Sidney beat me to the tsk-tsk, and Tracker beat me to the claim that while a cookie-cutter approach is probably a bad idea, there might actually be something here. Love may be some combination of mystewy and magic and chemical compulsion, but that doesn't mean it's always a good idea; We've all fallen for at least one of the wrong people, and some of us make that mistake -- the same mistake -- again and again and again. What's wrong with demonstrating that there are other options? And perhaps more to the point, if thse seminars are such a terrible, crummy idea, what do we say to the women who keep falling for self-absorbed Bad Boys, the guys who keep falling for needy, self-loathing babes? That they're SOL, that their chemical make-up dooms them to responding only to unhealthy triggers, and that they should just go join a celibate religious order? "Go with your gut" is swell if your gut sends messages that leave you happy and fulfilled. But if your gut is a little upgefucked -- maybe because you picked up some screwy messages in childhood -- then it seems to me that introducing the gut to the brain could make for a very productive relationship.

Forgive me, Chihuahua, but I think that's a knee-jerk response. The fact is that everyone in this country, the hardscrabble working class included, pays less for food (as a percentage of income) than anyone else in the world and than at any time in our history. The argument that it's elitist to spend more for food ignores, among other things, the fact that we are simply accustomed to cheap food, just like we're accustomed to cheap gas for our cars. But just because something's a habit doesn't mean it's desirable, nor does it mean that it's unchangeable.

Furthermore, the cost of eating lousy food gets paid by those working class families in plenty of other ways. It's a lot more expensive, for example, to buy clothes at the fat kids' store. Doctors and meds cost money. And -- somewhat more contentiously -- a diet made up largely of processed sugars and starches makes kids' blood sugar levels soar and then crash, leaving them lethargic, with little ability to concentrate on school work. In other words, leaving the physical issues aside, it could be argued that feeding your working-class kid crap food is a good way to ensure that the kid stays working-class.

There are a lot of things that should be done to improve America's eating habits. Some of them can only be accomplished by the government, and are likely to be accomplished, if at all, very slowly. Some of them have been accomplished and will continue being accomplished only at the societal level: When I was a kid in the 60s, lettuce came in two flavors -- Boston and Iceberg -- tomatoes were uniformly tasteless and hard as rocks, and the rest of the fresh-vegetable spectrum was rounded off by onions, potatoes, carrots, and celery. That really was it, and I grew up in Manhattan. But over time grocers came to understand that there was a market for a broader spectrum of fresh vegetables, and I can now buy arugula and napa cabbage and shitake mushrooms even at the lousy supermarket down the block. And more recently, of course, people have hollered for even fresher, better produce, and farmers' markets have sprung up in response.

But none of that will make any real difference unless individuals start to pay more attention to, put more value on, what they eat. And part of that process does involve paying more for it, in part because stuff that's better for you -- and usually tastier -- costs more to raise. Those bulletproof tomatoes I grew up on, saturated with all kinds of chemicals and lacking in any flavor except a vague sense of wetness, are cheap as hell to produce. They've been bred to grow quickly, so the farmer gets more harvests out of the land, and they're almost no waste from shipping, because those babies are so hard that no amount of knocking around in a truck can damage them. But they taste like drek, so choking them down is a chore, and when you buy them and feed them to your kids, you've reinforced their belief that vegetables are revolting. And, as mentioned above, over time that becomes an extremely expensive belief.

I am INTO food, so wouldn't that make me a good person to give advice about what is good or right [and also about what is wrong]?

No. Your personal experience has no bearing whatsoever on mine or anyone else's, and the fact that you get dizzy with delight over the "first green garlic of spring" does not give you any more authority than the person who doesn't. And it most particularly doesn't give you any authority to determine whether other people's eating habits are "right" or "wrong."

If someone busily munching on a bucket of McNuggets comes up to you and says "Geez, Mandy, how do you come by your glowing skin, your poppin'-fresh energy, your rather staggering sense of self-esteem?" THAT's the point at which you can proselytize about your personal eating habits and your belief that the world would be a happier place if everyone followed your lead. You can also reach this point if you are armed with, for example, significant and scientifically valid statistics indicating that your way of eating would indeed be of measurable benefit to people who do not happen to reside in your skin.

To do otherwise, to claim authority and for your way of eating merely because it has worked for you, is as arrogant and presumptuous as it is to accost strangers in bus stations to ask if they have accepted YOUR personal religious saviour as their own.