Is there a perfect diet? (Part 2)

Avocado or ham?

In 1980 I came across the book that changed my life. It changed my diet too. As a result of reading it I went from being a lifelong carnivore to a strict vegetarian. All before I hit 30.

The book was The House on the Rock. The author was Brian Cleeve. The whys and wherefores are covered in my recently-published memoir/biography, Television Doesn’t Like Rebels: The life of Brian Cleeve. While I don’t want to repeat myself here, I do need to dwell a little on the ‘spiritual’ basis for my change of diet. That can be summed up in a single sentence. I realised that God cares about what I eat and drink.

In The House on the Rock I read this:

One should give up all foods that interfere with hearing and seeing. One should give up meat, and alcohol, and tobacco. That is the beginning.¹

What are ‘hearing and seeing’? you might well ask. It would probably take a book or two to address that question fully. But the short answer is this. These are long-dormant ‘senses’ that we humans have forgotten we ever had.² Nowadays most people regard them as either magical or paranormal and best avoided. However The House on the Rock outlined how anyone could learn to use these faculties in order to hear and obey God.

Having grown up in Ireland during the 1950s and 60s, I knew little about my religion (Catholicism) beyond what I learnt as a child. But surely even a child could see that this was borderline heresy! None of the saints I had read about ever ‘listened’ to God in the way that Brian Cleeve was describing. And the only dietary restrictions I was aware of, e.g. no meat on Fridays, had been done away with by Vatican II.

At the same time I was convinced I was being offered something stunningly simple. I could learn to be useful to God, without having to become an impoverished monk such as Francis of Assisi or a martyr like Joan of Arc. All I had to do was change my diet, try to listen to God, and then do whatever He wanted of me. It was a no-brainer. I was in!

In those days I ate meat and fish. No meal was complete without one or the other (usually meat) taking up a lot of room on the dinner plate. I did not smoke but I drank occasionally. Now I felt ready to give it all up. I was careful though. I made the transition over several months. (If I think about it, I can recall my last meal of steak, onions, and spuds.) By the end of 1982 I was a vegetarian.

I was now eating a lot of dairy produce: milk, cheese, yoghurts, etc., and loads of fruit. After a few years I expanded the range of foods I ate to include things like tofu and avocados. In the early-1990s I added fish. Although the IBS I mentioned in Part 1 remained in the background of daily life, my overall health improved and stayed good for years.

Then, in the summer of 2018, I was laid low by a strange and debilitating illness. I had never been really sick before, so the experience felt a bit odd. Previously, whenever I was sufficiently under the weather to go to my local doctor, I was not a ‘good’ patient. I might or might not do what the doc said, but I always got better anyway. This time, however, I resolved to submit myself completely to orthodox medical treatment.

My GP prescribed various pharmaceutical products like antibiotics and steroids, and I took them all scrupulously. But none alleviated the situation. In fact they were actually harmful and even dangerous to my health. I tried a few alternative remedies too but, while I suffered no ill-effects from any of them, I saw little benefit either. Eventually I decided to abandon the drugs, vitamins, etc. Instead I began to treat myself through a combination of light exercise, fresh air, and good food. I simplified my diet, becoming a non-fish-eating vegetarian once again. It took a while but by the middle of 2019 I was back on my feet and raring to go.

There I might have stayed but for the fact that, a few months later, my world (and everyone else’s) was turned upside down by the arrival of the ‘global pandemic’. I have discussed the effects on my thinking and outlook in another book called Into the Memory Hole: Despatches from the “world of lies”. In summary, I began to question everything I knew - or thought I knew.

After March 2020 I re-examined all my beliefs and assumptions about the world and my place in it. While I discarded many once-cherished ‘truisms’, there were a handful of rock-solid certainties I held onto. I could never provide ‘proof’ of any of them to another person but I am as convinced of their reality as I can be about anything.

The first is that God exists. I cannot comprehend exactly who or what God is. How could I? But I am certain of that much.

The second is that He/She/It cares about me and my wellbeing. As I said above, that reality hit me for the first time many years ago. Since then it has become even clearer.

There are a few others, but one in particular strikes me now as I write this article. It is the last sentence in the House on the Rock extract I cited above:

That is the beginning.

I probably read the book dozens of times since it was published nearly 45 years ago, but I must have overlooked that sentence. Now I think I understand what it means. I am still only at the starting gate!

It is as if I was just a child back then learning his ABCs. Had I thought about it at the time (unlikely) I probably would have felt that was all I needed to learn. The 26 letters of the alphabet! Very important but hardly the beginning and end of understanding the subject. What about grammar and syntax? Or Shakespeare’s plays, Oscar Wilde’s stories, and T.S. Eliot’s poetry? And that is only English. What delights lie in wait for anyone interested in French or Arabic or Polish? For the curious mind, exploring language can be a joyous pursuit.

Same with food.

As a young man I thought I had found the ‘perfect’ diet. Now I realise there is no such thing. I believe there is a ‘perfect’ diet for me and I hope to find it some day. But there is no single diet that everyone should adopt as a gateway to good health, physical or spiritual.

As I see things now I believe that diet and the spiritual life are intertwined. The food we consume is important, but there are other things too. What we put into our minds - into our very souls - also shapes who we are and what we can become.

But how can we know what we should eat (or watch, or read)? As an historian I have spent many hours on research. That is my thing. But here I am concerned with bridging the gap between research and knowledge. We don’t need specialist skills to find the way forward. We already know.

You could call it intuition, instinct, listening, or prayer. But, once we have put aside our own desires for a particular outcome, the answer will be there in our minds.

Personally I try to approach everything in as detached a way as I can - with an open heart and an open mind. But, as I wrote in Part 1, there is ‘no one-size-fits-all. We are all different’. If there is a perfect diet for you, you will have to find it yourself.

All I can promise is an unimaginable journey. And great fun along the way!

1. Brian Cleeve, The House on the Rock (London 1980), p. 15.

2. William Golding writes about these once-common attributes in his 1955 novel, The Inheritors.