Rosemary McLeod: Fashion mistakes cause cringe, diet obsession causes mirth

Beetroot has become the vegetable du jour for reasons to do with fashion just as much as white lipstick once was. Photo/Getty

I'd be lying if I said I was never a fashion victim, because I once wore hot pants. Denim hot pants.

Yes, I was a lot younger and much slimmer, but it remains a searing memory that, to quote a James K Baxter poem, had to be torn across and burned for the sake of going on living.

I have recovered the memory of it, though, because young women are wearing them again with a different name, and most have legs equally unlovely.

I die small deaths at the memory of halter-necked dresses that emphasised my short neck.

There is too little length in my neck for polo-necked sweaters too, but I wore them and they made my chin itch madly. They were in fashion. They were compulsory, and are becoming so again. Not for me. No, not a second time, to quote The Beatles.

My mother once made me a backless dress that featured a wrap skirt for good measure.

There is a photograph of me wearing this disaster, and when I find it again I will burn it.

The hours I spent wearing that dress among her friends that chilly day still makes me cringe. A wrap skirt in Wellington? Backless? Why on earth?

I have also in my time worn white lipstick and white stockings, and had my hair long and parted in the middle because that was what you did. It didn't suit me. That didn't matter. It was what you did.

Beware the man, to quote Sam Hunt, who tries to fit you out in his idea of a hat, but we all let him do it in moments of weakness, moments of being told what's fashionable.

Which brings me to beetroot, the vegetable du jour for reasons to do with fashion just as much as white lipstick once was. Say what you like, chant the mantra of its virtues, but it tastes like earth. Little else.

Mix it with carrots as a juice and you insult the honourable carrot. Make borscht, and it tastes like earth with sour cream. Peel it and your hands are dyed magenta. Spill it and everything is stained.

Grate it into salad and it turns deep pink. Soak it in vinegar and – what a relief – it tastes like vinegar. Puree it into a cake. Go on. Eat earth cake. There are worse things to ingest, but not many from the vegetable world where all things – apart from swedes and beetroot – are blameless.

We used to be told what colours to wear. Today we're told what colours to eat, and dark colours rule. Eat dark. Eat silverbeet and beetroot cake with black truffle icing just because you can. Wash it down with squid ink flavoured dark chocolate. Throw up at your leisure.

I'm grateful that I grew up in a time of meat pies and cream buns, fried chops and mashed potato with extra butter. It didn't make me slender, but it gave me pleasure. We eat today to feed our anxieties, which is to say we diet. Endlessly and volubly.

We count calories and dazzle ourselves with the maths. We treat food as a medicine that can make us healthy, and shun food that a few people really can't tolerate – like gluten – for fear of missing out on being interesting.

And now the fashion is to swallow other peoples' processed poo, in pill form, to lose weight. What was once an insult to hurl in anger is on TV as a straight-faced solution to obesity, in a three-part series.

It's the seriousness that makes it so exquisitely funny. I'm very much hoping it will become a craze.