
Do you leap up energized and full of vigor after eating? Or does meal-time leave you sluggish, bloated, and out-of-sorts? If you’re eating the typical modern diet, you are probably already concerned about the all-too-obviously detrimental effects of food on your well-being. And if you’re not worried, you should be.
What is the root of this difficulty? And what solution is there? While experts disagree about the causes of the modern plague of food-induced malaise, new research by the North American Grammar Council (NAGC) strongly suggests that the proliferation of adjectives over the last forty or fifty years is a likely contributing factor to the collection of postprandial symptoms sometimes grouped together as Food Related Unpleasant Feeling Syndrome (FRUFS).
Think about it like this: for uncounted thousands of years, mankind ate a wide and sometimes idiosyncratic variety of food. Until very recently—in comparison to the history of our species—our diet included meats, fish, whales, cheeses, vegetables, fruits, olives, beer, wine, sugar, honey, water, sea urchins, and countless other foods. But one ingredient, so pervasive in the modern diet, was, in the past, conspicuous by its absence: what this diet did not include was adjectives!
Over the past year, NAGC has undertaken an exhaustive survey of food labels and restaurant menus from the past hundred years. The results of this research are as follows:
One obvious trend is a steady increase in the amount of adjectives added to food products of all types. At first, this increase was gradual, barely perceptible. During the last couple of decades, however, this trend has increased exponentially. Consider the following disturbing statistics:
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, food contained an average of one adjective for every ten ingredients. By the last decade of that century, this had risen to an average of two adjectives for every five ingredients. During the last ten years, the average food product has contained nine adjectives for every ten ingredients. Restaurant food is even worse, with an average of two adjectives for each food ingredient!
Are you outraged yet? You should be, especially now that you are aware of the possible link between added food adjectives and FRUFS.
Despite the overwhelming pervasiveness of adjectives, members of the growing movement known as “Adjective Free” eaters are taking decisive action, making the most strenuous efforts to avoid all added food adjectives.
In fact, some proponents of the adjective free (or noun-only) diet have gone beyond food and espoused an adjective free lifestyle. Not only do these “nounists” reject adjectives in their food, they attempt to avoid them as much as possible in their daily life.
And, of course, there are the most radical and zealous anti-adjectivists. Four weeks ago, adjective-free rioters stormed the White House, demanding the removal of all adjectives from public life. Before being hauled away in an armored law-enforcement vehicle, agitators briefly gained the White House porch, making it, for a few minutes, only the House.