If you are one of the millions of people who saw Alex Jamieson's boyfriend Morgan Spurlock scoff his way through a mountain of McDonald's in his film Super Size Me, you probably remember her as "the boring vegan girlfriend". While Spurlock goofed around and made us laugh, Jamieson was in the background cooking lentils, munching carrot sticks and telling him eating all that junk could kill him. In fact, she was the only one who didn't seem completely shocked by just how quickly Spurlock's health deteriorated once he started his new regime. Her tone veers between a smug "I told you so" and sincere worry for a loved one.
The day before the McDonald's diet starts, Spurlock sits down to an organic vegan "last supper" of tofu and vegetable filo tart, lovingly made by Jamieson. By the end of day two, he is throwing his guts up and she is less than cheery. Later on in the film she is telling him she thinks meat is as addictive as heroin.
Jamieson, who's 31, has been vegan since her mid-20s. "I have to admit I haven't been 100% vegan for the past six years," she says. "In the last couple, we've travelled to 20-something countries; it's tough to be vegan in Brazil or Iceland but, well, I do my best."
Tall, beautiful and with a radiant complexion, Jamieson looks nothing like she does on screen (rather stern and pallid) and nothing like the sickly vegans of popular imagination. She is also much funnier and less pious than viewers worldwide were led to believe. Since it was first screened at Sundance in 2004 (where Spurlock was awarded best director), Super Size Me has made more than $35m and been nominated for an Oscar. Throughout the film, Jamieson comes across as more than a little contemptuous of the whole project. On day 21 of the diet, when Spurlock wakes in the night with severe chest pains, she begs him to stop; later, when a doctor tells him he has turned his liver into pâté, a condition usually associated with long-term alcohol abuse, she is there again, this time on the telephone, telling him she loves him and doesn't want him to hurt himself.
One of the most memorable moments of the film is when Jamieson, straight to camera, complains that Spurlock is having trouble in the bedroom department. "Saturated fats are impeding the blood flow to his penis," she says primly. In short, he's having trouble getting an erection, and "when he does", Jamieson adds, "I have to be on top, and he gets tired easily". None of this endears her to the viewer.
"They always pick the clips where I'm at my worst," Jamieson says in her own defence. "People were writing into the message boards saying, 'She's a bitch - you should leave her.' Come on. They only put in the parts where I'm complaining. I am a such a good girlfriend, you wouldn't even believe it."
At the start, Spurlock and Jamieson made a pact. She would go along with his "gastrointestinal form of hara-kiri" if he made her one promise: after the experiment was over, he'd eat whatever she put in front of him, no matter how green and leafy.
Almost as soon as Spurlock started on his McBinge, Jamieson was devising a detox diet for him to follow the instant the madness was over, the more so after the chest pains incident. This has since morphed into a book, The Great American Detox Diet, complete with foreword by Spurlock and a promise that following Jamieson's advice and recipes will help you "lose weight, increase energy levels and undo the damage to your body - in just 8 weeks!"
So was the whole thing a bit of a set-up? The vegan chef whose boyfriend goes on a meatfest and just happens to be cured by her "specially devised detox". You've seen the movie, now do the detox.
"It was kind of funny that the detox was even in the film," Jamieson says. She was borrowing Spurlock's office to type up the detox and the cameraman, Scott Ambrozy, asked what she was up to and decided to shoot her at work, a stroke of fortune that meant they could put on the cover of the book "as featured in the hit movie Super Size Me". After the film came out, Jamieson was bombarded by people who wanted to detox "the way Morgan did". "We got so many emails from people who saw the film and said, 'For the first time I realise that what I've been eating has affected my body. Morgan is me, that's me, I see myself. What did you do? How did you fix him?' So many people wanted to know. After the movie came out, Morgan said, 'Wow! Maybe you should put some of that in the book I'm writing.' So I started to and then we both realised it had to be its own book - there was just too much."
And so The Great American Detox Diet was born. A few pages in, it becomes clear Jamieson is serious about this stuff. If anything, she's more serious than Spurlock is. The film simply gave her a wider platform from which to preach what she had already been practising. And while Spurlock attacks the fast food industry in general and McDonald's in particular, Jamieson has a much trickier target, namely the standard American diet, or SAD as she calls it. For a diet book, it's pretty political: part Fast Food Nation, part Gillian McKeith, but without the poo analysis and quackery.
"Food can hurt us or heal us, and given what's happening to us on the current SAD, it is now, frankly, killing us," says Jamieson in her second chapter. And it's no good being smug and thinking, "What does this have to do with me?" because the American diet, Jamieson says, is also the standard western diet.
