I have been noticing a trend in the last few years that seems to be a multi-area movement to reexamine and reevaluate our perceptions on the “progress” made in several basic areas of human life specifically food and drink, reusables, and exercise. In each of these areas, I have observed a shift toward the styles of the past, and in some cases the distant past, in a very complete way. I do not discount the fact that I have been reading more and more lately, and that the media used to promote these ideas is almost exclusively print, or that these “trends” may simply be the effects of the liberal social realm in which I find myself. Either way, there is something going on and it seems to be catching on in more than just the liberal, leftist circles and I’d like to start looking at it from the perspective of beer.
I can’t say I’ve always liked beer, my first one that I can remember was a warm Busch Light at a party in high school which I couldn’t even force myself to choke down despite the social pressure, but now I like it a LOT. Even more, I prefer, most of the time, craft beer with unique, potent flavors, different textures, that challenges my brain to take a second look at what I’m drinking, but at the same time there’s always room for an ice cold American Lager when I’m in the mood. This preference was something I developed on my summer adventures in Seattle, where craft beer had already taken hold and people demanded tastier brews even in the divest of dive bars. I remember being disappointed when I would come home and try to find a solid pale ale or esb at the UIC college bars. However, in the years that followed, I began to see more and more craft brews spring up at bars that didn’t normally carry them (most of Chicago’s watering holes), and even more surprising, more and more craft breweries started opening up in the area. People I knew who I recalled having the “High Life Light is way better than Keystone Light” conversation with, suddenly were asking if I’d ever had the 3 Floyd’s Alpha King, and celebrations of Dark Lord Day began to include a wider population than the bearded, tatted, pierced beer geek gang. When I ask people (from behind the counter of the finest wine and spirits store in the galaxy) what the beer that did it for them was, what made them trade taste for quantity, what made them pay a little more per bottle they usually have a memory of a friend sharing something delicious or going to a brewery somewhere, but included in almost all their answers is that they feel like they are drinking real beer. Real beer? After the flashbacks of the scene in Hook where the lost boys feast on nothing subside, I think that maybe there’s something to this. Reality, in this case, is how well they are perceiving it. How much do I know about this beer? Where did it come from? What was it made with? Why was it made to taste/look/feel this way? Who made it? The more we know about this thing we are putting in our bodies, the more we believe in it and the more real it becomes to us. Surely this influences taste, but I think it tickles another fancy that more and more people are developing: a preference toward responsible and anthropological motives for what they do. This principle is directly opposing the commercial, big business, tell-you-what-you-want kind of philosophy that has dominated food production and distribution (and still does in most ways). I would like to think that this is due to a shift away from commercialism and consumerism, but I highly doubt that that is truly the case, instead it might be a more sustainable, responsible version of the same (the lessor of two evils).
I am including food (and wine) production as analogous to beer. I cannot speak for the rest of the nation, but in Chicago anyway, there are more and more community supported agriculture (CSA) options than ever before. I hear my friends and acquaintances talking about their Saturday rituals of heading to the farmers’ market(s) around town, of which there are more and more. I recently watched a documentary called The Truth About Farmer John which chronicled an Illinois farmer’s struggles with his personal demons and those that accompany any midwestern monoculturalist. His final solution to the problem of what to do with his farm and how not to lose it was to make it a CSA, a rather novel idea when you look at it through the eyes of a businessman. How do you say, “hey everybody, I have a farm that is totally organic, but small. The harvest is susceptible to all kinds of problems that could be solved with pesticides and chemicals but I’m not going to use those and therefore can’t guarantee you’ll get produce from me, but please give me a bunch of money in the spring and we’ll see what happens,” and think you’re going to make it in a world built around big-business, large-scale farming that produces all our foods from one or two raw ingredients and makes it taste extra good through all the things added to it? The only explanation I can think of is that people are starting to realize that, though it was the past, there were some things about agriculture we had right before the huge monoculture farms took over and the scientists made our food with chemicals. There is a way to be profitable and sustainable, you just have to have some faith and everyone has to work for it together.
