by Paul Graham
Most other times when I went out with friends, I wasn’t troubled as much by the lack of a beer option. But on Softball Night, I regressed to a younger age—in many ways during the game, my teammates would say, and also at the postgame ritual. I was no different from celiac kids across the country who want to have what everyone else on their Little League team has after the game, whether pizza or burgers or ice cream sandwiches. I also frequently craved the salt and grease of fries, which I never ordered because the fryer wasn’t “clean.” Rarely, but intensely, wings or a burger sounded good. But mostly I wanted to join in the clinking of glasses filled with beer.
As I’d done with so many other foods and experiences I had given up, I tried to think my way out of the trap. I wondered if I wanted the beer after the game because I truly wanted it, because it could satisfy me at that moment more than anything else could, or if I wanted the beer only because the story I had been told all my life about men and games and camaraderie and celebration had convinced me that softball night was incomplete, a letdown, without a beer. I loved playing the game, but I loved the postgame more: the brief stops at doublewide bars and old hotels where we shared an hour with people we would not have met otherwise, or the evenings we gathered around a cooler on the tailgate of someone’s pickup truck beside a lazily flowing river as the heat and the light softened, drinking sweaty cans and quietly talking as the fish stirred the water’s surface in ripples. Back when I could still drink any beer at all, every one of them, even the lower-quality brews, tasted decent as I stood in my cleats, adrenaline still pumping. There’s a spot only certain foods and drinks will hit at certain times.
And that was why the beer I was drinking—or not drinking—ultimately did matter.
After my discovery of Omission and Glutenberg, I started tucking a bottle into the cooler I took to the game, along with water and a banana (since I still couldn’t handle the dyes in sports drinks). I never brought them into the Hearth with me, but I considered it. (Once, I did in fact sneak a beer into another local place, as punishment for many wrongs committed by the owner, the least of which was stocking nothing better than Woodchuck raspberry cider; I ordered a glass of water, drained it in three gulps, and then stealthily refilled it with an Omission, using a ball cap as a screen.) Packing my own chute, so to speak, didn’t mean I was unappreciative of my teammates when they thought about me, as they increasingly tended to do, by dropping a can of Smith & Forge or Stella Cidre into the cooler they filled with Labatt or Yeungling. I drank the cider, because it was their gift to me. But first I opened my beer, and I stood with my pals in the dying light on a baseball diamond, drinking rich malt and hops and feeling, for a short while, so wonderfully complete.
For reasons I could not understand, the distance and time I spent running had both been getting longer. Back in the winter, I would have been happy to run any distance at all without collapsing on the shoulder of the road. But after a few weeks I wanted to be in 5K shape, and then 10K. In the middle of the summer I passed the 10K marker, pushed my way to 15K, and then close to a half marathon.
Since classes were over for the summer I could run in the daytime, and I did, pounding pavement in the teeth of the afternoon heat and glare. I ran without a dog at my hip, without music, without a watch. I didn’t even care about exact mileage; I was content to estimate the distances. I had no goals, no race on the horizon, no plan. I followed a vector away from the house and back amid the whir of cicadas and the dizzying smell of hot tar. My route took me out of the village and along the roads that led, eventually, to some of the farms that grew the produce we cooked and ate. I primarily ran to find that zone of perfection in which I forgot I was running. I hardly knew who I was; I was unaware of anything except for the road and the approaching cars.
