Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of US by Matt Fitzgerald

Author:Matt Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Pursuit of Pleasure

Nataki and I finished our coffee and drove back to the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country, a campus-style hotel whose several separate buildings were all named after wines. Our room was in the Chablis building. An apartment complex just up the hill from the Hilton was called The Vineyards. The largest industry in Sonoma County is winemaking. The second biggest is wine tourism. You feel like you’re in a giant wine theme park when you visit.

After freshening up in the air-conditioned comfort of our junior suite, we departed again. At eleven o’clock in the morning, it was already almost—but not quite—too hot to drop the top of Nataki’s convertible. A ten-minute drive brought us to a small retail plaza that contained a little shop called Recherché du Plaisir (French for “Pursuit of Pleasure”). A modest sign above the entrance advertised “Chocolates, Confections & Sweet Bites.” We stepped inside.

Recherché du Plaisir had opened just seven months earlier, and everything still looked new. A model Eiffel Tower stood against the front wall. A small framed black-and-white photographic print hung from another wall. It depicted a couple of stylish Parisian flappers sipping coffee at a little outdoor table. These details went unnoticed until later. Our eyes were drawn first to the mouthwatering displays of truffles and macaroons at either end of a long serving counter. Behind the counter stood Lucy Gustafson, a smiling, matronly woman in her mid-forties and the proprietress of the establishment.

I had emailed ahead to tell Lucy that my wife and I were interested in a chocolate-tasting experience similar to the wine tastings that are the stock-in-trade of wine tourism in Sonoma. I was also interested in hearing her ideas about chocolate. An anonymous quotation on her shop’s website gave me a pretty good sense of Lucy’s perspective: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive, well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming, ‘Woo-hoo! What a ride.’”

During the half hour Nataki and I spent inside the shop, I learned that Lucy was raised in Forestville, a small town just west of Santa Rosa. Her father was a schoolteacher. When Lucy was nine years old, the family rented out their home and relocated to France for six months. She fell in love with the country and was particularly impressed by the French mastery of the art of living.

“I think the Europeans have it right,” she told us. “It’s fine to work hard but you also need to play hard and enjoy your life.”

When Lucy came home from France she immediately began to plot her return to the Old World. As soon as she was old enough to work, she took jobs cleaning the homes of neighbors, saving as much of her small income as she could. One of these neighbors happened to be making chocolate truffles one day as Lucy scrubbed and vacuumed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.