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It was one of my epiphanies: It’s completely wrong to quote-unquote follow a diet. That to me is why diets fail. Eating is deeply personal, right up there with sex. If you try to follow someone else’s recommended eating habits, it’s a recipe for failure, it’s not you. It can be little things. What do you do for lunch each day? Everyone’s different. What about dinner around your house? Breakfast? You can’t follow a diet. If anything, you should lead a diet, by saying: Here’s how I eat. That’s the boss. So here’s what I should probably change about how I eat if I’m going to lose weight.
Q. One of the things I really enjoyed about this book was getting to know the personalities behind the diets. It’s quite a lot of eccentrics. Did anyone stand out for you?
A. I’m fascinated by Sylvester Graham. He started out as a Presbyterian preacher and became really involved in temperance, and that led him to develop this belief in this really bland diet, like the most boring diet in the world. No meat, no spices, no mustard, no alcohol, no coffee, no nothing you’d want to live for. His greatest enemy was libido, and the worst sin of all was masturbation. He thought if you ate these foods you’d tend to masturbate. He was completely fascinated by it. And he lives on in the Graham cracker. He lives on in s’mores and cheesecake crusts.
Q. There’s such a historical connection, in the US at least, between dieting, sexuality, morality, religion.
A. We’re saddled with a couple things historically. Your own Boston Cooking School [founded in 1879], all those ladies — and I guess they were all ladies — were basically Puritans, a generation or two away from strict Puritanism. You weren’t supposed to take pleasure in physical tastes and that sort of stuff. The whole Protestant go-it-alone individualism, pleasure is to be mistrusted, is at the root of a lot of our attitudes to food to this day. It’s why we go on diets, probably. I’ve got four bookshelves in front of me now of diet books I’ve read, and no one really talks about the real aesthetic joys and rewards of a good meal.
Another book by Estabrook:
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit By Barry Estabrook
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato
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