ninme

The Sunday Times - That’s no food allergy, just bad manners, by India Knight

But I do loathe the way in which people – usually women on a diet – turn something commonplace and understandable, such as not eating bread because it makes them fat, into a look-at-me-I’m-special, cod medical issue. If such people simply said, “I try not to eat bread because it turns me into the Michelin man”, everyone would be perfectly understanding. But that would be admitting to vanity, which won’t do: far better to pretend we actually have a condition.

I am carbohydrate-phobic myself: if I eat stodge I get fat. But the words “wheat allergy” have never passed my lips, because I don’t suddenly break out in welts and have difficulty breathing if I so much as glimpse a piece of Poilâne. If I go out to supper and my host serves bread-and-butter pudding, I eat a little of it because I am polite. I can’t think of anything ruder than being asked to dinner and faxing the host a great list of the things I will and won’t eat or of emitting great public wails of distress at the sight of potatoes.

Few people have such scruples: many consider it perfectly normal either to e-mail you their dietary requirements or to turn their nose up at food you have spent hours cooking. It drives me mad – particularly when people with real and serious conditions such as diabetes or Crohn’s disease never make a fuss and just quietly leave what they can’t eat without you even noticing.

Our attitude to food in this country is deranged. [M]illions of people invent allergies in the tragic hope of seeming as special as some little half-starved, half-mad Hollywood starlet (or of legitimising their borderline eating disorder)…

In other food news, it was also reported last week that the preponderance of peanut allergies may actually be caused by the government’s advice to avoid peanuts during pregnancy (a new one to me, I must say). An all-party House of Lords science and technology committee will next week recommend that this advice, which dates from 1998, is withdrawn immediately. “Evidence suggests that countries which expose young children to peanuts have much lower or nonexistent cases of peanut allergy,” a source told a London newspaper.

Honestly: no wonder every other person seems to have a bizarre, phobic, unnatural relationship with food. As I never tire of pointing out to pregnant friends who are longing for the odd glass of wine, our mothers’ generation smoked and drank their way through pregnancy with no extra folic acid and no adverse effects whatsoever – and ate peanuts, blue cheese and the rest.

But we have in the past 15 years or so chosen to decide, strangely, that not only is pregnancy a sort of illness, but that being alive itself is a sort of illness that must be self-diagnosed, self-medicated and self-cured.

It is unbelievably tiresome and very damaging: what used to be called “faddy eating”, which made everyone roll their eyes in exasperation, is well on the way to becoming the norm – and far from rolling our eyes, lots of people are applauding. We are fortunate to know so much about the food we eat and about the chemicals we should avoid. All that’s left is to tuck in like a normal person and have a little of everything in moderation.

ninme breaks into wild applause