Lots of runners and other athletes, I knew, reported they felt better after adopting a GF diet. I was diagnosed around the time Peter Bronski’s book The Gluten-Free Edge was published. Bec had a professional interest in the concept. According to Bronski’s accounts, it was as if the athletes he’d met had been putting low-grade fuel into their bodies before cutting gluten. Once they were free of wheat pasta and bread, and of all the gluten in processed foods, their performance data improved—but, more important, they also claimed that they felt noticeably better. They no longer feared they might crap themselves on their runs; they experienced less gas. They did not suffer as much afterward from that sensation I’ve always thought of as runner’s bends—that hot, greasy, cramped feeling low in the gut.*
All of this was true for me, though not all of the time. I did feel like I was running cleaner. I wasn’t sure I believed the GF diet always led to a performance edge, though. It’s a difficult claim to back up with hard science. Plenty of athletes eat diets high in gluten—think of all of those Subway endorsements!—and perform at peak levels. Plenty of athletes abuse their bodies and compete well, too. So much of running, of any athletic routine, whether indoor cycling, weight training, or playing baseball, is psychological, even superstitious. I’ve run well simply because I expected to, and I’ve also had my ass handed to me under nearly the same conditions. I could not always point to an objectively verifiable difference.
It’s possible that many athletes and active people in studies like Bronski’s, who feel they train and turn out better efforts off gluten, might have silent celiac disease. Or they might have responded to a GF diet because they had one of the other gluten-related disorders that are more challenging to diagnose but can also sap a person’s strength. I took two full minutes off my per-mile time after my body stopped destroying itself, but cutting gluten hadn’t turned me into an elite Kenyan marathoner. Even when I was fully recovered, I had some terrible outings, stretches of three or four miles where I felt as if I were leaving a trail of body parts behind me. The improved times led me to enjoy running, and it was starting to look like I was pretty good at it, but I would have given all of the great runs back in exchange for my old diet, to be able to move and eat my way through the world as I once did. I’d surrender the lighter, faster feeling on the road; the ring of heat pleasantly buzzing around my face; the sensation, afterward, like a breaker somewhere in my chest had been thrown. I’d have taken a minute slower, or five miles shorter.
Like all runners, I turned over ideas as I ran, musings and sources of contentment and old bitter bones I for some reason couldn’t stop gnawing on. One of the thoughts I kept coming back to, out on the road, was my continued discomfort with, and exasperation for, the question “Oh, you’re gluten-free?”
I had come to despise the phrase “gluten-free” almost as much as I hated millet. I hated it even in the midst of the peace and resignation I was beginning to feel, because of the resignation, the sense of being checkmated. I admit that I think about the precision of language a little too much—it’s an occupational hazard—but from the first time I entered the GF world, the “free” part seemed a misnomer, unless by “free” one meant freedom from sickness, which is so obviously desirable a condition that it hardly merits comment. I disliked the “gluten” part, too, for being reductive, obscuring the panoply of foods that disappeared. It reminded me of my doctor’s careful word choice when he’d diagnosed me.
What, then, would I suggest in its place? I liked wheat-free better, if for no reason other than that it named a recognizable foodstuff, but there was the issue of “free” again. Without wheat? Wheat-poor? Breadless? All equally bad; they missed the other foods that weren’t bread, the lost places and experiences.
For my part, I had come to prefer “celiac.” I found it a fittingly ugly word for an unfortunate stroke of alimentary luck. It was the medical description for my case, and though I knew it didn’t apply to everyone, I found “celiac” perfect right down to the etymology—it is derived from the Latin coeliacus, which comes from the Greek koiliá for “belly.” The Greeks first chose the word to describe the intestinal anatomy because koiliá referred also to geographical features such as caves and cavitie
s. The abdominal cavity and the intestines are both hollows—hollows within a hollow. But more to the point, celiac disease creates such holes. Any severe allergy or sensitivity does this: it clears spaces on the table, in the pantry, and on the travel and social itinerary. It clears spaces in one’s mind, hollows out corners of the memory, and empties certain traditions of a little of their pleasure.
