After liberalism | The Spectator

The carnivore confessions: I’ve never felt better than on my meat-only diet

Since late last summer, I’ve been experimenting with something pretty crazy. It’s not drugs. Nor is it a trendy celebrity religion. It’s meat. Like Jordan Peterson and other great apes, I’m on the carnivore diet. The carnivore diet is a lot simpler than keto, for example, which involves counting macronutrients. On carnivore, you merely refrain from eating anything that isn’t an animal product. Beef, lamb, chicken, pork and seafood are all in, but vegetables, fruit and grains are out. It’s reverse veganism, or the hunter-gatherer diet, but with more hunting and no gathering. Apart from those who work at a zoo, most people know of the carnivore diet because of Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila.

John Keiger

Save French food!

The annual publication of the century-old Michelin restaurant guides creates an excitement in France akin to the Oscars, but the 2020 Guide Michelin is provoking dyspepsia. This is the first time since 1965 that the restaurant founded by Paul Bocuse — the pope, the Napoleon, of French cuisine — no longer figures among the 27-strong group of French restaurants receiving the ultimate culinary accolade: three-star status. Two years after the maestro’s death, the black truffle soup and volaille de Bresse en vessie Mère Fillioux no longer seduce Michelin inspectors. What Bocuse called la sainte trilogie, butter, cream, wine, has lost its infallibility. And Monsieur Paul is not the first to go.

Jane Stannus

Salami of the sea

‘Seacuterie’ is a crime of a word. It looks OK in writing, if you don’t think about it too much, or if you’re the kind of person who approaches words like a scientist observing a new strain of bacillus. A linguistics student would point out that seacuterie is a portmanteau word, in which segments of multiple words are cut loose from their motherships and roped together into rafts of new meaning, producing such fantabulous and indispensable neologisms as ‘sheeple’ and ‘frenemies’. ‘Seacuterie,’ he’d tell you, is a portmanteau of ‘sea’ and ‘charcuterie.’ That’s all very well, but portmanteau or no portmanteau, ‘seacuterie’ sounds silly when you say it aloud.

Roger Kimball

Cab and conversation

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the US edition here. I had to go to Hillsdale, Michigan, home of Hillsdale College, to make my first visit to Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town that is the epicenter of about 100 California wineries and tens of thousands of vineyard acres. On this first, virtual trip, I dipped my toe into the Alexander Valley, the region north-northwest of Healdsburg. There are more than 40 vineyards in the Alexander Valley and I sampled two of the best, Silver Oak and Jordan. At least since Plato’s Symposium (Greek for ‘drinking party’), it has been understood that the essential accompaniment to wine is not food, though that is nice, but conversation.

Food & Drink