Entertainment Therapy
/Could it really be this simple? 25 Million Type 2 Diabetes Cases Cured. The drive to eat and store food we inherited from our ancestors is having trouble adapting to our perfect world, a world where commerce has given us unlimited food, as entertainment-therapy.
The way modernity has come to define exercise is largely based on eating. A routine which stimulates appetite to grow muscle mass would have been immoral for most people for most of history--because it would have meant that the people around you wouldn't have had enough food. 'Over eating' as a form of 'fitness' would have been incomprehensible.
The traditional popular movement arts, the village arts, may be a mixed bag. After all, if you only do a certain dance for one week out of the year, and that week just happens to come with a major feast, then perhaps its purpose was to stimulate appetite, and help resolve the constipation a sudden increase in food intake would likely create. On the other hand, if the art was practiced year round it would in all likelihood have to be based on training efficient movement, not strength; training endurance, not surge. Of course, wrestlers sponsored with copious amount of food by a king trained for surge, not endurance. But heck, it's all speculation. Eating, dancing, fighting, the reasons are beyond reason.
In all humbleness, it seems that in this era most of us are looking for an ethic of conscious eating. It's hap hazard out there. Opinions abound. Strategies multiply. Knowledge mixes with whim and whimsy. The simple answers get wind behind them and sally forth, for a while. We seem intrinsically to know that the answers must be simple, but what seemed to work for a while now degenerates into folly, cant, or personal preference.
Taxis, hair cuts, moving furniture and hot food. The four things we tip for. (I tried to tip the new accounts guy at the Bank of America the other day, it didn't go over that well.) There must be something about food, something so deeply irrational about how we view it, that we are all blind. Like insects that keep flying into clear glass windows.
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In the interest of full disclosure, here is what I ate yesterday:
4 Barrel Coffee, Yogurt, Nuts, Banana.
Salad with both pickled and raw cabbage, pickled bamboo shoots, tomatoes, romaine lettuce, hard boiled egg, raw carrot, raw daikon (shredded), and left-over slow cooked soy sauce pork shoulder. Miso, lemon, sesame oil dressing.
Lamb stock with slow simmered shiitake mushrooms (dried), celery, carrot, leek, shredded cabbage, parmesan cheese.
The way modernity has come to define exercise is largely based on eating. A routine which stimulates appetite to grow muscle mass would have been immoral for most people for most of history--because it would have meant that the people around you wouldn't have had enough food. 'Over eating' as a form of 'fitness' would have been incomprehensible.
The traditional popular movement arts, the village arts, may be a mixed bag. After all, if you only do a certain dance for one week out of the year, and that week just happens to come with a major feast, then perhaps its purpose was to stimulate appetite, and help resolve the constipation a sudden increase in food intake would likely create. On the other hand, if the art was practiced year round it would in all likelihood have to be based on training efficient movement, not strength; training endurance, not surge. Of course, wrestlers sponsored with copious amount of food by a king trained for surge, not endurance. But heck, it's all speculation. Eating, dancing, fighting, the reasons are beyond reason.
In all humbleness, it seems that in this era most of us are looking for an ethic of conscious eating. It's hap hazard out there. Opinions abound. Strategies multiply. Knowledge mixes with whim and whimsy. The simple answers get wind behind them and sally forth, for a while. We seem intrinsically to know that the answers must be simple, but what seemed to work for a while now degenerates into folly, cant, or personal preference.
Taxis, hair cuts, moving furniture and hot food. The four things we tip for. (I tried to tip the new accounts guy at the Bank of America the other day, it didn't go over that well.) There must be something about food, something so deeply irrational about how we view it, that we are all blind. Like insects that keep flying into clear glass windows.
_____________________
In the interest of full disclosure, here is what I ate yesterday:
4 Barrel Coffee, Yogurt, Nuts, Banana.
Salad with both pickled and raw cabbage, pickled bamboo shoots, tomatoes, romaine lettuce, hard boiled egg, raw carrot, raw daikon (shredded), and left-over slow cooked soy sauce pork shoulder. Miso, lemon, sesame oil dressing.
Lamb stock with slow simmered shiitake mushrooms (dried), celery, carrot, leek, shredded cabbage, parmesan cheese.
