Food-Hating Tower of Maintenance

She may have started out with good intentions - saving chickens, starting a garbage heap and all that - but all too often it's a slow and steady kayak cruise into a full-blown eating disorder. Today's concerned twenty-something has pretty much turned vegetarianism and veganism into a rite of passage; admirable enough, I guess, except perhaps for the often short-sighted perspective that will find many of them looking like frail, hollowed-out junkies by the time they're hitting their mid-thirties. It's like watching someone go slowly bat-poop crazy, their diminishing sustenance intake in direct proportion to their insane and wearying rationalizing. And yet as they sit there trembling and complaining of various wim-wams and vapours while you tuck into your burger and slug back java with a vitality they can't even remember, they will actually adopt a superior attitude and lemon-sucking expression as they toss out the textbook platitudes of the hopeless foodophobe. "I could never eat that." No kidding - you can barely get through your flax cracker and I'm the nut here?  Oh wait, nuts are deadly poison, aren't they? ...Sigh.

Comments

[Shem]

Really dig your stuff in the straight.

[Greg]

So, RF, you dated this gal?

[RF]

No. It's a composite... Besides, I'd never get that specific to base it on one person. Someone might hunt me down...

[RF]

...And thanks, Shem.

[Spike]

Did you know that this is so common nowadays that there's a psychiatric term for people with this preoccupation? Orthorexia. "Righteous eating." Ironically, this bug-eyed, scrabbling pursuit of the ultimate healthy diet can be downright lethal.

And it's nice to see I'm not the only one who noticed the sudden skyrocket in cases of "wheat allergies" and the like. Self-diagnosed, of course. I had to bite my tongue when I recently read one woman's descriptions of the sweaty bouts of nausea she experiences when she eats non-organic produce. Sheesh.

[mia]

I hear you. I feel your bane. Pass the butter, skinful chicken and caffeine...

[Zing]

Ofttimes I have lamented my move from the politically correct and "hip" environs of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. My move back to the northeast's blue collar former steel town, but ethnically diverse whistle stop of Pittsburgh sometimes felt like a backward journey through time to an unenlightened age. Though I certainly recognize the above practitioner of Orthorexia (even in Pittsburgh) their numbers are blissfully inconsequential. Happily the local cuisine of cheese and onion stuffed perogies, hot sausage sandwiches on white toasted rolls, giant fried fish sandwiches, and the ricotta & provolone cheese and prosciutto and salami stuffed pizza rusticas often scare would be food haters out of town before they are run out on the rail.

Thanks for warning others of these food wary succubusses a head of time!

[Ginny-Sue]

I notice people bandy about the word 'allergic' these days. When I asked one man what the effects of his allergy to all fish was; swollen throat? Boils? Being rushed to hospital? He admitted it wasn't actually an allergy but an 'inherited' dislike from his mother. ?? It was only one item in a long list of foods he wouldn't, couldn't or didn't eat, poor fella. And yes, he was eager to tell me 'oh, I'd never eat that', 'oh, I can't have that', 'oh that has a bad effect on me so I cut it out'...oh oh oh!

[rg]

I have a deadly allergy to cauliflower and mushrooms. If you don't believe me, you are no better than a neo-con "allergy-denier". You and Karl Rove ... or Hitler.

That aside, my own stools, Sir, are gigantic and have no more odor than a hot biscuit.

Road to Wellville -- rent it, chop-chop.

[RF]

I could never eat a hot biscuit. Especially now.

[THORPE]

This is usually what happens when someone who has gone from "vegetarian" to "vegan" to "humorless, self-righteous evangelistic vegan who nags people about becoming vegans" takes it one step further. I've seen them haunt the one place they feel sort of safe, the local organic co-op groceries. They obsess over the tiniest differences between different brands of the same product, convinced they'll start choking if they eat something that has 1% more or less of this or that.

[Bruce]

Well on the part about being allergic to wheat is a real, physiological, immune system disorder.

It's called Cealiac disease and can eventually cause cancer and chronics malnutrition.

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/celiac/index.htm

Great cartoon though! Just posting this for your, erudation.

There are other reasons to be vegetarian like saving money or helping the environment of course but this obsession with eating this or that, apart from and seperate from, actual physiological disorders is silly.