Category: Culture

A Few Myths About Food

food myths

People believe all kinds of stupid crap, stuff that doesn’t really make any sense but somehow gets passed around as absolute truth.  Mostly these things are harmless, like poinsettias are poison or bananas grow on trees, but sometimes they get a lot more traction than that and start causing trouble.  For example, here are a few “facts” that don’t have a lick of evidence to support them, but people believe they are the key to a healthy life.

You should drink 8 glasses of water every day.  There is absolutely no evidence to support this myth.  Think about it!  Why eight?  How big are the glasses?  Can you drink them all in the morning and take the rest of the day off?  What happens if you drink nine?  Do you OD and start swimming upstream?

Smoothies are healthy.  Not necessarily.  If you make your own, you’ve got a fighting chance (depending on how much chocolate sauce you use) but if you buy them commercially, you’re getting sugar – lots of sugar.  That’s why they taste so good.

Salt is bad for you.  Wrong!  Banishing salt from your diet can hurt you just as much as eating too much.  Here’s the deal: use your head!  There’s no need to be a sodium evangelist, but you shouldn’t flash the salt shaker around like maracas, either.

Low-Fat is a healthy alternative.  If you eat like Henry VIII, maybe, but regular people need a certain amount of fat in their diet.  The other thing to remember is stuff that’s labelled Low-Fat is only low-fat by comparison.  Compared to what, you ask?  Good question!

You need to walk 10,000 steps a day.  Once again, there is no evidence to support this.  However, unlike most modern myths, this one actually has an origin.  One of the slogans to promote fitness before the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo was Manpo-kei which, literally translated, means 10,000 steps.  Somehow, it got morphed into a fitness fact.

Energy drinks are healthy.  Not even close.  Read the label/do the math. They’re loaded with enough sugar to qualify them as junk food.  Plus, there have to be some serious chemicals in there to turn the liquid you’re drinking bright blue, or neon green.

And finally:

Organic food is chemical free.  No it isn’t.  First of all, on our planet, the wind blows, and very few organic farms are hermetically sealed.  Secondly, there are all kinds of chemicals that are allowed in “certified organic” food; it’s just that nobody mentions them.  And finally, “organic” is a term that has a slippery definition, so slapping it on a label doesn’t mean much.

Different Thoughts?

language

Recently, a lot of very smart people have been quietly studying the next impossible question: which came first, language or culture?  Like the chicken and the egg conundrum – Uh, good luck solving that riddle — it does bring up an interesting concept.  Does language affect the way we look at the world?  Or, more precisely, do people who speak different languages think differently?

Wow!  This is a huge question that scholars are going to be pondering for years, but the simple answer is … yes.  Let me try to explain without sounding like some kind of philological fascist.

Every language has words that simply do not translate because every culture has concepts that don’t.  For example, the Hawaiian language has no word for “weather*.”  Why?  When your weather is consistently Paradise 2.0, you just don’t need an uncountable noun to describe it.  Meanwhile, in all Inuit languages, there are dozens of different words for snow.  They describe every variant imaginable in a world where survival depends on what kind of white stuff Mother Nature is throwing at you.  Both these linguistic imperatives make sense in their own neighbourhood, but they don’t to each other.  Hawaiians and the Inuit have totally different concepts of weather, and their language reflects that.

Likewise, every time I go to France, it takes me a couple of days to realize I’m not getting bad service in restaurants.  The problem is my concept of lunch is completely different from the French dejeuner.  The words mean exactly the same thing but … they aren’t.  In North America, we treat lunch as a necessary nuisance that’s done and gone, but in France it’s an important cultural ritual that can take a couple of hours.  Even though the words translate perfectly– one to one– they mean wildly different things.

But it’s not just cultural differences that influence language.

English has a ton of prepositions, but let’s just use “in” and “on.”  In Spanish, “in” and “on” are the same word: “en.”  Spanish speakers don’t differentiate.  They don’t think that way.

The Russians have a word “toska” which is kinda/ sorta,/maybe religious longing, but not really – uh — so much as a feeling of loss without knowing what is lost.  But you kinda have experience it to know what it feels like.

Hygge, fernweh and forelsket are also words that simply don’t translate into English.  It’s not that English speakers don’t have the same feelings as Danes, Germans or Norwegians; it’s just that we don’t think that way.

I don’t believe culture precedes language, but I do believe that, as a culture evolves, people simultaneously adapt their language to accommodate it.  Once that happens, the actual words tend to veer away from their objective meaning.  They get loaded up with information that’s specific to the speaker.  Words are the tools we use to express our thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are incomprehensible to an outsider.  That’s why anybody who knows anything about language will tell you that to learn a language properly, you must first understand the culture.

 

*In contemporary usage, Hawaiians have borrow the Chinese word “huan” which loosely translates as change.

The Moon

moon

Fifty years ago tomorrow, a guy from Ohio stepped onto the Moon, and suddenly Earthlings became extra-terrestrials.  It was a spectacular accomplishment.  Everybody on this planet — from Brooklyn to Borneo — knew about it, and US president Richard Nixon got so carried away he called it, “the most significant event since creation” (fire and the wheel notwithstanding.)  But our species going to the moon was more than just going to the moon.  It was a blatant demonstration that humans can defy the natural laws of the universe (notably, gravity) and do whatever the hell we want.  We had the confidence, the ability and the audacity to hurl ourselves off this little blue marble, visit another celestial body and come back to tell the tale.  In your face, Mother Nature!

Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man …” was the culmination of The Big Idea, an inherent human trait that has dominated our existence since long before Pharaoh Cheops decided he wanted to be immortal and asked his scientists, mathematicians and engineers to make it so.  Our reach has always exceeded our grasp — until we grasp.  Then we begin the whole process over again.  For example, the wheel is a magnificent tool, but inventing the cam which converts circular motion into vertical power was a singular act of genius.  Necessity may be the mother of invention, but invention itself is its own philandering father, propagating numerous offspring to find a new necessity and begin the process all over again.  Human history is a litany of necessity and invention — each progressively more complex and imaginative than the last.

The Lunar landing itself didn’t do much to change the lives of anybody, really.  (The slingshot of Space Race technology wouldn’t hit our society for a generation.)  The next day, most people simply went about their ordinary earthly business.  But we were all a little bolder, a little more self-assured, a little more hopeful.  After all, we’d just put a man on the moon: how hard could the rest of our problems be?  But that’s the nature of the Big Idea.  Its very soul is the notion that, when we concentrate our ideas and abilities, we can make the impossible ordinary.  That, once inspired, humans are capable of thinking beyond themselves.  And that inspiration is, by nature, selfless, righteous, and beneficial.  The Big Idea assumes the greater good.

Neil Armstrong didn’t just decide to go to the moon.  He got there because, in the early 60s, there was a Big Idea, and in 1962, President Kennedy went to Rice University and asked Americans to reach for the stars.

“We choose to go to the moon,” he said. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade …, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone …”

Seven years later, at Moon Base One, somewhere in the Sea of Tranquility, an army of NASA scientists, mathematicians and engineers made it so.

These days, it’s fashionable to embellish our human flaws and limitations, to scroll through our problems, upload our complaints and download our responsibilities.  We are the grandchildren of the Lunar Generation, connected by our machines, concerned and conceited with ourselves and comfortable with our own righteousness.  But history shows us that one day – someday – there will be a new Big Idea and the human adventure will begin again.