You Can Thank ‘Paleo Nostalgia’ for the Paleo Diet’s Popularity
LatestThe epiphanic moment in Midnight in Paris doesn’t have anything to do with artists, cultural decadence, or even trans-epoch romance — it’s all about a mundane dream visit to the dentist in which Hemingway sycophant Gil Pender realizes that, holy shit, the local anesthetics in the early 20th century sucked so much that it was probably better to just suffer with an infected tooth than have a sadistic giant named McTeague dig around in your mouth with a rusty screwdriver and some good ol’ Yankee Doodle know-how. “Golden age thinking,” or nostalgia for a time we never knew, is part of the inescapable absurdity of being human. Nostalgia intrudes — rudely, often uninvited — on every conversation about modern innovations, from the inevitable demise of artisanally mass-produced Nora Roberts paperbacks, to the proliferation of processed, carb-heavy foodstuffs. Wasn’t human existence soooo much more salubrious when everyone (except all those poors who couldn’t afford expensive books!) read musty leather-bound volumes and trudged out to the garden to yank a turnip out of the ground every time they wanted a snack? Surely, those were the days.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this misplaced nostalgia has been the so-called Paleo diet, which contends that people didn’t evolve to sit on their haunches and eat cheese Danishes all morning — we were meant to run through the woods, harpooning mastodons and grunting inarticulately at each other. The human body wasn’t engineered to deal with bread and pasta, so eating lots of bread and pasta turns us all into the the dough people from WALL-E, not the worst fate in the world if someone invents one of those sweet hover recliners.