Daily Blague

On Thursday night, I went down to the West Village to have dinner with Édouard, of Sale Bête, and le copain. The latter, a very fit triathlete, expressed an understandable impatience with the idea of treating obesity as a disease, at least on today's broad scale. I asked him if he had read Michael Pollan's critique of nutritionism in the Sunday Times Magazine. He hadn't, and I did a very bad job of arguing its importance, in part because I couldn't decide which is worse, Americans' credulousness or their government's inaction. As a result, my comments were disorganized and inconsequent. I hope I've done better here.  

There's a line of thought in Mr Pollan's piece that I don't take up at Portico: the bad science inherent in premature findings. What we don't yet know about life in scientific terms stretches like an infinite dessert beyond the little that we do know, and most of what we know is reductionist, the study of discrete areas. We know just enough about nutrition, it seems, to confuse everyone. Once upon a time, for example, fats were fats. Now there are "good" fats and "bad" fats. We can be sure that there is much more to be learned, and "scientists" who draw sweeping dietary conclusions from what we happen to know at the moment are not doing their job.

We had dinner at the Hudson Street branch of Le Gamin. My roast chicken was delicious, but I was too interested in the conversation to be very assiduous about cutting it up. Perhaps Édouard will be good enough to remind me of the name of the very fine wine that the three of us drank two bottles of.