Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book. In the words of Woody Allen

Friedrich Nietzsche. Form http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/s

Mere Anarchy, a book by Woody Allen, is his first collection of stories since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects. One of them, Thus Ate Zarathustra is also published in The New Yorker, July 3^rd, 2006.

Here are some excerpts:

There’s nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin.

Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the Athenians, and in a lost play by Aeschylus Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit.

It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem in scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the Ethics he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.

Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos—Christ, there’s no limit to the man’s appetite, and yet his music is sublime.

 The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off—which is not the case with Kant’s “Tractatus on Starches.”

Breakfast 
Orange juice 
2 strips of bacon 
Profiteroles 
Baked clams 
Toast, herbal tea 
The juice of the orange is the very being of the orange made manifest, and by this I mean its true nature, and that which gives it its “orangeness” and keeps it from tasting like, say, a poached salmon or grits. To the devout, the notion of anything but cereal for breakfast produces anxiety and dread, but with the death of God anything is permitted, and profiteroles and clams may be eaten at will, and even buffalo wings.

Lunch 
1 bowl of spaghetti, with tomato and basil 
White bread 
Mashed potatoes 
Sacher Torte 

The powerful will always lunch on rich foods, well seasoned with heavy sauces, while the weak peck away at wheat germ and tofu, convinced that their suffering will earn them a reward in an afterlife where grilled lamb chops are all the rage. But if the afterlife is, as I assert, an eternal recurrence of this life, then the meek must dine in perpetuity on low carbs and broiled chicken with the skin removed.

Dinner 
Steak or sausages 
Hash-brown potatoes 
Lobster thermidor 
Ice cream with whipped cream or layer cake 
This is a meal for the Superman. Let those who are riddled with angst over high triglycerides and trans fats eat to please their pastor or nutritionist, but the Superman knows that marbleized meat and creamy cheeses with rich desserts and, oh, yes, lots of fried stuff is what Dionysus would eat—if it weren’t for his reflux problem.

Aphorisms 
Epistemology renders dieting moot. If nothing exists except in my mind, not only can I order anything; the service will be impeccable. 
Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter.

Read More

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703sh_shouts

Woody Allen. Mere Anarchy. P. 141. York, 2007.