When journalist Sophie Haigney was talking to a friend about her fascination with some of the more outlandish-sounding diets out there, her friend came up with the term "dark nutrition." And in a piece for the New York Times Magazine, Haigney digs right in. The story, for example, opens with influencer Kelly Pi sampling raw buffalo brains. It turns out that everything is raw for Pi, who eschews the cooking of anything, even the roadkill she occasionally scavenges. If that sounds crazy to you, Pi counters that the typical American diet of processed foods and alcohol—people "are basically poisoning themselves"—sounds crazy to her. Haigney heard this same argument again and again as she interviewed people on the fringes of nutritional thinking.
"Some avoided specific vitamins, or disavowed seed oils, or believed that vegetables were unhealthy," she writes. "Some swore by organ meats, some by cane sugar. Some snacked on raw chicken or took large doses of supplements. However weird their diets seemed, they told me, the standard American diet—filled as it is with pesticides and preservatives, dyes and junk—was weirder." Haigney's story is less about evaluating the diets' nutritional merits than about exploring why people adopt them. As it turns out, many interviewees described turning to unconventional diets in response to health problems. The story also discusses the "n of one" principle popular in dark-nutrition circles, "the idea that the only way to learn what is good for you is by ignoring broad samples and experimenting on your unique self." Read the full story, in which Haigney samples some of the fare herself.
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