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Comment by joobus | Hacker News Reader

I feel the whole article was cringe. It kept creating the "clean" strawman, valiantly slaying it with word vomit, then resurrecting the strawman with some slight variation to be slayed again. Apparently, putting the adjective "clean" before food makes "clean" a pejorative.

I also kept thinking "Brought to you by Monsanto" the whole time I read the article.

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Serious question: if you think the article was creating a "clean" strawman, then to you, what is the actual definition of "eating clean?"

There isn't a generally agreed upon definition, and that is the point. Even the author acknowledges this.

> At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms).

If you aren't clear of the definition of "eating clean," then let's ask, what strawman do you think the author was knocking down?

Read the article.

First, it was raw veganism = clean eating.

Then, coconut oil = clean eating.

Then the alkaline diet = clean eating.

Gluten-free = clean eating.

Dairy free = clean eating.

Serious question: how can "we" agree we "fell" for something if we can't even define what we are talking about?

The point is that we fell for all of that.

I'd put all of those things under the umbrella of "clean eating". And barring some other condition like celiac disease, a diagnosed gluten intolerance, or lactose intolerance, they all seem like pointless dietary restrictions, but there are a lot of people who will buy something just because it's advertised as "gluten-free".

Except a big part of the article's thesis is that a big part of why eat clean is so big is because Big Ag has so thoroughly destroyed trust in the food system and nutritional advice that people are desperate for any solution.

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