His best formula was to take a complex culinary process and break it down to fundamental principles based on a combination of history and science, and then turn that into something the regular home cook could accomplish. Sometimes his history was suspect and occasionally his science went awry and more than once he got sucked into a geeky gadgetry vortex that entertained mostly himself. Nonetheless his approach was always based in reality. What he tried to do could be done by regular people, indeed in many cases substituting cheaper equipment for fancy “single-taskers”.
Until now. When he looked a bit skeletal guest-hosting Iron Chef a few weeks ago I thought, “Huh, he looks kind of skeletal. I wonder if he’s been sick?” No, he wasn’t sick, at least in the conventional sense. He had in fact succumbed to a far worse malady than a mere infection of the body. As I found out a couple days ago when I selected a recent episode of Good Eats, the ever-practical Mr. Brown had a much worse condition. He had written a diet book, and had starved himself to sell it.
It was a let down to say the least; in fact I felt somewhat betrayed. I’ve never had a lot of interest in “body shape activism” or any of the anti-anti-fat movements, but I do understand one thing: given the intense social pressure to be thin, and the overwhelming multitude of weight loss books, seminars, videos, programs and theories, the fact that there are still many overweight people mean that those weight loss methods don’t work. If any one of them did, everyone would be using it, and they would be thin.
That’s not to say that weight loss is impossible – of course it is. People are capable of losing incredible amounts of weight; that’s what keeps the dream alive. I’m sure someone came to Alton Brown and said, “If you can write some crap about nutrition, and then lose 50 pounds, we can sell your book as a miracle and you’ll make millions.” And he did, and will. If you starve yourself and spend every waking minute at the gym, you’ll lose weight. As Milo Bloom put it, summarizing simple physics, “Eat less, exercise more.”
One can avoid pregnancy by employing abstinence, and if used correctly it’s 100% effective. The problem with this approach, like Milo’s or other any other diet program is that people want to have lives too. A prescription based on willpower is doomed. The physical drives will always overwhelm feeble conscious manifestos, and even if the mind has a temporary triumph it will eventually turn. The fact beyond “diets don’t work” is that the diet that worked yesterday doesn’t work tomorrow.
I would expect the young Alton Brown, the perky host that questioned conventional wisdom, to ask these kinds of questions. It would have been interesting to see his take on diet-book history. But it was easier for him to go with the flow. When his book stops paying royalties he’ll chub out again.
- jack*
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