The word of the year, according to Collins, the dictionary people, is binge-watch. It means to watch DVDs consecutively or, more voguishly expressed, a box-set back-to-back. But I was taken by the runner-up, clean eating.
This is a trend. There is a magazine called Clean Eating and the definition is not simple. ‘The soul of clean eating is consuming food in its most natural state,’ it says, if that helps. You should avoid artificial sweeteners, monosodium glutamate, trans fats, some common food dyes and sulphur dioxide (which I admit makes dried apricots taste horrible). There’s plenty more.
We have been here before. In Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906), about immigrants, a character envisages magazines devoted to enthusiasms of the time: eugenics, Nietzsche and ‘Horace Fletcher, the inventor of the noble science of clean eating’.
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