AgPerson

I was under the illusion that I am fit: I do half hour lunchtime swimming or running workouts a few days a week, and go on the occasional day hike or kayak trip or bike ride on weekends.

Half an hour on the frisbee field this afternoon kicked my butt. I haven’t played Ultimate in a while now, and after thirty minutes in the heat I was wiped out. I’m trying to decide whether this should be discouraging — I’m woefully out of shape and don’t know where I’ll find the time to do the sort of work necessary to become competitive; or encouraging — I can work to build up my speed and stamina and go back to playing a game I really enjoy.

With summer almost over, though, I’m leaning towards the first option. Especially since a lot of the people playing seem to have naturally a level of fitness I can never hope to achieve by effort.

I am home. Nine days of transit and vacation filled constantly with the frenetic energy of children. At home, once the cat has settled down, I am greeted with a deafening silence. I turn on WBUR and listen to the sound of people talking — some sort of interview about cows. Better than nothing.

The television was almost never on. There were no radios. There were many iPods, all set to shuffle. I kept up with the news of the world and my various internet feeds via my iPad. None of it seemed particularily important, none of it moved me. The only thing I felt the need to check in on daily was the comics.

There wasn’t much of a plan, aside from go to the beach now or go to the beach later. We sailed in the sound. A kayak ended up in a swimming pool. Lacking a volleyball, we used an enormous beach ball as a surprisingly effective substitute. I played RISK for the first time. I won at RISK for the first time. We made tacos, and the kids were enthralled. Near the end of the week, the jellyfish invaded.

I’ve generally been of the opinion that one should spend one’s — that is, my — limited vacation time exploring new places or doing new things. I’m not rushing to do everything, moving too fast to take anything in; at the same time, I don’t want to waste time doing nothing. This vacation was an interesting combination: North Carolina’s Outer Banks are new to me, but the beach is very familiar. There was no set schedule, but there were some clear goals.

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I am trying to figure out how to get my calendar back. I have data going back to 1997, and now everything is corrupted. Some events are duplicated over five hundred times. When an event with an alarm goes off on my iPad, it won’t let me get back to what I want to do until I acknowledge the alarm. Five hundred times. I’m not sure how this compares to water boarding, but it sure seems to qualify as an enhanced interrogation technique.

After reading In Defense of Food I have been trying, with some success, to follow the Pollan approach to eating, focusing more on fresh fruits and vegetables, cutting back on meat, and avoiding most processed food-like substances, especially products that make elaborate health claims on their packaging.

I do feel better about what I am eating, in part because rather than treat this solely as a health exercise, I have framed it as a competition — me vs. the agro-giants that are out to ruin my health. If you start thinking of Kraft, Nestle, and all the other huge food conglomerates as evil corporations more concerned with their profits than the fact that they are increasing juvenile diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, it is a lot easier to avoid their products. Since said products are custom-engineered to trick your taste buds into thinking they are good for you, the mind-over-matter approach is important to avoiding them.

Articles like this recent one in the Times about salt content are especially effective, at least for me, in engendering loathing and disgust towards packaged foods:

The power that salt holds over processed foods can be seen in an American snack icon, the Cheez-It.

At the company’s laboratories in Battle Creek, Mich., a Kellogg vice president and food scientist, John Kepplinger, ticked off the ways salt makes its little square cracker work.

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

I think the point here is less about the specific problem (excess salt) and more about what that salt is covering up — the true essence of the food we are scarfing down, a sticky, gray, medicinal extruded corn mash.

I don’t agree with everything Pollan says, and In Defense of Food is less footnoted than I would like. In particular, he is widely critical of food science and nutritionism, but then uses many scientific studies of food and eating habits in making his claims, without adequately explaining why some studies are more reliable than others. But on the whole, I feel the book is well worth reading, and it has had a major impact on me and my eating habits.

One Pollan prescription is along the lines of “if it doesn’t go bad, it isn’t good.” I understand why this is the case, but the consequence is that I keep buying good things and not eating them before they go bad, a problem I didn’t have to deal with quite as much before.