The Bad Paleo's Guide to Good Living.

Vegetarians are on the outs (again); Jim Goad recently launched a scathing broadside.  Meat, not factory farmed, is back in and moral.  

 

It’s a distant, barely a footnote, memory, when the hipster diets of vegan or vegetarians held an alleged moral high ground reaching a peak perhaps with a very good article on modern “factory farming” in the American Conservative  , back when it was rebellious to subscribe.(The vivid imagery of alien people working in the horrors of a modern American factory farm, was one of the few glimpses on the Right of immigrants doing jobs no Americans would do--nor should anybody. Corporations really are engaged in Marxist exploitation).

South Beach/low carb diets could never capture the imagination, perhaps because we knew too many people on such a regime, and found the Puritanism with all it’s extremes a bit off putting. Plus Splenda is just wrong.   

As localism was becoming popular for a faction of the dissident Right in so far as eating from a local farmer, along came the paleo diet, promoted in the political realm, getting on about four years ago, by Lew Rockwell and Roissy--who deemed the paleo diet Alpha, amongst others.  Combinding localism with an ogre’s love of great things like bacon, beef, fish and so forth, a new combination was formed.  Gone was the proletarian’s diet of fried breaded fish and potato; enter a portion of grass fed flank stake, broccoli, and salad topped with uncured bacon.  Gone was pasta and beans, in was coconut and more bacon.

In the age where everything is political, one must have a politics of eating.

So it is little wonder a new combination has formed and rallied around a material thing, “raw milk” –an odd thing from the strictly diet perspective as dairy is outside the paleo diet.  No matter though; Raw Milk and its plight has become part of the paleo diet/localvore/Americanist resistance imagination, a sort of in-group code word like chanting Attica in the 70s.

Most paleo diet blogs are about living longer and better and so forth, but I have to believe that there are paleo diet fans, perhaps like myself, who see it as a great balancing act with the many vices they juggle, and perhaps that will be the next act in the politics of food, something along the lines of John Zmirak's The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living.