March 18 2003

DISCUSSIONS OF DIET tend to oppress on a number of levels. There is, for one thing, confusion: studies are constantly bursting forth with admonitions to eat more of this, less of that, even if last month we had been admonished to eat less of this, more of that. In our little household, for instance, the once-friendly potato has fallen into disgrace because of its high glycemic index, and the daily cook (that would be me) has been forced to make other arrangements that generally involve legumes – not that there's anything wrong with legumes.

The very word diet, meanwhile, is killingly grim: It means some antifat regime consisting of unattractive foods on the one hand and the forswearing of attractive foods on the other. It means sackcloth and ashes and the death of pleasure.

Of course, diet doesn't really have to mean those things, and while the word will probably never strike us as sexy, we are perhaps already coming to understand it as something other, or at least more, than a two-syllable form of no. I make this claim in part because of some recent browsing in Jed Diamond's The Whole Man Program (Wiley, $14.95), a guidebook for men older than 40. Like most such books, Whole Man is a potpourri of wisdom and nonsense, but an aspect of the former is a series of extended discussions about diet.

These are not at all depressing. They deal in gradations rather than absolutes – less meat and animal fat (and potatoes!), more fresh fruits and vegetables, plenty of water, green tea, red wine, and exercise – and they emphasize the importance of pleasure in eating.

"The opposite of the Male American Diet is not the Inedible and Boring Diet," Diamond writes; men need not be reduced to "eating wheat grass, juicing carrots, and subsisting on cabbage and grapefruit.... We can, and should, have food that gives us pleasure."

It is startling to see this proposition so bluntly put, especially in the context of dietary guidance. Pleasure of any kind strikes at the dark heart of our lingering puritanism. Most of us believe on some level that if it's good for us it's sure to taste bad, part of the wider belief that good rises only from suffering. We have forgotten, or suppressed the ancient understanding, that pleasure and pain are fairly reliable guides in life. They are not infallible, true; we must all resist the urge to subsist on ice-cream cones. But if we resist eating something because it doesn't appeal, the answer isn't to force ourselves to eat it anyway but to find some alternative that does appeal. In today's cornucopia, that isn't difficult.