Jacqueline Alnes wants you to know that current Instagram diets are really just repackaged versions of fad diets that have been floating around diet books, pamphlets, and lectures from the early 1900s.Â
She should know: In an empathetic, personal, and deeply researched story, she describes the way her own health challenges led her away from authority figures who had let her down (like her doctors and running coaches) and turning instead to restrictive diets. Following the dancing bananas on a couple of famous fruitarian websites—and going back a few hundred years in the history of fruitarianism—Alnes points out that humans keep reinventing the idea of “clean” eating. “Eating fruit and fruit alone is not the issue,” Alnes writes. “Instead, the ways that the fruit cure have been evangelized, monetized, and weaponized is a symptom of something much larger, one that stretches back all the way to the racist origins of thinness itself.” She emphasizes the difference between a cure and (the ongoing work of) healing.
What Alnes does exceptionally well is connect modern fad diets to a long history of disordered eating, and the business that blooms around it. One restrictive diet ushered her into corners of the internet full of people struggling to address chronic illness, eating disorders, and many other health complications. The author reflects the way religious dogma cast a shadow over the fruitarian movement, from Adam and Eve to “praying to the light of my laptop for an answer.”
In an interview with Christine Yu for Outside Magazine, Jacqueline said, “If someone says, do this one thing and it can help you, it’s more appealing than your doctor telling you to do things in moderation. Instead, you can definitively know that you did something, you took action. It aligns with the idea of shame and this desire to be good.”
This book is, in one way, about going down an internet rabbit hole for awhile. I think of Marian Bull’s article about the year she got into overnight oats and healthy living blogs, how that came from a place of loneliness. The impulse to make a change can be a very good and potent one—it may be the first sign that we are beginning to grow aware of our own unhappiness—but it is easily misdirected by fad diets, especially when we’re feeling vulnerable.
One thread in The Fruit Cure might be familiar to readers who grew up in a specific kind of internet community (some of whom may have read about Freelee the Banana Girl in Jezebel, The Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan, etc.). Alnes explores the ways we perform good health—from Instagram posts to bikini photos to “What I Eat in A Day” lists. She explores the way popular diet leaders attracted followers, details they shared about themselves to gain a foothold, and how anyone might be tempted to follow them. She makes it clear, especially in the historical examples, that the power these leaders wielded could be deadly.
She asks: Who is being harmed here? Who didn’t make it in the history of these restrictive diets? Were the leaders ever held accountable for their actions? And what became of the followers—did they suffer and log off, or launch their own wellness brands?
The Fruit Cure is the kind of book that would be good company in a waiting room—a genre no one should underestimate. Alnes ends the Outside interview with these lines: “It can be really beautiful not to live in extremes, to live with imperfection, and to give yourself permission to change, to be flawed, to have seasons where you may not be as productive. It’s something that I’m still working on.”
Thanks again to Melville House, especially Valerie Merians, for the chance to be a small part of this book. The Fruit Cure was acquired there by Athena Bryan and represented by Kate Johnson of Wolf Literary. Congratulations on your launch, Jacqueline! You worked so hard to get here.
