This week, Gwyneth Paltrow managed to wind up the internet yet again with a throwaway comment. On the SmartLess podcast, the wellness guru admitted that during quarantine, she found herself “drinking seven nights a week and making pasta and eating bread. I went totally off the rails.” The internet imploded, and I’ve been trying to pick apart how her comment got so under everyone’s skin. I don’t want to be Mr. Pandemic, but we are in a pandemic. So, Gwyneth talking about a weakness for bread while people are sick and dying doesn’t read particularly well.
It is, of course, a very Gwyneth comment, to fall off the wagon and into the bakery. The kind of wry rhetoric she often uses to present a sort of caricature of a hyper-well, hyper-Gwyneth that never lets standards slip. I feel like she’s in on the joke of her own Gwynethness while also taking it quite seriously. Her quips—my personal favorite being “I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin”—are full of truth but not altogether true. It’s not fake or false, it’s just dialed up to 11. The essential boringness of eating clean and exercising loads is lessened by ironic wit.
I am not immune to Gwyneth’s charms. Even as a man of limited patience, I repeatedly indulge Gwyneth’s A-list health shenanigans. I am somehow fed, emotionally at least, by updates of the frothy science behind the world’s wellest woman getting even more well. Perhaps it’s the rebranding of being barefoot as “earthing,” or the quinoa-based whiskey cocktails, or the vagina candles. (I was hoping we could get through this without mentioning the vagina candles, yet here we are.) But the Goop experience for those who cannot afford it (most people) is essentially harmless, a benign spectacle to be taken with a large pinch of pink Himalayan rock salt. Much like her personal quips.
I don’t want to dive too deeply into Gwyneth’s depressingly bread-free lifestyle here, because, science or not, it is madness. Can we please all take a second to properly toast bread? The crusty, doughy vehicle for butter that is the opposite of sad. We all know the hug of a sandwich, the friend that is focaccia, the grin of a grilled cheese. These times are hard enough without giving up the instant upper of carbs. Looking back, my lowest points of lockdown were every moment I wasn’t actively eating bread. Make of that what you will. As people have turned against the early lockdown lifeline of sourdough, as banana bread has become déclassé, I have to ask myself: Hasn’t bread been through enough?
Gwyneth’s bread chat was also given a platform. The Guardian came through with an uncharacteristically spicy tweet: “Gwyneth Paltrow broke down and ate bread during quarantine. What was your lowest point?” The tweet vaguely supposes that re-carbing was Gwyneth’s lowest point (she didn’t strictly say that and neither did The Guardian) but the implied suggestion that her quarantine rock-bottom was pasta and a slice of wholemeal had an antagonizing effect for readers.
But, to me, the high priestess of wellness enjoying a nightly penne just felt very—how do I put this?—human. Gwyneth, like the rest of us, succumbed to comforting foods in uncomfortable times. No gimmicks, no vibrations, no crystals. Sometimes we need Gwyneth at an altar of vagina candles, shunning carbs and spray cheese, while the rest of us mainline baguettes. Sometimes we need her hyper-Gwynethness. But it’s a comfort to know that sometimes, when things are tough, we could all murder a bagel.