Dietary elitism in the NYT. Surprise!

I'm pretty tired of "experts" telling you what you should eat. Mark Bittman (a food writer I usually respect) rubbed me the wrong way with his recent article on the Mediterranean Diet. This diet is supposedly good for your heart, but as Bittman admits, the control group was faulty, and the conclusions of the original study were far from earth-shaking.

Bittman also adds that the Mediterranean Diet is awesome, "Unless you're committed to a diet big on junk food and red meat, or you don't like to cook." (In other words, basically everyone.) He says this without irony, which only cements his reputation as an ivory tower food prescriptivist, utterly out of touch with regular Americans leading regular lives.

Dismissing people with bad diets as people who "don't like to cook" is the worst kind of elitism. Many people just plain don't know how to cook, and don't have the time to learn. Most people are working full-time jobs, juggling children, trying to keep it together. Do you really want to be the one to dump an extra burden on them, just because you think it's important? For a family facing foreclosure, or crushing credit card debt, or an hour-long commute each way to work, "Cooking more fresh food" is pretty low on their priority list.

We didn't get here because - as many "experts" seem to believe - we're too dumb to tell real food from junk food. We got here because we're too busy to do anything else. There's a reason it's called "convenience food." It's convenient.

I have made a lot of huge changes to my diet for the better over the last few years. But I was raised on frozen dinners, by a single mom who worked full-time as a secretary while taking night classes to earn an MBA. Even if she wanted to whip up "a vegetable dish or two, some legumes and a piece of fish, all cooked in or dressed with olive oil, and maybe a little bit of bread (preferably whole grain)" she wouldn't have had time, in the half hour she had after getting home from work, before she had to change clothes and go to school.

Sure, we should all eat better, and there are a lot of ways to do so. But please step down off your patronizing soap box and start treating the "typical American" like human beings.

Image courtesy Flickr/Spanish Recipes