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This is a guest post from Slate's Timothy Noah
In the April 4 New York Times Magazine Norris Church Mailer, the last of Norman Mailer's six wives and author of a new memoir, tells Alex Witchel that Norman cheated on her with "a small army of women":
When Norris discovered the scope of Mailer's infidelities, she was struck by how many of the women were either his age-he was near 70 then-or significantly overweight. "He made the remark, ‘Sometimes I want to be the attractive one.' I think he felt if it wasn't somebody young and beautiful, he wasn't betraying me as much.
Notwithstanding Ms. Mailer's beauty and youth (when they met in 1975 she was, at 26, literally half his age), it won't come as a major surprise to anyone even glancingly familiar with Mailer's life and work that he remained a compulsive seducer of women into his twilight years. Mailer's libido was such an open book that well before his widow wrote A Ticket to the Circus (you might also consult a separate new memoir by Carole Mallory, a model who claims she began an affair with Norman three years after he married Norris) we knew not only what Mailer thought about sex, but specifically what he thought about sex with fat women. Witchel's magazine piece sent me back to Mailer's 1998 pan of Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full (a book I rather liked) in the New York Review of Books:
At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist-how you resist!-letting three hundred pounds take you over.
Even at the time I remember thinking this paragraph didn't tell you much about Wolfe's novel, or even about Mailer's opinion about Wolfe's novel. Both topics seemed to bore him. Making love to fat women, on the other hand, was a topic that clearly fired his literary imagination.
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We can't trust academics to tell us how to eat, says Michael Pollan in the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine. At best, the nutritional experts get it wrong—like when they told us to eat margarine instead of butter. At worst, they're colluding with food marketers to mislead the American public. So how might we find the path to healthy eating amidst a treacherous food landscape populated by lab-coated eggheads? By trusting in the "accumulated wisdom of the tribe."
It's an idea Pollan has been pushing for a long time. In a Times Magazine article from 2007, he proposed that traditional ways of eating—the ones we learn from our mothers and grandmothers—have evolved over many generations to optimize health. Now he's compiling some of these tried-and-true dietary folkways for a new book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. To that end, he invited readers of the Times' Well blog (written by Tara Parker-Pope) to supply their own homespun aphorisms about eating, and then published 20 of his favorites in the magazine on Sunday.
What about the other 2,703 suggestions made by Times readers? You can find them all on the Well blog, but only a few will make it into Pollan's guide for healthy eating. His aim, he tells us, was to collect "genuinely useful, and nutritionally sound, examples of popular wisdom about eating," but some of the tips provided "made little, if any, nutritional sense (and therefore didn't belong in the book)." Wait a second, how does Michael Pollan know the difference between what's nutritionally sound and what isn't? Is he—God forbid—-depending on the expertise of academics rather than the accumulated lore of the tribe?
Some tips from Mom, it would seem, are more correct than others. Quite a number of readers shared Mom's favorite dinnertime dictum: "Clean your plate." But that tip, passed down through the ages, does not make "nutritional sense" to Pollan. It certainly doesn't jibe with his cardinal rule to "eat less."
If we need someone with special knowledge to arbitrate among all these food-related traditions, then why bother with any of them? It all reminds me of something my mother used to say: "If you already know the answer, then don't bother asking."
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I'll say this for the excerpt from Frank Bruni's memoir that appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: Never before has a story of bulimia made me so desperately hungry. "Macaroni and cheese. There was macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it's sort of congealed and stiff at the edges." Yes, yes—me, too!
It's a wonderful piece, but I'm a little bothered by what it says, or implies, about our relationship with food. Bruni makes it sound as if he's been endlessly skirting between the Scylla of overeating and the Charybdis of bulimia. (According to Michael Pollan's blurb for the book, he's "plumbing the depths of our personal and collective eating disorders.") Yet there's no real evidence that the author was ever fat to begin with. Sure, he may have been chubby as a kid, but according to the memoir, he was 5-foot-10 in high school, and about 180 pounds. That translates to a body mass index of 25.8, or just barely "overweight," according to the standard cutoffs.
If anything, Bruni seems to have been much healthier than most Americans. Studies have repeatedly found that those who register as slightly overweight (on body mass index) live longer than people in the "normal" range. Bruni's a clear example of why that might be the case: As the star of his high-school swim team, he spent hours in the pool every day—a practice that surely contributed more muscle mass, and an inflated BMI. (At the time, writes Bruni, his doctor recommended that he lose "5 to 10 pounds." That was bad advice.)
Another clue emerges when Bruni shows up for his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He signs up for a fitness class, but at the first meeting "the teacher talked about something called a body-fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists ... I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day." But if he was fatter that half of the other students, that means he was thinner than half of them, too. Young Bruni was exactly average.
It's fine with me if Frank Bruni wants to be skinny for aesthetic reasons. (In the Times piece, at least, he never claims another motivation for his diets and purges.) But let's be careful about what we call overeating. If he wasn't putting his body at risk, then why make it sound like a problem?
Crusty Mac 'n Cheese photograph courtesy of Spike Mafford/Getty Images.