The more I identified as a celiac, the more I felt caught between the abrupt emergence of my own new dietary needs, which were absolute and irrevocable, and the whims, as I often encountered them, of people I met who had decided to cut gluten simply because they had heard doing so would make them feel “amazing.” They would lose weight, their workouts would be better, they would have more energy, and their lives, overall, would improve. I read about such people in their blogs and elsewhere on the Web, and I met them at parties or gatherings, where they sometimes sidled up to me and asked me if I had noticed, since going gluten-free, improved mental clarity, focus, and energy levels, or if I believed that the stomach was indeed a second brain. I had no response to these questions except to say that I was not the best yardstick by which to measure. Yes, I supposed I felt pretty “amazing” of late, but all things were relative: I had also required two bags of someone else’s blood just to make it from feeling wretched to feeling awful. And I had really, really liked foods made with gluten.
I began to assume that every eater who went voluntarily GF was a fad dieter. I knew they were fad dieters if gluten was off-again/on-again like a bad relationship. Unless they suffered from any of the gluten-related disorders—the detection of which could be difficult, as any doctor knows—I didn’t see a good reason for them to cut wheat and other glutenous grains. Not that their eating habits were my business. They weren’t. But I was still so uncomfortable with my own gluten-free diet, and with everything that came with it, that I could not see the virtue or the sense in voluntarily taking those restrictions on. It especially offended me if the person seeking “amazement” and “clarity” seemed to think that my life as a GF eater was as easy and as fun as they so often made their GF life sound, usually by citing all the delicious new products (oh?), the way chain restaurants had responded by putting GF items on the menu (happy day!), and the weight they’d lost. In the early days, I told them I still had ten pounds to gain back. Ironically, I might have gained the weight back faster on a commercial, prepared GF diet, since many GF foods are more calorically dense to compensate for lost flavor and texture. As I once heard a registered dietician put it, “A brownie is still a brownie,” which is both true and not true, as you need more sugar and fat in a GF brownie to get you to a real brownie experience. Many of the professional GF bakers I met were both grateful for the eating trend and realistic about its ephemerality: “Sooner or later,” one baker told me, “some of my customers are going to realize these baked goods aren’t making them skinny, and the bubble is going to burst.”
I’ve since evolved in my view of those who voluntarily take on GF diets. If special eating practices help a person—physiologically or psychologically or both—to be a genuinely better human being, to contribute more to the world, then sure, go ahead and eat whatever you need to eat. It took me a while to get there, though. My response to the GFers-by-choice I met that summer and throughout the year was to step back and use my newly reclaimed mental clarity to judge middle-class American eating practices. With the exception of pregnancy, allergies, or certain moral or religious beliefs, like those of vegetarians or people who kept kosher, why limit oneself? There was so much good food out there. This was America post–Slow Food Revolution, not suburbia circa 1950. The urge to exclude, to slash, astounded me. Moderation and mindfulness seemed better routes to well-being, which, after all, was the goal of every diet without a moral or a medical grounding.
More than that, though, I began to think it privileged to alter one’s diet so severely on a whim, whether by choosing Paleo, GF, or even organic. I investigated the degree of privilege firsthand when I visited a local food pantry to check out the GF offerings (substitutions, not inherently GF foods, like canned beans or vegetables). As I had predicted, I found the options to be thin—virtually nonexistent. What do you do if you can’t afford the substitutions, the grains that used to be the thriftiest but are now the most expensive? The answer was obvious: you kept eating wheat and feeling like crap, and, as a result, everything else suffered. Most eaters in the world, including plenty in this country, have no recourse when the staples of their diet, whether wheat, rice, or beans, suddenly become unobtainable. They don’t have the flexibility to just pick up other options. Americans are among the wealthiest eaters in the world, and yet we have the tensest, most dysfunctional relationships with food. It’s a testament to how confused I was that even as I leveled such criticisms at the voluntarily gluten-free, I had completely lost sight of the privilege that formed the foundation of my own eating habits: local, organic, seasonal, homemade, and now GF. I had not undertaken these practices on a whim—I was deeply committed to them—but still, the option to do so is undoubtedly symbolic of life going your way.