The detox is broken down into an eight-week plan, because that is how long it took Spurlock's body functions and blood levels to get back to normal after his McDonald's diet. This is not a "cold turkey" detox. It's slow and steady, the emphasis being on changing your lifestyle rather than getting into a party frock. Week one, for example, is dedicated to increasing your water intake to at least 10 glasses a day ("Mild dehydration is one of the great plagues of modern life"), week two is "rethinking our love affair with sugar" and on week three it's caffeine ("We're addicted to this stuff, and I mean addicted, as caffeine works on the same parts of the brain as amphetamines, cocaine and heroin").
Dairy products, food additives, artificial sweeteners and refined carbohydrates are also considered the devil's work. Jamieson can't quite believe we pump all this "crap" into our bodies and no one has noticed how sick it's making us. "We're miserable. People are more sick now than they have ever been. Yes, we have a longer lifespan, but we're also taking more and more drugs than ever," she tells me, over a vegan lunch of sea vegetables, beans and brown rice (a much tastier combination than you'd think).
She has a disconcerting habit of pointing to our plates and making grand statements: "These sea veggies are the most nutritious food on the planet. They've got so many minerals and nutrients and stuff in them, it's crazy. If everybody was eating a little bit of this every day, it'd be great - maybe we wouldn't need so many supplements, wouldn't have cravings for all these other foods." It's all pretty sensible stuff, but occasionally Jamieson sounds as if she's practising for a sixth-form debate: "We're all being fed a bunch of bullshit, a bunch of lies about how we should be healthy, and the people who are telling us are the people who are going to make a lot of money out of selling us drugs and stuff that we don't need."
Her arguments aren't especially sophisticated. Take milk, or what she calls the "dairy dilemma". The US department of agriculture's recommendation of three servings of the white stuff a day (including yogurt and cheese) is "about twice what the World Health Organisation recommends. Why is that? Why are we all of a sudden needing so much more than everybody else on the planet? I don't understand that. And we have diseases here that involve protein and calcium that they don't have in rural China; they have very little dairy in their diet there, and they have no osteoporosis. Here we're told to drink milk for healthy bones but we have more osteoporosis than anybody. There is something happening here - we're not being told the whole story."
Jamieson emails me later to clarify a point she made about those on food assistance. She'd been talking about her recent experience on Spurlock's 30 Days television project, during which they lived on minimum wage for 30 days: "We went to a few food banks to get food assistance and the quality of the food is terrible. We were given whole cakes, sodas, candy and canned vegetables - that had sugar in them! Yes, I think when you're starving you just want calories and, yes, I'm glad these programmes exist - but shouldn't they get better-quality food? Can't this country, supposedly the best and richest in the world, provide for its citizens better?"
This argument highlights a few of the problems with detoxing: it's expensive, time-consuming and middle class. You won't find quinoa, buckwheat and those super-nutrient sea vegetables in a pile-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap supermarket. And even if you did, you'd have to be earning a fair amount to make them a substantial part of your diet, especially if you wanted to cook them with organic vegetables.
Jamieson takes the criticism head on, fully accepting not everyone can afford to do their weekly shopping at a farmers' market: "There is a trickle-down effect. The more the middle class takes a hold of it, the lower the prices get. Hopefully organic is going to become more affordable." In the meantime, she'd love to write a book on healthy eating on a budget.
It is impossible to read The Great American Detox Diet without questioning your own eating habits and Jamieson's message stays with you. A couple of days after our lunch, her words on sugar still fresh in my mind, I found myself rejecting a choc ice in favour of a banana - no mean feat, I can tell you. I also go from thinking veganism is nothing short of a cult to thinking that perhaps there's something in it.
As she sits opposite me, an impressive rock on her slender finger (by its size, I'm guessing Spurlock proposed after the success of Super Size Me, rather than before), I decide Jamieson is just the right side of smug, is in fact one of those women other women secretly want to be, which is handy if you've got a book or way of life to sell. I mean, I can't imagine anyone actually wants to be Gillian McKeith, can you?
Jamieson was brought up by bohemian parents in 1970s Oregon (her mother had a weekly organic gardening programme on the local radio station). After college, she moved to New York and took a job assisting an entertainment lawyer. Rooted to her desk, and in a stressful and competitive environment, she sought solace in the usual things: coffee, fizzy drinks, cakes and other food Valium, as she calls it. Before long, she became overweight, depressed and plagued by migraines. While bored in the office, she started tuning in to a holistic talk show on the radio. Gradually she became convinced it was her diet that was making her feel lousy. Not long after, she ditched her desk job and enrolled at the National Gourmet Cookery School and began retraining as a health counsellor. "When I realised I could learn to cook this way, help people and make money doing it, I thought, oh my God, I've finally found my calling, because, boy, entertainment law was not my calling."
