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What kind of an eater are you?

From locavores to femivores, to fast food junkies and punk domestics, here are 11 labels for every kind of person at the dinner table.

9. Fast food junkie / Philanderer

Alan Diaz/AP

  • By Stir It Up! editors

 The fast food junkie eats fast food for the sake of convenience – they don't (or can't) carve out the time (or own the tools) to marinate and grill a flank steak. They'll buy frozen pizzas and soda and compare prices on Hot Pockets. These are the people to whom Taco Bell markets a taco with a shell made of Doritos. Fast food junkies most likely don't even care about all the scientific research comparing the nutrition of a poorly made hamburger to an equivalent sized brick of Uranium-238. Some people call them ignorant. They call themselves blissful.

Philanderers have food affairs. To all outward appearances, philanderers are healthy eaters. A glance in their fridge reveals vegetables and organic meat products with nary a gram of fructose in sight. They might even lecture you on the benefits of healthy eating. But their lives are like a bad parody of an Eagles song: Philanderers can't hide their lyin' eyes. Or the ketchup stains on their shirt collars.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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