adonis be damned

The age-old pursuit of perfect health…

Is health really necessary? Of all the peculiarities inherent in the individual  one of the oddest has to be the quest by the physically fit for physical fitness. It is easy enough to understand why a fourteenth-century Frenchman with no idea of the number of calories, glucides and fiber in a loaf of bread and no idea what gave them head colds might turn to mandrake root as a solution to their problems; but why, in the twenty-first century, do middle-class Westerners frequent health food stores or health food departments in supermarkets while paying close scrutiny to the labeling of nutritional qualities and gobbling up blue-green algae pills and the like?  The theory of whether civilization is actually dangerous to our health is more plausible than it may appear. After all, anxiety about health is an inevitable component of civilized life.

---George Blanda (right) watches the action with Ben Davidson. Blanda spent nine seasons with the Raiders as a quarterback and placekicker while Davidson played defensive end for the franchise from 1964 to 1971. Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/1011/oakland.raiders.rare.photos/content.1.html#ixzz2RBhxm600---

—George Blanda (right) watches the action with Ben Davidson. Blanda spent nine seasons with the Raiders as a quarterback and placekicker while Davidson played defensive end for the franchise from 1964 to 1971.
Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/1011/oakland.raiders.rare.photos/content.1.html#ixzz2RBhxm600—

At times, the pursuit of health is not as single minded in motive as might be assumed. Currently, the quest for pure foods, non-industrial foods, and healthful diets has taken on the characteristic of both political cause and near-religious crusade. To insist that one’s vegetables and milk, meat and fruit be produced organically, without recourse to chemicals, is one way of rejecting the economic order, agri-business at the multinational level, of which Monsanto is the poster child; is a way of rejecting the economic order that produces those chemicals and the complex role that government plays in subsidizing and abetting the system.

---The search for the one best way of running is what drives Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run,” which came out in 2009 and has sold at least half a million copies since. The book tells the story of a group of larger-than-life ultramarathoners, with names like Caballo Blanco and Barefoot Ted, and the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, a tribe of men and women who spend their lives racing, in sandals, through canyons—except for when they come to the United States to win hundred-mile races. It’s a rollicking narrative, a romanticization of a distant group of people, and a broadside against American shoe companies.---click image for source...

—The search for the one best way of running is what drives Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run,” which came out in 2009 and has sold at least half a million copies since. The book tells the story of a group of larger-than-life ultramarathoners, with names like Caballo Blanco and Barefoot Ted, and the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, a tribe of men and women who spend their lives racing, in sandals, through canyons—except for when they come to the United States to win hundred-mile races. It’s a rollicking narrative, a romanticization of a distant group of people, and a broadside against American shoe companies.—click image for source…

Many a youthful idealist who may be bent on reforming “the system” if not outright kicking its foundations out as part of a political base of belief, is often food rebel sublimating the political radicalism onto the offering on the dinner plate, an off-shoot of some variant of utopianism and a search for control through the regulation of well-being by attacking the normative.  ( to be continued)

“He used for exercise to walk to the alehouse, but he was carried back again.” Samuel Johnson

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