I had just started a consulting gig about a thousand miles away from home. An insurance company in Illinois wanted some changes to their software. Another consultant and I decided to go to lunch together and talk shop. But it didn’t work out quite like that. My companion was checking out the menu so carefully that I had to ask what he was doing.  

“I’m on the Atkins Diet. I can’t eat carbs. I only eat high protein food.” My fellow consultant was an intelligent person. You can’t make a living in software consulting unless you have something on the ball.

I had, of course, heard of the Atkins diet. Wikipedia claims that Atkins’ book was one of the top 50 best-selling books in history in the early 2000’s. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper at that time without running into somebody’s opinion about it. I usually turned the page, so I didn’t know much. But my associate and I had an interesting lunch as I munched my potato fries.

You don’t see much about Atkins and his famous diet anymore. There’s a reason for that. Robert Atkins died of cardiac arrest in April of 2003. His cardiologist said his arteries were 30 to 40 percent blocked. On the positive side, that shows Atkins (to quote Bill Gates – I actually heard him say it at a convention) “ate his own dog food”. He didn’t discover the secret to a long life, but he wasn’t a hypocrite.

What is it about food and obsessive compulsion? Rules about what you eat are in just about all religions. Acts 15:29 has rules about food. (But Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:4 said, “Never mind!”) Shite Muslims are told not to eat shellfish. And Jews have such complicated laws that there is a whole industry dedicated to “kosher” food – with consultants to inspect the production process to make sure. I wonder if any of them got caught up in the Atkins diet.

Roxy and I are vegetarians (mostly – it’s not a religion with us), but it’s not really about food. Roxy was a food chemist working for the Department of Agriculture. They say that you should never know how sausage is made. Roxy knows how it’s made, and she has a soft spot for animals. We just can’t be a part of that. Her family had a small farm where they grew a lot of their own food, including pigs. Roxy’s job as a little girl was to hold the pan and catch the blood when her father cut the pig’s throat. Roxy’s mother would make blood sausage the way she learned to do it from her mother. But Roxy also knew that those pigs had a delightful life – except for the last few minutes. Those pigs were never part of agribusiness.

I love to study the Mormon religion and their history. It’s fascinating! They have dietary laws too. The Mormon laws are in one place and they’re easy to find and read. Look up Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants.  All I can say is that all those Mormons lining up to buy McDonald burgers every day must have a flexible way of interpreting what looks like plain language to me. It’s just another example of my blog: Lies are the Middle of Everything.