In large part, my blogging (and typing) hiatus has been due to some very minor and temporary nerve damage in one of my fingers. This, after a sprained thumb and a fractured toe have made for a pretty colourful month! I haven't really been out of training, but haven't been able to play a lot of hockey :(
A colourful month.The term is winding down, the off-season is changing pace, applications are being sent to universities for the fall, coaching is slowing down, the snow is melting (but still falling) and as the days grow longer, I find more and more reasons to believe that it is eternally spring within myself.
Anyways, I've also been reading a lot of Rousseau lately for my political philosophy course and curiously and finding some very prototypical arguments that resurface in the writing of none other than one of my favourite contemporary writers, Micheal Pollan!
For those of you who haven't heard of him, Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and is a real advocate of returning to our instinctive and pre-choreographed relationship with food. Pollan makes some very provocative and salient points in both books, but essentially calls for a return to local, seasonal, intuitive eating.
Most notably, Pollan warns us of nutritionism:
"The first thing to understand about nutritionism — I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis — is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.
In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help."
(Taken from a New York Times article)
Agh, there is so much to say, but I have to keep it succinct and ask only this -
Is Pollan adopting a Rousseauian return to pre-enlightenment ideas regarding food, too? The idea that the hunter-gatherer was the most nutritionally balanced state of humanity is one that resurfaces in scores of popular literature, academic discourse and in my head during bus rides. If time is history, history is progress, and progress leads us away from our instincts, then is Pollan (knowingly or unknowingly) reinterpreting the Second Discourse of Rousseau in his own framework? Do we need to look backward to move forward with a healthy life?
Well, that is something that merits further investigation and I am far from qualified to present a detailed response at this stage in my learning, but if anyone has any thoughts, I would be more than interested to know. As for me, I'm keeping this idea in the hopper because I smell some ammo for a future paper!
Training is going fantastic. I get stronger every workout, learn to manipulate my mechanics with every session and am really seeing some great improvements in my kyphosis and posture. I'm currently training 2on/1off and finding that though the glutes are a little slow to respond during this training cycle, doing some basic day-off work every day (inchworms, X-band walks, clams with band, static stretching) keeps me from losing progress on off-days when I am mostly seated, hips flexed and glutes asleep. I recommend having day-off work, no matter your fitness/sports goals!
There are about 120 pages worth of essays, 3 exams and a seminar presentation in my near future, but you know what? I asked the cosmos to bring it.. so here I go!
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