The food part of running always baffles me. I lose 10# to get to 'thon racing weight by eating less in the weeks before and giving up sweets completely, but the rest of the time, my body's a dumpster in which I toss every morsel frowned upon by Michael Pollan and the rest.
Eat food? Would my grandmother recognize it? I guess--after all, it's her green bean casserole, complete with gelatinous canfuls of sodium-filled mushroom soup, that I've come to love each holiday. My earliest memory of her involves sitting at her kitchen table as she sipped her Sanka. Let's admit that grandmothers recognize a lot more as food than we might realize, mostly out of necessity and, then, convenience. Great-grandmothers too, probably.
Mostly plants. Potatoes. Corn syrup is plants.
Not too much. Stop being so prim.
I have noticed though, that when I break my bad habits--too much meat and sugar mostly--I'm more alert and I don't crash in the middle of the afternoon. It's easier to sustain a high training load on a good diet. It doesn't make that much of a difference in the training itself, but it matters for how you feel the rest of the time, for how great a cost you pay in tiredness for each mile you run.
the body is a vessel...or dumpster. and it's a machine that needs fuel. but metaphors aside, we only get five senses and i plan on using em all. Not that discussions about human/animal/environmental/labor rights aren’t worth the print, but i wonder whether a “consumer health” bestseller like Pollan considers the taste and texture of what we should and shouldn’t be eating. For the athlete, Pollan's "not too much" might be his best point. If you apply it only to extremely delicious but wholly innutritious food.
ReplyDeleteI agree, and I think I can be a little glib about Pollan, who's doing good work. The "not too much" part is key, and pretty much involves losing weight by not eating too much. It also involves cutting out junk food. It's pretty much non-controversial that we should source our food ethically, namely, in a way that respects the dignity of food producers, animals, and the earth (by "Earth" I mean the sum of all the ecologies that we all rely on). It's a matter of justice.
ReplyDeleteWhat's confused me about environmentalism is that I've had a hard time thinking that's it's not incoherent that the earth and animals are ethical ends...that's not a totally reasonable position, and I've been trying to figure out why. Here's my previous and flawed reasoning: We think of justice as equality; the earth, animals, and humans aren't analogous or equal things, and can't be made to be equal; only humans are equal to one another; therefore justice doesn't apply to animals or the earth.
But I've come to realize that we need a concept of justice that doesn't involve equality in order to accommodate our moral sensitivies about the earth, food sourcing, etc. So I'm all for what Pollan says now...I sometimes, though, wish he'd write in a less smug tone.