When journalist Sophie Haigney was talking to a friend about her fascination with some of the wackiest diets, her friend coined the term “dark eating.” And in one piece for the New York Times MagazineHaigney digs straight in. The story, for example, opens with influencer Kelly Pi sampling raw buffalo brains. It turns out that everything is raw for Pi, who avoids cooking anything, even the road-killed animals she occasionally scavenges. If that sounds crazy to you, Pi counters that the typical American diet of processed foods and alcohol—people “poison themselves”—sounds crazy to him. Haigney heard this same argument over and over again when she interviewed people on the fringes of nutrition thinking.
“Some avoided certain vitamins, or disavowed seed oils, or thought vegetables were unhealthy,” she writes. “Some swore by organ meats, others by cane sugar. Some snacked on raw chicken or took high doses of supplements. As strange as their diet seemed, they told me, the standard American diet – full of pesticides and preservatives, dyes and junk – was stranger.” Haigney’s story is less about evaluating the nutritional merits of diets and more about exploring the reasons why people adopt them. It turns out that many people surveyed said they had turned to unconventional diets in response to health concerns. The story also addresses the “n of one” principle popular in dark nutrition circles, “the idea that the only way to learn what’s good for you is to ignore large samples and experiment on your unique personality.” Read the full story, in which Haigney tastes some of the dishes herself.
Gn Health
