Bring your appetite, not your fears, to the dining table

Photo: Kitty Leaken

At the beginning of every year, hot on the heels of holiday excess, my salad restaurant Vinaigrette fields a flurry of calls and emails about which of our menu items are “Whole 30 friendly.” If every generation has its favorite diet (remember Brandt, Atkins, The Zone, South Beach?), the one that has captured our attention now is the Whole 30.

The Whole 30 is a "clean eating plan" that calls for eliminating dairy, sugar, legumes, alcohol and grains from your diet for 30 days. I’ve come to think of the Whole 30 as a mythic ideal. Myths can be useful, but this one has highlighted a streak of near-evangelical dietary extremism in our culture.

Many of my customers now seem to believe that entire food groups are basically poisonous and must be vanquished. Whereas people in the past might have wanted to shed five or 10 pounds, going easy on the carbs, we now embark upon holistic-sounding but severe “cleanses” or “fasts.” We’ve scared ourselves about microscopic amounts of phytates in nuts or the insidious trace gluten that lurks in the cloudy veins of Roquefort cheese.

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