Our normal eating pattern is a relic of colonial oppression, so skip lunch for freedom!
If there’s one thing that makes me want to go all Cagney and push a grapefruit in the Internet’s face, it’s the phrase “You’re Doing It Wrong.” It’s been a popular cliché with tiresome, bossy millennials for a few years, and every week brings more news of things you have performed incorrectly. These are never important things. One doesn’t read YOU’RE UNBLOCKING THAT CLOGGED ARTERY WRONG. It’s always “Putting cans in the fridge: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG,” written in the tone of someone standing behind you with corn-chip dust on his shirt and beard, smirking because you totally don’t know that putting the cans upside down recirculates the carbonation. Moron.
The other way to write the headline is helpful: Here’s a smart new way to do something you do all the time. (Such things are called “life hacks” by people who were not slapped enough by their editors in front of everyone.) But it’s not enough to find a new way; the old way has to be WRONG, and YOU are WRONG for DOING IT. This leads the author’s peers to find something else that everyone is doing wrong, and crow about it on some website that summons buzz and infuses the most banal innovation with virulence. How’s that piece about how everyone’s buttering their toast wrong doing? Forty-six thousand shares! Toast-buttering will never be the same!
This is why many adults read the stories of overeducated millennials stooped with college debt working crap jobs and writing piecework blather for fizzy websites, and are not overly burdened by pity.
Monday night, for example, I was informed that I was eating ice cream wrong. This is unlikely. I have ice cream on Friday and Saturday nights, as part of a ritualized celebration of the weekend. I excavate it from the scround with a weighty scoop (a scround, if you’re wondering, is the square-round container used by most ice-cream conglomerates) and put it in a small cup. If it’s in a big cup, you feel like you’re depriving yourself. If it’s in a small cup, it looks like more. If I was DOING IT RIGHT I suppose I would cut the scround into six slices, thereby guaranteeing that the bounteous flavor-ribbons that run through the lower half were evenly apportioned. Because the first time you open the lid you see mostly a clean surface with no indications of the chunks and fudge and veins of caramel beneath. A lesser person with no restraint will burrow down, mining the rivers of chocolate and caramel. A man who knows we must take all things in their stead, as they come, will accept that the first night with the scround will be mostly vanilla.
You will be repaid in a week or two hence with a bowl that’s almost nothing but chunks.
This is how I do it, and it works for me. But what do I know? I thought I understood the way I ate my meals, too. I wake, hungry; some bowl-scouring bran embedded with desiccated fruit nodules, a wee divot of sausage, a draft of orange juice (no pulp no sugar GOD FORBID SUGAR NO) and I am set for hours.
Then something happens around noon. I want to put something else in my stomach. The intervening hours have not been strenuous; I have lifted no bales, toted no barges, but the prospect of lunch intrigues. A light lunch is consumed. It fortifies me for hours, but — and I know, this is sounding like I’m some sort of ravenous nightmare alien with an interdimensional gateway in his gullet that throws all that food into a parallel universe, undigested — about six hours later the desire for something to eat hits me again. And so I make a larger meal, which I partake with wife and child. We say grace. We discuss the day. We clean the plates.
You know where I’m going, don’t you. I AM DOING IT WRONG. But it gets worse.
This three-meals-a-day thing? It’s anti-science. So says Mother Jones magazine, touting a book by one Heather Carroll. For the Left, anti-science is a serious charge, because you might be a Denier. I once remarked that I wasn’t particularly worried about nuclear waste, because in a few decades we could probably bring it up to orbit in a space elevator and shoot it into the sun with a rail gun. A reasonable reply would be a discussion of the feasibility of space elevators, but my interlocutor looked at me as though I had suggested making the waste disappear by chanting Bible verses while shaking a dried gourd full of rattling pebbles.
Anyway. There are people who feel their belly gnarl at noon and think the science says I shouldn’t be hungry, but I associate the gongs of noon with sustenance, and science be damned. I have been anti-sciencing myself at regular, predictable intervals my entire life and I still believe the Earth revolves around the Sun, so the cumulative effect can’t be injurious.
But it gets worse. Here’s the headline:
Why You Should Stop Eating Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
Dogmatic adherence to mealtimes is anti-science, racist, and might actually be making you sick.
Racist. Three meals a day at set times: I might as well be standing at a slave auction, pointing my walking stick at a man on the platform and shouting “TEN DOLLARS FOR THE STRAPPING BUCK.” It’s racist because the colonists noted how the Indians did not eat regular meals at set hours, and thus concluded they were superior. Now, if the Indians — or for that matter, people in India — ate three meals at set times, in accordance with an elaborate mythology about the Sun and the Goddess of Bagochipz, who separated the crunchy from the soggy when the universe was made, then it would be a Tradition to be described in loving detail, and possibly enforced by law in the workplace to prevent religious discrimination. I’m sorry, my faith requires me to eat at 11:45.
Here’s the damning indictment:
When European settlers got to America, they also imported their meal habits: a light meal — maybe cold mush and radishes — in the morning, a heavier, cooked one midday, and a third meal similar to the first one later in the day. They observed that the eating schedule of the native tribes was less rigid — the volume and timing of their eating varied with the seasons. Sometimes, when food was scarce, they fasted. The Europeans took this as “evidence that natives were uncivilized,“ Carroll explained to me in an e-mail. “Civilized people ate properly and boundaried their eating, thus differentiating themselves from the animal kingdom, where grazing is the norm.“
There’s a word I can’t wait to use tonight: Come down to the kitchen for boundaried eating, daughter.
No one will follow this advice, unless they live alone and feel odd and sad and somewhat pathetic sitting down to a meal at a particular time. Then they will eat whatever and whenever and feel that pale glow of righteousness, because they are in touch with ancient ways and also science and have thrown off the hobbling remnants of colonial opinion. I’d guess that most of the magazine’s readership will continue to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, even though they know it’s anti-science and racist. Yet they eat at noon. It’s almost as if they know that the society is so soaked with racism that you can’t brush your teeth without Othering someone who prefers to use pumice glued to a stick, but what can one person do? Besides bask in the briny righteousness of learning anew how awful we are?
Happiness. YOU’RE DOING IT —
Oh, sorry, right. I hate that.
— James Lileks is a columnist for National Review Online.