Diet

This past week has shown that, when discussing the colour of eggshells, we need to walk on them. Sainsbury’s has announced that it is phasing out brown eggs in favour of white because the latter have a 12.7 per cent lower carbon footprint. As suspiciously precise as that figure is, it caused some commentators to rant that net zero madness is just a cover for cost-cutting. White hens lay white eggs and eat less feed, which in turn reduces emissions, so what's everyone getting scrambled up over?  However, buried in the original press release is a throwaway admission that Britain only switched to brown eggs in the 1970s because they were ‘perceived as more natural’. Even Queen Elizabeth ‘favour[ed] brown eggs, believing that they taste better’.

I bought some pork scratchings the other day, and the packet said it was ‘high in protein’. Gruntled, the brand, is distributed by the Keto Shop and is now being marketed as some type of health food. I had to laugh. Wolfing down a packet of pork scratchings in the pub is now part of the latest health kick? Demand for protein is being driven by health-conscious middle classes, including Gen Zers. According to one national poll, nearly half of adults in the UK have increased their protein intake in the past year, including a whopping two-thirds of those aged 16-to-34-year-olds. This is boosting demand for chicken breasts, lentils and – I can hardly believe I’m writing this sentence – cottage cheese.

‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us all, but women in the most dehumanising terms, into mere bodies; bodies that can be chopped, changed, rearranged increasingly even to accommodate the outward trappings of the opposite sex. This manifests itself most completely of course in porn, as it always has, where the cold-eyed camera sees everything of the body and nothing of the person inhabiting it.

Jordan Peterson has spent much of the past few years eloquently torpedoing all that the liberal progressives hold dear, and he’s not done yet. Citing a profound health transformation, the bolshy Canadian psychologist is now piling into the opinion-saturated arena of diet, and the vegans aren’t happy. But Peterson’s latest revelation is not about culture wars or the eroding of free speech. This is about his own mental health, which has at times been unspeakably grim. Controversial as ever, Peterson is now claiming to have beaten away his regimen of antidepressants through the excessive consumption of a rather more rudimentary substance: meat.