You guys.

A DECADE.

TEN. YEARS.

Ten exact whole years have happened since I published The China Study: Fact or Fallacy?—a critique intended as a passion project, written for my dozen-person audience of fellow dogma-averse misfits, funded “between jobs” by insurance money from an accident, with a URL typo that haunts me to this day (verily, I weep).

I’ll be honest here. If I’d known ahead of time how much the whole thing would blow up—the stress of highly public back-and-forth debates, the sudden appointed role of dietary rabble-rouser, the bizarre permutations of my name I’d be greeted with for years to come (Diane Minger? Denise Miller? Dennis Munger? Who even am I)—I probably would’ve psyched myself out and never posted it. Or at least been much more careful about the “liberal use of adjectives and cutesy expressions” that flagged me as a meat industry shill (cattlemen sure do love their modified nouns!). I would’ve told Denise the Younger not to get seduced by the paleo community, replete with its own ideological circle-jerking, just because they welcomed me so readily. And I definitely would’ve deleted the “Professional Sock Puppeteer” title I’d listed as a joke-job on Facebook. The internet, as internets are wont to do, took it seriously, and I must forever bear the shame of having faked such prestigious credentials. I repent.

(more…)