At around the same time she met Spurlock. As well as studying, she was "working as a waitress in a cocktail bar" at night. Spurlock came in to her bar, ordered a Guinness and asked if he could take her for coffee after her shift.
After the course, she did a six-month internship at a macrobiotic restaurant in Milan, followed by a stint as a pastry chef in a vegan restaurant back in New York, then a job as a chef in a non-profit summer camp in Connecticut (the Hole In The Wall Gang, founded by Paul Newman for children with life-threatening illnesses). When she returned to New York, Jamieson enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and started building up her client base. Then, on Thanksgiving 2002, along came Spurlock's light bulb moment.
In some ways, the pair have a very traditional relationship: they are engaged to be married, she's at home cooking (or, as a natural health counsellor, teaching her clients how to cook), while he's out making films. At home they eat vegan, but Spurlock still eats meat once or twice a month. "He's somewhere between detox and McDonald's," she says of Spurlock's current state. "He hasn't eaten fast food since, but he'll still have a slice of pizza or, as he likes to say, 'a really good burger, really juicy, handmade, with real cheese', which is fine. It's no big deal. Then he comes home and we eat like this," she says, pointing to our plates again.
Although they still live in the same tiny East Village apartment, life has changed considerably for Jamieson and Spurlock since Super Size Me. "Some of it's great, some of it's really weird. If it wasn't for the movie, I wouldn't have the opportunity to talk to people about this stuff." On the other hand, if she's out with Spurlock, they are always in the public eye, especially if he eats anything. "I know he's at some point going to shave off his moustache, which makes me really sad because I love it, but I think that will take off a lot of the attention."
Jamieson's next book is on healthy eating for children. She'd love to see an American version of Jamie's School Dinners, but thinks it would have to be regionalised because America is "too massive" and "you can't just have a school in New York City because most of the country would be like, 'Eugh, that's just New York.' " She and Spurlock have even become friendly with Jamie and Jools Oliver: "He and Morgan are like lost brothers or something. Both totally goofy 12-year-olds." Oliver cooked for them in the summer, when he and his family were in New York. "He said he'd never cooked a vegan meal before. He's so sweet. I was like, 'Dude, you can make anything and I'd be psyched.' He made this amazing Indian feast for us and it was fantastic."
And what of Spurlock's now infamous lack of libido? Have things improved since he stopped eating McDonald's? "Well, I never see him because he's always on the road, so it's worse. He's even more stressed out now." She laughs. "No, things are fine, thank you very much. I wouldn't have said yes if they had gotten worse." There will be no documentary of the wedding. They are, in fact, planning to elope, probably to a beach far away, the kind of place that doesn't have a McDonald's.
·The Great American Detox Diet, by Alex Jamieson, is published by Rodale at £10.99. To order a copy for £9.99, including UK mainland p&p, call 0870 836 0875 (theguardian.com/bookshop).
Vegan treats
Avocado sesame pasta
Serves four.
115g rice or mung bean pasta (gluten-, dairy- and wheat-free)
1 ripe avocado, peeled, stoned and diced
4 cherry tomatoes, quartered
2 tbsp toasted sesame oil
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
1 tbsp hulled sesame seeds
2 tsp naturally brewed soy sauce, shoyu or wheat-free tamari
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
¼ tsp chilli flakes
Fresh coriander leaves, to garnish (optional)
Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions. Drain, rinse in cold water and set aside in a bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the remaining ingredients, mix in the pasta and garnish with the coriander.
Spicy sweet potato fries
Serves four.
1 medium sweet potato, washed, scrubbed, dried and cut into 1cm 'fries'
2 tsp each chilli powder, sea salt, black pepper
1 tsp each dried oregano, paprika, mustard powder
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/gas mark 7. Place all the ingredients on a large baking tray and toss to coat the fries evenly in the seasonings. Bake for 25-30 minutes, tossing every 15 minutes or so.
Maple pecan biscuits
Makes 30 biscuits.
285g pecans, ground in food processor to the size of small pebbles
340g instant porridge oats
115g unbleached white spelt flour
115g wholemeal spelt flour
350g maple syrup
60g unrefined coconut oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp sea salt
16 pecan halves
Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Line a baking tray with baking paper. In a mixing bowl, combine the pecans, oats and sifted flours. In another bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, coconut oil, vanilla extract and salt. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and stir to combine. Scoop 16 tablespoonfuls of dough on to the tray. Gently press down using your palm, then press half a whole pecan into the top of each biscuit. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until just golden brown.