Another idea that I have been exposed to recently through my friends who practice Crossfit is the Paleolithic diet. This diet is based simply on what our ancestors ate, the driving idea being that we evolved to eat this way and the agricultural revolution is too recent for our bodies to adapt, if we are going to at all. I have to say, it sounds like one of the most logical and complete diets I have come across to date. It doesn’t make any of the mistakes of the failed fad diets which demonize or omit a certain nutrient (think “carbs are evil” “fat is evil”), rather it embraces them all, they just say that there is a proper delivery method and proportion for each nutrient that can be approximated by how our distant ancestors ate. I’ll let you google it for the specifics, but I found it interesting that someone thought, “Hey, why don’t we look at diet from an anthropological perspective and see what we are made to eat rather than just keep breaking down chemicals to their lowest common denominator and build food without the natural complexity of its delivery system.” This diet assumes we do not know everything there is to know about how food interacts in our body, but we can try banking on two million years of evolution and see how that works.
Feel free to stop reading if you think I’m blatantly plagiarizing The Omnivore's Dilema and In Defense of Food, but I think the ideas go a little beyond what we put in our body. For instance, the idea of bringing your own bags to the grocery store, containers to restaurants, your own coffee mug to Starbucks! These are things that I was amazed I had never considered before they became popular. I mean, they benefit both parties and they prevent waste, duh! However, culturally, they were totally foreign and strange. I mean, if one had no concept of the supermarket and you told me about it, one might think that they would need some way of carrying the goods back home and one would not be crazy to think “Oh, I better grab a bag or a cart in which to bring the stuff home.” Something like this requires very little effort other than getting over the tradition of not doing it, which I have to say, I fail at over and over.
The next glaring example of the idea that maybe we don’t need all this extra stuff and we had it right before in many ways is the notion that our bodies are, for the most part, made correctly. Everyone can see the glaring examples of how people believe that the only way to achieve perfection of their body is to do something to it: wear something, put on makeup, shave, trim, clip, take supplements, eat special foods, etc. There is very little out there telling us, you are fine the way you are, just don’t lose it! That is an idea that I think goes along with this whole food, wine, beer, reusables, etc., in that it shows that people long ago (in this case pre-historic long ago) had some things right. More and more evidence, or at least idealists are coming out and saying “More equipment is not the answer. More complex supplements are not the answer. The answer is less external, more internal.” I watched a lecture by Christopher McDougall, the author of Born to Run (which I plan to read as soon as I finish my second round of The Fountainhead) in which he said plainly, (I’m paraphrasing here) “Humans are made to run very long distances, in our bare feet. We are not built for speed, we run long, relying on the large amount of springy connective tissue in our legs and we don’t need any special gear to do so.” He also contends that running barefoot will benefit posture, arches if you have flat feet, callused tissue on the foot, pretty much anything wrong with you mechanically. I can not testify to the effectiveness of running barefoot, but I can say that the thought of defending barefoot running against the standard form of shoes with thick padding and arch support seems backwards to me in the first place. Barefoot was first, should we not be defending shoes against that? I should add, to clarify, that McDougall does not necessarily mean literally barefoot, he runs in Vibram Five Fingers and is simply saying that we should run in something that is going to protect us from getting glass in your foot, but not something that is going to support us in some way we were not built to be supported.
I have to say, I really like this idea, it feels like the craft beer of exercising; it’s been around forever, but it had been almost forgotten in mainstream culture. It has always been the real way of doing things, but we thought we could dominate nature, perhaps we need to stop trying to dominate nature and rather learn to work with it better. Perhaps we have more to learn from our past and our ancestors than we have cared to think. Perhaps some of our “primitive” ways we not so primitive at all. Perhaps we oversimplified and in doing so lost something that nature’s complexity brings to us. Perhaps we lost what we had as children, that drive that lets us enjoy running for the sake of running, that which keeps the grin on our face after hours outside playing in the park and which might keep it there after mile fifty with fifty more to go. Whatever we did, I feel like there is some truth in the idea that we might have been missing something in how we have been doing things lately and that we may just be as smart as we think we are, just not in the way we have been thinking.
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