Eventually I saw that although those who were voluntarily GF might have offended me by squandering their choice, unless they were spreading factual misinformation about what the GF diet truly meant, they weren’t causing any problems. Some of them did in fact loosen their restrictions in front of their friends by drinking beers, cooking with real soy sauce, or telling the server to leave the ponzu sauce or blue cheese on the entrée because these things were fine for people who ate gluten-free, or at least they were fine for them. This behavior does no celiac any favors. I didn’t encounter many such eaters, though. Mostly I met people who hadn’t been feeling as well as they hoped, and were trying to eat their way to feeling better. And in the best cases, these voluntarily GF eaters were helping to fund more research into good GF products, and also filling the coffers of GF food companies who donated to foundations at work on finding real, permanent cures for gluten-related disorders. This made them more useful to the team effort than an eater like me, who had turned his back on most commercial GF offerings—albeit for good gastronomical reasons—and stepped into a culinary time machine aimed at the poorer rural neighborhoods of seventeenth-century Western Europe.
The biggest reason for my tension with those who went GF by choice was this: so much did I love gluten, and so badly did I still miss it, that I thought everyone, but especially all of my friends, should be consuming my share of gluten as well as theirs. My only option was to eat and drink vicariously through them. Therefore it would excite me and gratify me if they ate more gluten, not less. They could even eat it in front of me, if they cared to. Just, please, eat the real stuff.
So I was delighted when, sometime in the summer, the era of the beer texts started. Usually my father, but also David (who by then had moved with Mere to California), and other beer lovers who lived just across town, would text me a picture of the exciting new beer they had found. At first, Bec thought this was about as cruel as hating on a celiac got, but I saw right away what was going on. I did not reply, Hey man, I hope the tap lines at that place are crawling with bacteria and you have the runs in the morning. Instead I told them to drink two, or four: always one for me and one for them. I knew the beer texts (which continue to this day) were a greeting card, a way of saying, I’m still taking you to the bar with me, man, and I’m thinking right now of how much you’d like this pint of porter. But being men, we didn’t feel like we could actually say that, so my friends and father just snapped a picture of a Weapons Grade IPA or the latest recipe from Lagunitas and wrote, “Mmmmmm. Beer.” How was I certain of their meaning? I was not snapping pictures of gluten-free beers and replying in kind, that’s how. I never drank a GF beer, not even the good ones, with my friends in mind, because I knew they wouldn’t like the beer I was drinking as much as I did, since their taste was as yet uncorrupted. They were doing just fine in the beer department.
I did, however, begin to tak
e photos of the occasional sausage—blistered lamb kielbasa, its snappy skin about to burst on the grill—and text them to my father, because my mother is a vegetarian and no meat, let alone offal, makes its way into that house. I usually sent just the picture. No message. The subtext: I’m thinking of you, Dad. I know how much you’d like this sausage you can’t eat in your own house. Now we’re even, kind of.
PS: I have rib-eyes where this came from.
* * *
* Some studies suggest that GI distress after long or hard runs has nothing to do with diet, but instead results from a “shunting mechanism” in the body that restricts blood flow from the GI tract and redirects it to the legs and lungs, where it’s most needed. Other research notes that the differences in discomfort experienced by cyclists (which tends to be less severe) might mean that the jostling of the organs that happens on hard runs, whether long or short, explains the aftereffects. There is even a name: “Runner’s Colitis.”
A man I once worked with told me about a time shortly after he and his wife were married, when they ate three excellent dinners over the course of the same evening. Each meal was small and different enough from the previous meal that instead of gluttonous repetition, the sequence acquired an indulgent luminosity that you could see in this man’s eyes as he described it. Certain tastes and meals can stay with you like that; they have a way of lingering more intensely than other kinds of experiences. Every person has his own mental recipe book, or food scrapbook, filled with dishes and snacks that continue to feed him for long after the encounter. The hope of repeating them provides motivation to keep exploring—or, if left unsated, it becomes a form of haunting.
