Jacqueline Alnes (Melville House Publishing)
WHEN Jacqueline Alnes was 18, and in her first year at a US college, she was a talented athlete and runner. Two years later, she was using a wheelchair and largely confined to her house following the onset of a debilitating illness.
After collapsing on the running track, Alnes started regularly losing control of her limbs: her vision would swim, her head loll and then she would keel over. Successive doctors found no obvious cause for concern. Alnes was told she seemed to be fine.
Advertisement
Then, abruptly, she would lose the ability to speak, able only to repeat random words or make guttural sounds. When she came to, she had no recollection of what had happened to her.
These terrifying symptoms persisted, forcing Alnes to withdraw from competitive athletics, but they proved hard to diagnose. Tests of her heart, vision, blood and brain returned normal results. Anti-seizure medication alleviated her symptoms for a year, but made her depressed; when she stopped taking these drugs, under medical supervision, her mysterious condition returned, redoubled.
For Alnes, the trauma of losing control of her body, exacerbated by a lack of understanding among her teammates and routinely dismissive treatment by doctors, amounted to a crisis not just of health, but of identity. 鈥淢y entire self-worth hinged upon my ability to run well,鈥� she writes in The Fruit Cure: The story of extreme wellness turned sour. And as the title suggests, she was prepared to take drastic action to win it back.
Today, Alnes is an author and assistant professor of creative writing at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and although her illness remains undiagnosed, more than a decade of management has seen her symptoms largely recede.
But back in 2012, she was desperate. Between frequent trips to the neurologist, she sought answers online, leading her to discover 鈥淔reelee the Bananagirl鈥�, 鈥淒urianrider鈥� and their online forum 鈥�30 Bananas A Day鈥�.
Freelee and Durianrider (real names Leanne Ratcliffe and Harley Johnstone), an Australian couple and extreme 鈥渞aw vegans鈥�, were online influencers throughout the early 2010s, espousing the benefits of a predominantly fruit diet. Alnes was among hundreds of thousands who turned to them for help with ill-health or weight loss.
While Ratcliffe, Johnstone and 鈥�30BaD鈥� (as the forum was known for a time) have since largely retreated from public view, their legacy is inescapable in the proliferation of dieting content on social media: much of it highly prescriptive and too restrictive to be considered healthy, and possibly actively harmful.
In The Fruit Cure, Alnes delves into the personal challenges and structural failings that left her vulnerable to 30BaD鈥檚 regimen, and the unrelenting, culturally charged drive to diet 鈥� despite all the evidence against doing this.
In her accomplished and comprehensive, yet compassionate, book, she interweaves her own story with that of Ratcliffe and Johnstone, whose self-proclaimed 鈥渇ruitarian鈥� paradise finally fizzled out in 2016 with the acrimonious end of their relationship.
But this instinct to heal, even 鈥減urify鈥� ourselves of all society鈥檚 ills, by changing how we eat (or, more pertinently, don鈥檛 eat) is far from a modern phenomenon, as Alnes shows. Her research into the first vegetarian organisations of the 19th century and the 鈥渕ono diets鈥� (such as eating only grapes) trumpeted from the early 1900s onwards shows just how little has changed in our moralising around food.
Indeed, Alnes reveals many pernicious ideas about nutrition (such as 鈥渃lean eating鈥�) to be cloaking outdated and derided colonial-era beliefs about racial and sexual impurity. The parallels with modern diet culture are myriad and often unsettling. Yet, still, dietary influencers of today are often not held accountable for adverse effects.
Alnes鈥檚 interweaving of personal experience, diligent reporting and wide-ranging cultural history make The Fruit Cure an engaging, clear-eyed, often vulnerable read that goes a long way to make sense of why so many of us seem to find the simple act of eating so fraught. She dangles no quick fixes or silver bullets. But, as she knows from her own long, hard road to good health, that is precisely the point.
Writer Elle Hunt is based in Norfolk, UK
