Celebrity news
New year, new food porn insanity
Website:
The Daily Beast
Date:
January 7, 2016
This week, Tom Daley and his partner Dustin Lance Black gave a very sweet account of their relationship to Out magazine.
There were lovely details about the night they met, the cute passing on of a phone number, and today—happily ensconced together—picnics in the park and marriage proposals.
Depending on your attitude to coupledom and love, by the end there would have been stars in your eyes, or you would have been reaching for a bitter swig of gin.
But astonishingly, Daley’s publicity coup de grâce of the week—fitting in perfectly with a first week of 2016 media obsession with food, diet, and personal health—was the enormous, multi-compartmentalized pan he was pictured using to cook a full English breakfast, for “the American,” i.e., DLB. Awww.
The image has, at the time of writing, attracted almost 49,000 likes, and its popularity sent many a journalist out to try the contraption Daley is modeling so decorously, which seems to be the Master Pan by Lakeland, now predictably all sold out.
My first uncharitable thought: Daley really eats this kind of stuff, and still has the chiseled, muscled body he has? Then, after a swig of gin—and like thousands of others who shared the image from Daley’s Instagram—I became a little obsessed with the pan and the artful array of eggs, sausages, rashers of bacon, and baked beans.
But he is not alone: The first week of the new year has featured a multi-pan of food stories, predictably perhaps as many go into a post-Christmas tizzy about excess and detoxing after the seasonal break.
After telling us to indulge ourselves, the media and show-offs on social media are showing us their diets, both homely and abstemious.
After Daley’s sizzling bacon and sausage circus came the Debbie Downer: Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s chef revealed to Boston.com that the couple do not eat white sugar, white flour, MSG, coffee, caffeine, fungus, and dairy. Nightshade vegetables are out “because they’re not anti-inflammatory,” Allen Campbell said.
“So no tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, or eggplants. Tomatoes trickle in every now and then, but just maybe once a month. I’m very cautious about tomatoes. They cause inflammation.”
Come on, Mr. Campbell. The best things in life cause inflammation. That’s why we have the finest anti-inflammatories!
What a miserable menu Campbell provided. It left you dearly hoping that somehow, Brady and Bündchen were both taking secret deliveries—grilled cheese and truffle fries in the dead of night—behind their dictatorial chef’s back.
Campbell is “obsessed with plant-based diets,” apparently, thinking about “the future of the planet and the future of humans.” A plant-based diet “has the power to reverse and prevent disease” he says.
“80 percent of what they eat is vegetables,” Campbell says. “[I buy] the freshest vegetables. If it’s not organic, I don’t use it. And whole grains: brown rice, quinoa, millet, beans. The other 20 percent is lean meats: grass-fed organic steak, duck every now and then, and chicken. As for fish, I mostly cook wild salmon.”
Sugar “is the death of people,” he says, which made me want to eat a bar of chocolate and courier some immediately to Bündchen and Brady.
And then this teeth-grinder: “I use Himalayan pink salt as the sodium. I never use iodized salt.” (I know, I needed to squeeze a stress ball after that, too.) Brady and Bündchen’s children have veggie sushi, obviously, and the ingredients and making of said sushi were documented in exhaustive detail.
Yes, it all sounds like the right things to eat, but it also sounds fairly miserable and certainly, as far as menus can ever be, preachily self-righteous.
Still, the results of the world’s most miserable diet are visible in pictures of Bündchen striding forth on a tropical beach, with her little “koala,” her son Ben, attached to her back.
My little koala ?❤️ Meu pequeno coala
A photo posted by Gisele Bündchen (@gisele) on
Jennifer Lopez is emulating Bündchen’s example, revealing she eats “a lot of green vegetables, asparagus, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kale.”
Away from famous people’s kitchens, in Canada, at the first McDonald’s stand-alone café, since December they have been serving quinoa edamame mandarin salad, and kale and Brussels sprouts salad.
Already matcha (powdered green tea)—again, it feels like to this jaded follower of New Year’s food fads—is being vouched as the “biggest superfood of the year.” And who are we to dispute the collective wisdom of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kylie Jenner?
Meanwhile, the revelation that bowls are replacing plates, according to the London Times, came just as the Daily Mail provided a helpful guide to what “tummy type” you are—perfectly timed for the post-Christmas guilt-fest and illustrated with a picture that was both stress-inducing and infantile, showing women scowling at tummies variously described as “wine,” “mummy,” “thyroid,” “pear,” “stress,” and “bloated.”
Then, for the ultimate in self-induced anxiety, there’s the app that calculates the number of sugar cubes your favorite food contains—thanks again, Daily Mail.
This New Year’s food madness shows no signs of abating, particularly as for every story about food, websites have three others showing perfectly tanned and toned celebrities relaxing on very nice-looking beaches.
Daley’s next Instagram picture, after the viral hit of him and the breakfast pan, was a topless shot of himself holding some lemons, supposedly as part of a series of health and fitness hacks for his fans. His perfectly muscled, lean, and handsome body was on full display.
As one reader noted, the shot really had nothing to do with lemons.