In Which We Are Always Eating The Wrong Thing

Limiting Your Choices

by ALEX CARNEVALE

I struggle with choices; I'm better with Sophie's choices. I'm always encouraged by the idea that I should be eating a banana split. Someone told me that the guy who wrote Eat This, Not That! used to do Julia Allison, but I'm not interested enough to google whether or not this is true. Such indeterminacy is not really David Zinczenko's method. We all secretly love being told what to do, ask Brad Pitt.

If this acrylic painting of Zinczenko is any indication, he has used his slimming methods for good and evil in equal parts. I accidentally learned that he had a three-year relationship with Rose McGowan, and I am doing some ab exercises in hope I will forget this "fact." Apparently he broke her heart by slowly pushing a page from Eat This, Not That! across a table towards her. The comparison was between Marilyn Manson's penis and his own.

Zinczenko comes from the large sorority/fraternity of overweight children. Most once-overweight people (they are sometimes called Feys) spend the rest of their lives tormenting other with their ideas about food, and Zinczenko is no exception. As a 2003 NYO profile put it:

"I wasn't always healthy," Mr. Zinczenko said. "I was overweight as a teen and pre-teen, and I saw my father as he kind of experienced the effects of bad life choices. He was an example of somebody who had everything: diabetes and heart disease and high blood pressure. He was obese. I think this magazine is the only magazine that helps guys live their lives better. We're not jerking off Johnny Depp for 6,000 words," Mr. Zinczenko said, not so subtly referring to a recent issue of GQ . "We're saving lives."

In an essay for Men's Health, Zinczenko summarized his childhood succintly: "My older brother would invite his friends over to spy on me while I ate lunch. ‘Don’t disturb the big animal,’ he’d tell them. ‘It’s feeding.’ ” Despite the fact that this guy sounds like the inspiration for Bradley Cooper's life, there is something amusing about him and his book that is roughly analogous to the way I felt about Zeitoun.

It's important to think about what you're eating, or so I have been told. The best strategy for dealing with KFC is inevitably a Hobbesian chaos, punctuated by an awkward conversation with a homeless man. Most of the places in Eat This, Not That! I have never eaten, and some of them clearly don't even exist.

Going to Chili's feels like cheating on Applebee's even though I never go to Applebee's because I hold a fundamental doubt in my heart about the associations between an apple and a bee. In general, I have next to no desire to confirm my suspicions about what eating an Old Timer Burger on a whole wheat bun would mean for my future.

As I've said, some of the places in the book are fabricated entirely, lending the whole affair a certain Codex Seraphinianus-feel. These sandwiches look like spindly creatures, and no doubt come from the enigmatically predictable mind of Tim Burton. A green substance protrudes from one, hanging like a question mark.

No one should ever have said, "This might be improved by wrapping it in lettuce." Someone did say that. I have never heard of Hardee's really, but its gentle cousin Denny's is the most popular tourist attraction for those seeking breakfast in unique locales, a decrepitude it seems to wear as a badge of honor.

Bread is the major villain of Eat This, Not That! It lurks wherever calorie counts grow high for no particular reason. Since New York City compels eateries to display calorie counts, it is no longer any fun to go to Yankee Stadium.

I would never eat a lobster, because I regard it as an intelligent creature. All crustaceans are necessarily underrated as pets, and I once had a very tender, if mostly silent relationship with a clam. The sea is the place of all my deepest desires and wants so I don't like to eat anything that has been in it for over 48 hours.

Part of Zinczenko's method is coming up with a relationship to every single kind of food. This smells suspiciously of adding to my choices instead of decreasing them, a strategem that approaches a naive kind of futility. I can't remember if I should eat grits or not. Invariably I won't.

Eat This, Not That! has sold about 3.3 million copies, which proves that people want the idea of a diet more than a diet itself. Ironically, the books have benefited from the very reductionism they espouse. The problem with false choices is obvious, the problem inherent in improving our small decisions is that we lack full knowledge of products. Seeing these ideals stretched out before us is a strange way of knowing them better, and knowing ourselves better.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here.

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