Last week, I caught a bug that put me off food.
I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that, while feverishly wandering my house from bed to sofa to chair to bathroom floor, I had only one need: not to be fed.
In a kitchen that is chronically lacking in sustenance - regardless of the groceries I put in my fridge, the only things it ever yields are mouldy cheese and mustard - you would think that this would be simple. But it seems nearly impossible in a sustenance-obsessed culture such as ours to block out all talk of food. While I enjoy my dinner as much as the next person (especially if it involves oysters and champagne), there is something downright unhealthy about our growing obsession with what should be one of life's least complicated pleasures.
Good food, in my view, is like good sex - the more you do it, the less you ought to talk about it. I have often noticed, moreover, that the fussiest foodies often seem to enjoy eating the least and vice versa.
But it's a shock-jock universe - all talk all the time - when it comes to food these days. Where the television landscape once relegated culinary matters to specialty cable networks, my prime-time dial in Britain is clogged today with the likes of Jamie, Nigella and former plus-size model Sophie Dahl, who has rebranded herself as a stick-thin culinary goddess on the BBC's The Delicious Miss Dahl. The new British Vogue informs me that even lacto-pescetarian Gwyneth Paltrow has a cookbook in the works.
But it's not all the interest in food that has stuck in my craw so much as what it has led to - so-called experts haranguing the public over what we should and shouldn't eat.
I don't like being told, for instance, to down my greens any more than the people of Huntington, W.Va., recently enjoyed Jamie Oliver rolling into town with his camera crew and mockney cries of a "food revolution." Americans (including David Letterman) rejected his healthy notions so roundly that it caused Oliver to break down in tears on camera and sniff, "They don't understand me."
But yes, Jamie, they do. Being nagged about what to eat is annoying and - guess what? - not all that productive. As a recent study published in the U.S.-based Journal of the National Cancer Institute found, eating the government-recommended five fruits and vegetables a day has only "a very modest effect" on preventing cancer anyway.
Now I'm not slagging off salads here: I eat bushels of rapini and sweet potatoes and asparagus, but not because the World Health Organization told me to. I eat my veggies because they're delicious and satisfying and the sight of them makes me hungry (when I don't happen to feel ill). Eating for any other reason is a sad state of affairs in a society as rich as ours. And yet the nutrition zealots persist in telling us what to put in our mouths with a breathtaking certainty that is only surpassed by the fickleness of the food trends they promote. After all, wasn't oat bran supposed to cure colon cancer?
According to Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma and the recently published Food Rules, North American's obsessive focus on food maybe the cause of, rather than the solution to, its much-publicized "obesity epidemic."
"We have an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating because our fascination with supposedly 'good nutrients' becomes an excuse to eat too much," he told me in an interview this week. "Having a relaxed attitude toward food is also a component of good health too."
Take, for example, the recent decision by the New York City Department of Education to ban homemade goods from all school bake sales as part of its effort to target childhood obesity. In an effort to make schools "healthier food environments," only 27 pre-packaged snack items, including low-fat Doritos and whole-grain Pop Tarts, are now allowed to be sold on school grounds. According to the logic of the New York City government, in other words, low-fat processed foods are now "healthier" than granny's oatmeal raisin cookies.
Needless to say, it is this kind of reductionist, bureaucratic over-thinking that really ruins my appetite - and lots of other people's too, as evidenced by hundreds of parents and children who turned up at New York City Hall last month to protest against the ban by banging wooden spoons on pots.
The phenomenon also irks Malcolm Jolley, editor of the Toronto-based online food magazine Good Food Revolution (which has no connection to Oliver). While Jolley spends his working life writing about, eating and making food, he takes issue with the notion that some foods are inherently good or evil. "Delicious foods are the ones that are good for you," he says. "I think the problem is more the vilification of things like animal fat or carbs in favour of silly cure-alls like omega-3s or antioxidants."
Jolley rejects the idea of overanalyzing the nutritional content of food and instead promotes the notion of eating for pure physical and cultural pleasure. The main health benefit of food, he says, "ought to be keeping us alive."
Pollan agrees wholeheartedly, instructing us to "tune out the day-to-day findings of nutrition science, which do tend to exaggerate small changes in knowledge. The basics stay pretty much the same, though: Eat real whole foods and avoid processed foods."
And if you feel like a box of Pop Tarts for breakfast, knock yourself out. I just don't want to hear about it.