Given the current holiday season, it feels appropriate to address the nature of the human-food relationship as it commonly exists today. Living in a time and place of abundance, our relationship with food has become rather disrupted. Few of us, myself included, manage to sit down over a meal as a family on a daily basis. Few of us are really present at our meals, and our food choices tend to be founded more out of convenience, attempted precision, or fear of missing out and the thrall of flavor and food abundance more so than true sustenance or satiety. Few of us subsist entirely on food that is “food” in the truest sense -- unprocessed, locally sourced, prepared by hand.

While modern advances have allowed food-related opportunities that should serve to improve lives, I question whether that’s really the case. Gone are the stresses of whether there will be food to forage or hunt, or whether the season will permit ample harvest, and in their place we have the stressors over how to eat, a question that is only permitted by our food-abundance society. We now obsess over when to eat, what is too much or too little, whether a food is “healthy” or “unhealthy,” whether a food fits within a particular diet, what diet is “best,” the macronutrients we are eating, the split of macronutrients we ought to eat, the macronutrient split someone else is eating, etc.

No longer is a meal a blessing of sustenance and satiety and shared pleasure. It is now a responsibility that must be done right or else, or a test of willpower to resist temptation, or a box to check, or a formulation of specified servings and milligrams and percentages. It’s the difference between driving a convertible down the coast highway for a pleasurable trip to nowhere in particular, and sitting in traffic, late, on your way to a meeting you’ve been forced to attend.

I’m not saying that it’s as simple as just chilling out about the whole food thing and it will all be better. Our world today is far different than it has been for the last hundred or thousand or hundred thousand years, and our changed environment demands a change in our behavior. Our food freedoms, if we can call them that, have earned us food responsibilities as well. But I question whether our new stress-based relationship with food is a healthy or sustainable one. I don’t really have a solution to this apparent problem, and I’m not sure what an ideal relationship with food in an abundance society looks like.

But perhaps this holiday season, we can try it out and see what we come up with.

Enjoy food that is unprocessed, local, prepared by loving hands.

Be present, be thankful, and eat to satiate and fulfill, not to abate an un-scratchable itch or driven by fear of what is “right” or “okay.”

Be more human!

- PS

11/22/17

• Turkish get-up - 3,3,3

Then...

• For time:

• 21 deadlifts (225/155)

• 21 medball sit-ups (20/14)

• 50m SB carry (AHAP)

• 15 deadlifts

• 15 medball sit-ups

• 50m SB carry

• 9 deadlifts

• 9 medball sit-ups

• 50m SB carry