The hero of our story is an advertising executive named Arthur A. Peabody III.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the gluten-free craze ran its course. Multitudes of people realized that they weren’t really sensitive to gluten after all. Now, human nature being what it is, it wasn’t too long after that before the pendulum began to swing back the other way.
It’s commonly believed that the catalyst was the food critic for the New York Times, the esteemed Right Hon. Judge Winston Julius Washington Jamison IV (Ret.), who declared one day that eating gluten made him feel younger, stronger, and in general, more of a man. Within weeks, eating foods with gluten became a macho thing to do. The Mexican Ambassador, a macho man’s macho man, was seen eating gluten-fortified foods on a daily basis.
The nation entered into a golden era, where men were once again men, and women were women.
And lo! --we see our hero, Arthur A. Peabody III, approaching.
For it was his idea to link the eating of gluten to the macho days of the Wild West. He came up with an ad campaign so glorious, so inspired, that it quickly passed into legend. Like any good ad campaign, it included a call to action.
Git to scootin’, and eat yer rootin’-tootin’ gluten!
I was in the Russias last year, and, Putin or not, Russian bread is absolutely awesome. Nothing is more disheartening than to get off a plane and discover that you are once again under house arrest in a place where you are fed American White Bread.
Adam Gopnik wrote about returning to the US (Manhattan, poor darling) from a few years in France, and having to get used to tasteless baked goods and dairy products again.
Eat what you want. Eat lots of it. Yes, eat too much of it. Eat till you can just stagger across the room with it and prop it up against a sofa cushion. Eat everything that you like until you can’t eat any more…
And listen–don’t worry as to whether your food contains starch, or albumen, or gluten, or nitrogen. If you are a damn fool enough to want these things, go and buy them and eat all you want of them. Go to a laundry and get a bag of starch, and eat your fill of it. Eat it, and take a good long drink of glue after it, and a spoonful of Portland cement. That will gluten you, good and solid."
