has become a cultural as well as a dietary choice, and the exposition offered an entry ramp to a new kind of life. There was a travel agent who specialized in gluten-free vacations, and a woman who helps plan gluten-free wedding receptions. One vender passed out placards: “I am nut free,” “I am shellfish free,” “I am egg free,” “I am wheat free.” I also saw an advertisement for gluten-free communion wafers.
. . . . .
There have been a few studies suggesting that people without celiac disease have a reason to eliminate gluten from their diet. But most of the data are unclear or preliminary. Doctors rarely diagnose non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and many don’t believe that it exists. Few people seem to have been deterred by the lack of evidence. “Everyone is trying to figure out what is going on, but nobody in medicine, at least not in my field, thinks this adds up to anything like the number of people who say they feel better when they take gluten out of their diet,” Murray said. “It’s hard to put a number on these things, but I would have to say that at least seventy per cent of it is hype and desire. There is just nothing obviously related to gluten that is wrong with most of these people.’’
(Somehow I think the market for “gluten-free communion wafers” is vanishingly small, but maybe there is a congregation of daily mass-goers in Boulder, Malibu, Berkeley, Brooklyn, or Asheville of which I am unaware. Gluten-free communion wafers are like sugar-free tonic water: if you’re drinking such a volume of gin-and-tonic that you really need to get the sugar-free, maybe you should just consider drinking less gin? In other words, it’s the alcohol, not the sugar, that’s the problem.)
Specter demonstrates how a little knowledge of recent history is helpful when considering the latest diet fad: remember all of the others? No red meat, vegetarian, vegan. Low-sugar, no sugar, low-carb, paleo. Remember when fat was bad, and if you had to have some fat, margarine was a better choice than butter? And then the fat-free food industry decided to pump more sugars and starches in our old foods to make them palatable without fat? Yeesh. That’s what Specter reports is happening in much of the gluten-free packaged food industry: instead of wheat flour, it’s garbage loaded with potato or rice starch. And the crazzy just accelerates:
{Physician Peter H. R. Green] went on, “I recently saw a retired executive of an international company. He got a life coach to help him, and one of the pieces of advice the coach gave him was to get on a gluten-free diet. A life coach is prescribing a gluten-free diet. So do podiatrists, chiropractors, even psychiatrists.’’ He stopped, stood up, shook his head as if he were about to say something he shouldn’t, then shrugged and sat down again. “A friend of mine told me his wife was seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression. And one of the first things the psychiatrist did was to put her on a gluten-free diet. This is getting out of hand. We are seeing more and more cases of orthorexia nervosa”—people who progressively withdraw different foods in what they perceive as an attempt to improve their health. “First, they come off gluten. Then corn. Then soy. Then tomatoes. Then milk. After a while, they don’t have anything left to eat—and they proselytize about it. Worse is what parents are doing to their children. It’s cruel and unusual treatment to put a child on a gluten-free diet without its being indicated medically. Parental perception of a child’s feeling better on a gluten-free diet is even weaker than self-perception.”
It is sad that we can be so food-obsessed and yet so fat and ill-nourished at the same time. We North Americans really should be ashamed of ourselves. If world wars and national emergencies don’t impose rationing on us, we just impose our own! What our grandparents and great-grandparents wouldn’t have done in 1932 for a juicy steak, for a gallon of milk and a loaf of honest bread in 1937, or in 1943 for a pound of butter and a dozen eggs.
This summer, I read both French Kids Eat Everything: by Karen Le Billion and Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. (Short review: Le Billion’s book is focused on food and eating, while Druckerman’s is a more comprehensive comparison of the French versus North American cultures of parenting. Druckerman’s book is funnier and smarter, but both books by North Americans married to French men are written as though neither man has any responsibility for raising his own children. That’s a pretty powerful continuity across cultural lines, but it remains utterly unexplored by either author.)
One clear takeaway from both books is the inviolable French etiquette of eating everything you’re served as a guest, and of being appreciative of what you’re served. In France, even now when North America is on Gluten Lockdown, that involves a massive amount of bread baked with white flour–or in other words, pure poison.
I used to entertain a lot–large cocktail parties, small and medium-sized dinner parties, informal barbecues, and the like. But I got older, I got busier, and I got less interested in cooking. But I wonder how much of that was increasing fatigue over the past fifteen years from attempting to accommodate my guests’ allergies/preferences/fads. If so, that was my mistake. Since I serve edible food (non-poisonous, found at farmers’ markets and grocery stores, properly cooked or otherwise prepared), I should have have had the courage to let my guests make their own decisions as to whether or not they would eat. They are adults, or at least not babies, for the most part so that’s just what I’ll do from now on.