Last weekend, because I am a masochist, I read an interview with Ella Mills, nee Woodward, aka Deliciously Ella, the figurehead of the clean-eating movement. I’ve been writing about the bread-phobic brigade for a few years now (like I said, I’m a masochist), and I check in with them occasionally to see how, exactly, they’re stretching their glamorisation of disordered eating yet further. Yet on reading this latest dispatch, I had an unexpected epiphany: Deliciously Ella is the precursor to Donald Trump. A sylph-like, wildly privileged girl from west London looks a little less aspirational when you realise she’s from the same mould as a race-baiting Oompa Loompa with a Weetabix (gluten!) on his head, doesn’t she?
And it’s not just Deliciously Ella. Like John Cusack in Being John Malkovich, I suddenly see the face of my man everywhere. I am finally realising that so many of the things that have frustrated me, that I have been trying to understand over the past year, come under one umbrella: the umbrella of bullshit.
In 2005, the philosopher Harry G Frankfurt wrote an essay called On Bullshit. (It will always please me that Harry G Frankfurt is exactly the sort of name a bullshitting philosopher would have in a Marx brothers movie.) Lies and bullshit are both about deception, Frankfurt wrote; but while lying is a conscious act of obscuring the truth, bullshitting has no interest at all in the truth, “An indifference to how things really are,” is the way Frankfurt puts it.
Which brings me to the connection between Deliciously Ella and Donald Trump. In her latest incarnation, Mills professes herself shocked that some of her followers have “taken healthy eating to extremes” and insists she “can’t take responsibility”. Then, in the next breath, she talks enthusiastically about how, for Christmas dinner, she ate just carrots and brussels sprouts. She says she doesn’t believe that food should be classified as either good or bad. So, as the righteous food blogger The Angry Chef has noted, it must be a different Ella who on her own website writes that “to really thrive”, you should say goodbye to dairy and gluten.
Meanwhile, Trump has been furiously insisting that, contrary to what Meryl Streep (“the most overrated actress in Hollywood”) said at the Golden Globes, he “never mocked a disabled reporter”, even though there is widely circulated TV footage of him doing just that. Trump has also insisted he can’t possibly take responsibility for the number of racists who have supported him or committed crimes in his name, having apparently forgotten about the times he made racist remarks himself. The president-elect is interested only in his own self-promotion; he is not lying, because for him an objective truth isn’t even a consideration – he is bullshitting.
The denigration of experts, as I wrote last week, is an essential component to this bullshitting culture, because expertise provides a bulwark against nonsense. Food writer Bee Wilson recently described how she and a registered dietician, Renee McGregor, were jeered by several hundred people at the Cheltenham Literary festival when they dared point out some of the flaws in clean-eating cook Madeleine Shaw’s thinking (coconut sugar is still sugar). When the leading lights of the Brexit movement are called out on their lies and lack of preparedness, they cry “elitism” and pose in front of a gold door with a billionaire.
We live in a blog culture where it’s pitched as a triumph of democracy that everyone can claim authority, which means anyone who says that, actually, there is an objective truth is condemned. Feelings rather than facts are what matter, these purveyors of bullshit claim, and the success of this, as Tom Nichols writes in his upcoming book The Death Of Expertise, represents “the full flowering of a therapeutic culture where self-esteem, not achievement, is the ultimate human value, and it’s making us all dumber by the day”.
Nothing proves this more starkly than the way celebrities have filled the vacuum where experts used to be, because who appears to have more self-esteem than a celebrity? And so people with popular Instagram accounts are trusted over registered dieticians, panel-show politicians such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are validated, and a reality TV star is elected president. Yet, as Trump proves daily, few people have more fragile self-esteem. And what do you get once their facade is proven to be false? Just bullshit. That’s gross in a cookbook, but genuinely terrifying in politics.