"Extreme Moderation" and other Food-Related Linguistic Nonsense

While writing or attempting to write a story that's still too embryonic to get a snappy "about ____________________ line," I found myself confronted with the phrase "extreme moderation."

Extreme moderation.

It bubbled up to the top of my head while I was trying to flesh out a particular character, and before I even thought it through, I knew it would be perfect for this woman. And even worse, I knew I'd heard it a hundred times before, mostly in Paleo circles, and mostly applied to sugar, chocolate alcohol, or some other "borderline" food (occasionally even fruit): "to be eaten in EXTREME moderation."

Google it yourself: people appear to be saying this completely in earnest. Words and meaning, as Orwell says, have almost parted company. On the other hand, it's an interesting little psychological window into the Paleosphere, where moderation itself has to be extreme.

I also had a guy on Reddit a few weeks ago who started off telling me that white potatoes were "harder to digest" than sweet. When pressed, he revised this to the familiar nonsense about the glycemic index, and then, after agreeing that both sweet and white have their nutritional pros and cons and may be good/bad for different people, and furthermore that GI loses much of its meaning in the context of a mixed meal, nevertheless firmly asserted that sweet were "Paleo" while white were "not Paleo," for reasons known only to himself (he stopped responding). It was like trying to argue with a greased eel.

To console myself, I made cockscombs for dinner, but they were disappointing: it was like chewing on rubber bands.