What Clean Eating Got Wrong, and What It Got Right by Accident

For about three years, in a previous version of my life, I ran small weekend workshops about food. There was a whiteboard. On the whiteboard there were two columns, and I wrote the words CLEAN and DIRTY at the top of them, and then I stood there while a room of perfectly reasonable adults dictated which foods belonged where. Bread went in the wrong column. So did cheese. Somebody once put olives in the wrong column and I let it happen without a word. I think about that room more often than is comfortable.

The word did the damage

Nobody in that room was stupid, me included. The idea sitting underneath it was reasonable enough: most of us eat a lot of industrially assembled food and would probably enjoy cooking more of our own. That is a fine thing to say out loud. The problem is that we did not say it. We said clean, and clean has an opposite, and the opposite of clean is not less good for you. It is filthy. Once a vocabulary of purity attaches itself to eating it stops being about food within roughly a week and becomes about the person doing the eating. The term itself was never technical. It came out of marketing and the internet, and it never had a definition anybody could pin down, which is exactly why it spread so efficiently.

What the vocabulary cost, as far as I can tell, was not anybody's health. It cost people their ease. They arrived at those workshops already anxious and left with better organized anxiety, which at the time felt to me like progress, because they could now name the thing they were worried about. A woman once asked me, entirely seriously, whether it was acceptable for her to eat a slice of her son's birthday cake. I gave her an answer. I would like very much to go back and give her a different one.

Where it fell apart for me

I can date the collapse. I went to a friend's house for dinner and I brought my own food. Not an allergy. Not a dish I had been asked to contribute. I carried a container of my own dinner to a table where somebody had spent an afternoon cooking, and I ate out of it, and I told myself I was being disciplined. She was gracious about it in a way I had not earned. Driving home I understood, with the delayed and total clarity these things arrive with, that I had just made a woman feel bad about her own cooking in her own kitchen, in the name of eating well. Whatever eating well means, it cannot possibly mean that.

So that is the test I use now, and it is the only rule I kept. If a way of eating makes you worse at sitting at a table with other people, it is not working, whatever else it may be doing for you.

What it got right by accident

And yet. I would be lying if I said the whole thing was worthless, because a handful of habits from that period outlived the philosophy that produced them, and they are still with me.

• Cook more of your own food. Not for purity. Because it tastes better, costs less, and you find out what is in it as a side effect rather than as a project.
• Put vegetables in the middle of the plate. This turned out to be an enormous upgrade in pleasure rather than a sacrifice, which nobody in that room believed at the time, myself very much included.
• Read the label out of curiosity instead of fear. It is genuinely interesting to know how things are made.
• Buy the ingredient rather than the assembled product where you reasonably can. Whole vegetables, whole grains, a piece of fish rather than a thing shaped like a fish.

Strip the morality out of that list and what remains is a set of ordinary domestic habits that cooks in most places have had forever, without needing a name for them or a whiteboard to hold them. My grandmother would have found the framework baffling and would then have gone on cooking almost precisely what the framework recommends, because that was what sat in front of her and it was whatever the season had.

Plant-forward without the flag

I eat mostly plants. I am careful about how I phrase that, because the moment it hardens into an identity it starts doing the same work the word clean was doing. Vegetarianism proper has a long and serious history, philosophical and religious, running back thousands of years across several traditions, and I have not earned a place in it. I cook this way because I like it, because the food is far better than it used to be, and because I got tired of the rest of it.

The version I kept

Here is what fits on a card now. Cook when you can. Eat things that taste like themselves. Sit down. Do not make other people manage your food rules, and do not build a personality out of a shopping list. There is no clean column. There is dinner, and how much attention you brought to it, and who is sitting across from you. The longer version of how I got from the whiteboard to here is on the about page, along with the parts I am less proud of.

None of that is a program and none of it is enforceable, which is more or less the point. A rule you can fail is a rule that will eventually have you lying to somebody about what you had for lunch.

I threw the whiteboard out. It was one of those small physical acts that ends up meaning more than it should. Then I went home and made pasta with butter and a truly excessive amount of black pepper, and it was one of the best things I ate that month, and it would have gone in the wrong column.