Last week, within the space of twenty four hours, my Uncle Bill snail mailed me a well-intentioned copy of a Consumer Reports article putatively debunking the benefits of gluten free eating, and Slate.com published an account of the burgeoning gluten free backlash. (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/12/gluten_free_fad_don_t_be_annoyed_says_celiac_disease_memoirist.html)
Note that I went gluten free voluntarily a little over three years ago a few months before we found out that my daughter, Sammi, has Celiac disease. For me, a gluten free diet has resulted in reduced fatigue and anxiety, results that haven’t flagged after 36 months, while for Sammi it has produced a return to basic good health. So I am your basic true believer; quitting gluten changed my life and, essentially, saved my daughter’s. Accordingly, I scanned Uncle Bill’s mailing so that I didn’t feel like the guy who only ever consumes one version of the news (be it Fox News or NPR) because he doesn’t have the humility and/or confidence to admit that his side might be wrong about a thing or three. It turns out that the best Consumer Reports could come up with is to assume that if you have given up gluten you must be eating gobs of rice, which rice, Consumer Reports is happy to report, might be high in arsenic. (The high in arsenic rice sounds a lot like the high in mercury tuna, which means that tuna might finally get some respect; just imagine how exhausting the whole “chicken of the sea” label must be for tuna, leaving tuna no choice but to constantly remind folks that the actual sequence of events had life evolving in the ocean first and then crawling out of the sea onto dry land, i.e. chicken should rightly be considered “tuna of the land,” although this label may now fall to toxic-in-high-quantity rice.) Other than considering giving up eating rice cakes lathered in sunflower butter and jelly for breakfast, which I consider a daily confirmation of security in my masculinity, I tossed the article into the recycling bin without a second thought. (The sheer femininity of rice cakes makes the English language’s lack of gendered nouns seem stifling; why can’t we have la rice cake and le Manwich, even if this would lead to the difficulty of deciding on a gender for more androgynous foods like the marshmallow, which takes nature’s most androgynous shape, the equally round and straight cylinder.)
The gluten free backlash described on Slate.com did, however, hold my interest. Mainly because of a New Yorker cartoon it quoted thusly: “I’ve only been gluten-free for a week, but I’m already really annoying.” Moi? Annoying? But perhaps that’s exactly why I’ve taken so well to a gluten free lifestyle. Nothing, you see, gives me more pleasure than annoying my wife Jen by, e.g., pronouncing words in a way that really annoys her. I have a whole repertoire:
• Catsup instead of ketchup
• Pronouncing falcon so that the first syllable rhymes with all rather than Cal
• Pronouncing karate like the original Japanese’s “car-ahh-tay” rather than the Americanized “ka-rah-tee” and with the emphasis spread equally across all three syllables as opposed to the standard American pronunciation’s emphasis on the second syllable
• Pronouncing the s on the end of Illinois
• Pronouncing vegan “vay-gan” instead of “vee-gan” (Since I enjoy being annoying, and not being an asshole, I don’t use this pronunciation in front of actual vegans. Although this doesn’t mean that I am not an asshole, or that being an asshole doesn’t give me pleasure that I am too self deluding to acknowledge.)
But the strange thing is that unlike my relationship with Jen, in which I am annoying on purpose as a way of playing with her, in being gluten free I am unintentionally annoying; I am gluten free so that I can be anxiety and fatigue free, not so that I can turn down pieces of homemade cake offered to me in a spirit of kindness (which isn’t fun at all) and not even because I get to nonchalantly explain that it is gluten free bread when a friend calls me out for eating a sandwich (which is only fun if it does manage to annoy my friend; what more annoying response to “Gotcha” could there be than “No you didn’t”- as an example see Pee Wee Herman’s preemptive “I meant to do that,” which is both funny and annoying).
This sheds light on one of the strangest dynamics in human interpersonal relations, which is that if I do something for myself that feels really good and that I’m really excited about, I naturally want to share it with others, if only by talking about it and how good it’s making me feel. But this sharing, defined as any outward expression of passion for my new undertaking, even including simply engaging in the behavior that makes me feel good, is automatically interpreted by any individual who doesn’t either share my enthusiasm, or at least some form of sympathy towards it, as a judgment against them. In other words, “This is really cool, it changed my life and I’ve never felt better, and I highly recommend it,” gets automatically translated into and heard as “Excuse me, but they way you’ve been living your life is a big mistake.” And you can’t stop the translation by keeping your mouth shut; just going about your day and ordering a gluten free meal in a restaurant without otherwise making a peep is inevitably subversive.
In Tiger Writing, Gish Jen tells the story of a writing teacher who, in the midst of insulting Jen’s potential as a writer, explained that all good writing is subversive. The teacher was manifestly wrong about the exceptionally talented Jen, and I would suggest that he or she was also wrong about good writing. Writing needs to affirm as much as it subverts. But if we subtract one word from the lousy teacher’s formula, I think we are definitely on to something: All good is subversive. For whatever reason, we human beings seem to be hard wired for a zero sum game. If you have more access to the good, be it through gluten free eating, religious conversion, or simple luck, I necessarily have less. How else to account for Consumer Reports’ schadenfreude in their discovery of arsenic in the presumed staple of the gluten free diet?
My own faith tradition hints rather strongly at the subversive nature of the good: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Let us not be confused, Jesus is still very much the Prince of Peace, it’s just that establishing peace on earth requires rather a lot of conflict, even if this conflict takes the form of non-violent resistance. A pithy way of saying this in the Christian tradition might be to assert that there is nothing more subversive than spreading the good news. But whatever your faith tradition or lack thereof, the larger point in play here is that the good, however we experience it, be it via gluten free living or veganism, Christianity or Judaism, doesn’t make our life any easier. Instead, it does just the opposite, stirring up trouble for us wherever we go. That trouble could range from, on the low end, being the target of snarky New Yorker cartoons, all the way up to having your life threatened because of your religious beliefs.
In sum, the good leads to trouble, and the only way through that trouble is fidelity to the good, which guarantees more trouble. Annoying, isn’t it? But kind of funny, too.
Consumer Reports: “Looks like you’re eating arsenic for breakfast, buck-o.”
Me: “I meant to do that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment