I Recreate Amanda Bacon’s Elle Magazine Food Diary Using Stuff in My House.

Like most of you, I recently read the Elle article about what Amanda Chantal Bacon, a woman who may just be a low-blood-sugar-induced hallucination of Gwyneth Paltrow’s, eats in a given day. It was a lot like the first time I read Shakespeare or heard an interview with Bob Dylan. I knew it was English, but I didn’t understand a goddamn word and in the end just felt really inadequate.

Bacon, who has completely forsaken her name, spends her day eating leaves and twigs and acting smug, sort of like a really snobby guinea pig. She probably excretes tiny hard pellets and smells like cedar chips. Her entire day makes you want to cry a little.

I realized the only way to truly understand this woman’s madness was to try her diet for myself, so I spent the morning recreating her meals using only things I had in my home (because my husband gets kinda annoyed when I spend money on food that isn’t edible).

It did not go well.

Here is the breakdown.

This is how Bacon starts her day:

“I usually wake up at 6:30am, and start with some Kundalini meditation and a 23-minute breath set—along with a copper cup of silver needle and calendula tea—before my son Rohan wakes.”

This particular morning, I wake up at 8:00am. Actually, that’s sort of a lie. I wake up at 7:40am, but I spend 20 minutes in bed working on an elaborate fantasy that includes most of the cast of Hamilton, in which I am far more flexible than I am in real life. It’s pretty awesome.

At 8:09am I go downstairs and find that I am fresh out of whatever the hell silver needle and calendula tea is, so I make some Lemon Zinger, toss a silver bracelet in it, and pour it all into a Moscow mule cup. I’m pretty excited about how closely I’ve nailed it.

 

I try taking a sip but the copper conducts heat really well so it burns my lip. This is my first clue that Bacon is a cyborg. I switch to this mug:

 

I look up Kundalini meditation, and a website I found specifically says that I need to read up on it before charging ahead recklessly.

Rather than finish the article, I decide to charge ahead recklessly. I try focusing my energy on my nose, which just ends up giving me a headache. I’m unclear of what a 23-minute breath set is, so I just burp the alphabet while drinking my tea and looking to see if anything in my Amazon shopping cart dropped in price.

Not that different from a regular day, really.

90 minutes after waking up, Bacon has a pre-breakfast chi drink (“drunk in car!” she says, to be clear that she is grounded and normal and definitely not an alien trying to pass as human). I look up the recipe for a chi drink.

• Almond milk
• Cordyceps (a fungus used for strengthening the immune system)
• Reishi (some other magical mushroom)
• Maca (a plant that grows in Peru that’s good for your lady business)
• Shilajit resin (I shit you not, the description is “a rocklike substance used to relieve pain and inflammation.”)
• Some more herbs you’ve never heard of
• Pearl powder (literally made from grinding up pearls, because people in L.A. are so baller, they EAT what the rest of us consider jewelry)
• Stevia

Also, Bacon mentions something about Brain Dust.

I literally don’t have any of that stuff except for the Stevia, which I bought one summer when I thought I was being healthy but actually had just gone insane.

Instead, I heat up some actual milk and toss a mushroom in it. When I was in Peru, I learned that potatoes are a staple part of the diet, so I toss in part of a sweet potato. I don’t have the pain relieving rock, but I do have aspirin, which I put in there along with some Stevia (did I mention that you shouldn’t do any of this at home? You shouldn’t.) Bacon also mentions almond butter, so I put a teaspoon of sunflower seed butter in there as well.

I don’t have any Brain Dust, but my husband suggests that “head particles” are probably the same thing. Plus, I’ve had brain surgery before, so I’m missing a tiny piece of my skull, which means that my head particles are probably more brainy than a normal person’s. So I just scratch my head over the cup before taking a sip.

 

It’s sort of tasty, except for the whole potato-mushroom thing. Bacon says that the drink has super endocrine, brain, immunity, and libido- boosting powers, but I’d argue that getting drunk and looking at shirtless photos of Daveed Diggs does the same thing.

Bacon follows her potato-rock milk with three quinton shots and B-vitamins. I don’t know what quinton shots are, so instead I listen to three songs that include the word “shot” in them. I also have some gummi vitamins, because my body is a temple. A temple which will only accept nutrition in the form of candy.

