Some lovely and typical high-prose from the London Review of Books, in the course of Steven Shapin's piece on the Atkins' diet (Mr. Atkins is in the thumbnail pic):
Most fundamentally, eating is a moment of ontological transformation: it is when what is not-you - not rational and not animate, at the time you consume it - starts to become you, the rational being which ultimately decides what stuff to consume. Flesh becomes reason at one remove, and every supper is, in that sense, eucharistic. We are, literally and fundamentally, what we eat. The material transformation is simultaneous with the possibility of social and moral transformation or the advertisement of the social and moral states to which you are laying claim. A temperate person is someone who eats temperately; a posh and powerful person is someone who gets an 8 o'clock table at the Ivy; respect for life is shown by vegetarianism; red-blooded machismo by the consumption of red meat; your friends eat with you at home; you have coffee with your colleagues; the High eat later than the Low, thus making a standard display of delayed gratification and acquiring the associated status of those who can wait an hour longer than others for their food. Self-nourishing and self-fashioning both happen at the table.Sounds like the kind of rationalisations I make when faced with another blueberry muffin stand at the web cafe... the Paradigm Diet: ontology over carbohydrates!
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