We've turned the corner on beef
consumption and it's back on the rise after more than a decade of
falling like a sack of hammers. I attribute beef's decline to the
plethora of diets urging folks to skip the meat in favor of melba toast,
coffee enemas and colonic cleansings.
Sometimes
it seems like half the world is starving to death while the other half
is on a diet. It is estimated that 80 percent of ten year old girls in
this country are on some sort of diet. And they have so many to choose
from. There's the diets named after places where no one is fat, like the
Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Scarsdale and South Beach diets. A lot of
good the Scarsdale diet did its inventor, Herman Tarnower, whose so
called "friend" lost 185 pounds of lover when she murdered Herman,
probably because he made her eat too many pineapple chunks with cottage
cheese and kept telling her how fat she was. We also had the
no-white-food diet, eat only when hungry diet, the milk diet, and the
drinking man's diet, which consisted of martinis and whipped cream.
Actually, the drinking man's diet has been with us for centuries because
in 1087 William the Conqueror only consumed alcohol in order to lose
weight. Forever after he was known as William the Drunk.
Most
of the diets were dreamed up by doctors who had something to sell and
wanted to appear on Oprah. (She purchased Weight Watchers not long ago,
probably to get the wholesale price on Weight Watchers cream puffs.)
There were diet books by Robert Atkins, The Doctor's Weight Loss Book by
Dr. Irwin Stillman, and the No Breakfast Plan by Dr. Edward Hooker
Dewey. Some people got seriously rich from fat, like Jennie Craig, and
the people behind Nutri-Systems and Metrecal, which was all the rage
when I was a kid. And in 1961 Royal Crown Cola introduced the first diet
soft drink, Diet Rite, which started a flood of diet drinks. I had an
uncle who was hooked on Diet Rite and he offered me a taste one time.
That was over 50 years ago and I still haven't got the bad taste out of
my mouth.
There's a long history of
folks creating new food in order to get rich. In the 1830s Reverand
Sylvester Graham said being fat made people full of lust and so he
invented Graham Crackers as a solution. The Good Reverand was known as
"Dr. Sawdust" after that. When Dr. Harvey Kellogg became a Doctor at the
Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan he pushed a vegetarian diet and
invented granola and toasted flakes of grain to help patients lose
weight. We now refer to them as Corn Flakes and the company as Kelloggs.
Dr. James Salisbury created a concoction of minced meat and water to
help people lose weight, thus giving us the Salisbury Steak.
No comments:
Post a Comment