Undercover New York: The Diets We Dread

When I was a little kid and my parents first bought their house on LI, we had only one gas station in Shirley.

The proprietor — a human disaster area — was very friendly to my father. The station owner looked to be 1,000 years old, was very rickety, and had a complexion like bond paper. He recommended that my father follow The Sauerkraut Diet.

We tried. I used to actually like buttermilk, but the liquid from sauerkraut was something beyond.

In short order, the station owner disappeared. His sauerkraut diet apparently was no help. Sauerkraut and its noxious liquid disappeared from our home at the same time.

I remember my aunt Anna, who hailed from Eastern Europe and spoke mainly Yiddish, touting the benefits of a drink called Slivovitz. This was a clear, sweetened liquor, probably vodka, infused with actual pieces of gold dust. My father used to hang out a lot in the jewelry district, where most of the oldsters also swore by it. Useless.

I was told that my uncle Rudolph had a persistent skin ailment which was not cured until his doctors treated him with colloidal gold.

Surprisingly, I just read this morning that most of our current federal cabinet is on the Sauerkraut Diet. This includes our head of Health and Human Services.

Have we as a society regressed to a situation of Central European Dread?

Since I have always loved food, I have for years adopted one fad diet after another. The worst was something called The Beverly Hills Diet. The woman who popularized this had an East Indian adviser who said she had to cleanse herself by eating only fruit. To this day, I fear pineapples.

A friend of mine followed a guy called George Ohsawa, who ordered people to eat only soybean-based products and certain whole grains such as brown rice. This would also purify you. One day this friend, who despite being blonde had an unnaturally pale complexion, fell down in Lower Manhattan and was brought by ambulance to the nearest hospital. They diagnosed her with pernicious anemia.

What the hell is the answer? My mother used to say, “Eat a little of everything and you’ll be OK.” Works for turtles. Why can’t it work for us? The naturalists claim that Homo sapiens are built to be omnivores.