C.S. Lewis noted in his essay on the reading of old books that one of the great blessings of doing so is that it gets you out of your chronological provincialism. When you are stuck in your small town mentality, small differences are magnified and treated as though they were everything. But when you get out a bit more, you realize how much was held in common by everyone in that small town. The problem is that of the “invisible shared assumptions,” which do not become visible until you get out into the wider world, and get a larger perspective. Old books, or books of history, help with this important task enormously.
This larger perspective is most necessary on the question of food and health, food and economy, and food and . . . food. Americans have been food faddists for a long time — centuries. And I am not speaking of splinter groups and odd communes. This is a mainstream phenomenon; it is what we do. Whenever the newest fad hits, we think it is really new because of the small differences between it and the previous fad, which previous fad had the misfortunate of being successful enough to become the establishment. But if we walk up on the ridge outside this small town, we see how much this fad actually has in common with the one before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. It is our tradition to set up establishments, so that we can knock them down. And we invariably knock them down for the sake of the next establishment — diligently hiding from ourselves the manifest and plain realities of what we are doing. And the coming establishment will be every bit as temporary. How could it not be?
When someone asserts that it is “high time” that we as Christians learn to take “this issue” with the seriousness it deserves, we err if we rush to argue that particular point, pro or con. We must first take note of where we are. Who has the burden of proof? And do they have the burden of proof on their particular claim only, or do they also need to prove that they are doing something different than what a long chain of others with particular claims have been doing since the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes? I of course want to see evidence for whatever the particular claim is, but I would also love to see some kind of awareness of our long tradition of doing this same thing, over and over again. And in my experience that awareness is singularly lacking among zealous promoters. If it were not lacking, then by definition the food fad element disappears.
The American dinner table has been laden with absurd claims for a very long time. Suppose you had a young friend who had fallen in love, desperately, passionately, about seventeen times. When he came to you with news of the eighteenth lucky girl, and maintained stoutly that “this time it was different,” would you not be dubious? And you would be dubious even though she actually could be different — but you would still be wise not take it on his say so.