Name: The monophagous diet.
Appearance: Relentless.
Oh God, I know what you mean. We’ve had the paleo and the clean eating and the Atkins and the 5:2 and I really think I’ve had enough of diets now. I’m full. I feel your pain, but monophagy isn’t a diet that anyone is recommending.
No? What is mono … ph …? Monophagy means eating only one kind of food.
Like Bugs Bunny does? I suppose. The term is usually applied to animals, but it also describes people such as Jackie Page quite well.
Do I know who Jackie Page is? You will in a minute. She’s a 77-year-old great-grandmother, from Carshalton in Surrey, who has revealed that she drinks four cans of Pepsi every day.
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Crikey. And she has done for the past 64 years (though she does eat too).
Sorry, did you say 64 years? I did – since 1954, when she was 13 years old. That would be about 93,500 cans of Pepsi across 23,375 consecutive days.
Did Norris McWhirter stand next to her keeping count? Probably not all the time. Page takes spare cans to restaurants in her handbag and won’t allow Coca-Cola in the house.
I’d quite like an eccentric gran like that. “I don’t call it an addiction,” she told the Daily Mail. “It’s just something I like and I can’t help it if I don’t like anything else … Whether I am a caffeine addict or not I don’t know.”
I think I know.“‘I have never drank water – and even if I was dying [of thirst], no way would I,” she added.
Monophagy sounds very inconvenient. Yes. Although it suits some people. A 23-year-old animator called Andrew Hawryluk ate the same meal at Chipotle in Los Angeles for 186 consecutive days.
Dear God. And Mike Roman, from Hackensack, New Jersey, says he has eaten a plain cheese pizza for dinner every night for the past 37 years, since he was four. And he has peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch.
Does that count as a vegetable? Nope. Although Roman does point out: “Pizza has three of the four basic food groups.” He told the New Theory podcast he also listens to the same music and watches the same films and TV because he likes routine.
Do say: “What do you fancy tonight? Chinese, Indian, Italian?”
Don’t say: “I’m easy. As long as it’s chicken nuggets.”
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