It’s been 45 minutes and I’ve yet to consume anything that resembles food. I’m starving, I have to pee, and the kitchen smells like boiled potatoes. On the plus side, I have Bon Jovi’s “Shot Through the Heart” stuck in my head.

I decide to skip ahead to breakfast. Apparently Bacon has been up for three hours at this point, subsisting on resin and pearls and her own inflated sense of self worth, before she has her first meal of the day. She has unsweetened green juice (which she describes as her “overall mood balancer.” I want to point out to her that such a thing would be unnecessary if she ate actual food, as she would not want to face punch everyone in a low-blood-sugar-induced rage), bee pollen (which she says tastes “like candy” because she is a fucking monster), and “activated” cashews. She also has some fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, which I guess sounded too normal, so she adds turmeric.

The only juice I have is coconut water, which I dye green. I feel like this is a triumph. I decide to skip the turmeric, and it’s not like any integrity is lost in this omission because I didn’t really have any to start with.

I’m unclear on how to activate cashews (something about soaking them in salt water and then re-dehydrating them), so I just place them on a laptop computer that’s playing the scene from Weird Science where they bring Kelly LeBrock to life.

Let’s recap what I’ve eaten so far, shall we?

• Juice.
• More juice.
• Tea.
• Warm potato milk.
• Cashews.

I hate this woman with every fiber of my body.

I still don’t feel like I’ve had breakfast, so I decide to skip ahead to her snack, which is the closest Bacon comes to eating food during the entire day. She has yogurt and fruit which sounds so utterly normal I could cry.

A closer examination says that she has “cultured coconut yogurt,” which I don’t have. I do have coconut-flavored yogurt, though, and coconut flakes. In order to make the latter cultured, I read it excerpts from Shakespeare.

 

I also add some granola. It’s yummy, and it makes me less stabby.

 

For both lunch and dinner Bacon has salads, neither of which have any actual bacon in them. Her lunch salad is “zucchini ribbons with basil, pine nuts, sun-cured olives, and lemon, with green tea on the side.” She talks about how she alternates this with some homemade seaweed roll which she has bullshitted herself into believing is a taco.

 

To be fair, her idea for a zucchini salad isn’t terrible, but it’s also entirely insubstantial. She describes her lunches as “awesomely satiating” which is true if by “awesomely” you mean “fucking not at all”.

According to Bacon:

“I usually make this while standing, working with someone, simultaneously emailing and definitely texting. I know the right answer would be to sit down and take 10 minutes to eat, but that doesn’t happen for lunch, ever.”

And, I’m sorry, but really? I think if you don’t have 10-minutes to sit down and eat shredded zucchini it might be time to re-evaluate your life. I will note this: she has the strength to stay upright – and standing, no less – after consuming about 200 calories per meal. It’s miraculous. I’d applaud her, but I don’t have the energy.

Bacon, who’s probably hallucinating by this point, then drinks a whole bunch of green things that I suspect look remarkably similar going in as they do coming out. None of it makes any sense to me, but I do recognize the word “hemp” and “mint chip” so I eat a York peppermint patty while rocking a macrame choker I made in high school. Good times.

Dinner is another salad, eaten at a Japanese restaurant that Bacon describes as her 3-year-old’s favorite. And it’s not. Trust me, it’s not. Her son’s favorite restaurant is probably McDonald’s or some shitty pizza place. He just doesn’t know those places exist.

Bacon’s salad is … ugh, Christ, I don’t even know. It has, like, “micro-cilantro” which isn’t even a thing. I honestly have no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. I put some radishes and cucumbers in a bowl and add some mushrooms and herbs to some water. I’m totally cool with healthy eating, but we’ve moved so far beyond that realm. This life is inaccessible, pretentious, and not actually healthy.

 

I see that she finishes the day with some chia pudding or some shit, but when I try to look up a recipe for it I get another snotty message from a health site.

I realize that I am entirely through with this experiment. Deciphering this woman’s bullshit has been exhausting. It is 11am. I pour myself some bourbon and have some butterscotch chips.

They are delicious.

—————

UPDATE: Apparently to replicate Bacon’s menu, you would have to spend more than $700. What. the. Hell.

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