Feeding the Fire
The Lost History and Uncertain Future of Mankind's Energy Addiction
1
The Thinking man’s diet
At twelve, I was convinced I had stumbled upon the ultimate diet, and it was going to make me rich. I was a skinny kid who spent most of my adolescence combining Hostess Twinkies, instant pudding, heavy cream, lots of eggs, and cans of sweetened condensed milk in various high-caloric proportions in a tireless effort to bulk myself up—while the rest of my family struggled with their weight.
My stepfather swore by The Drinking Man’s Diet, the invention of Robert Cameron (aka Jeffrey Roberts), a San Francisco bon vivant and entrepreneur who marketed a “fun” diet in a fifty-page pamphlet that sold for one dollar in 1964. Predating Atkins by nine years, Cameron advocated healthy weight loss by reducing one’s consumption of carbohydrates, leaving dieters free to dine on porterhouse steaks, lobsters languishing in garlic butter, and salads smothered in Roquefort dressing. Cameron’s real genius was in recognizing that distilled spirits like vodka, gin, and whiskey contain only trace amounts of ca ...
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