Humans at Play (LQ 03-4 Sports & Games)

 

    LQ 03-3: Sports & Games (2010) In 1938, Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens, in which he argued that play was necessary for the creation of culture. His insight has become a cliche. This LQ collection demonstrates its truth, albeit indirectly, since it focuses on what we North Americans mean by its title. Huizinga included the arts, politics, etc in his concept. It seems to me that Huizinga’s argument amounts to saying that inventing ways of living that go well beyond finding food and reproducing is species-specific behaviour for humans.
     Play in the narrow sense is widespread among mammals. All young mammals play, and many species of adult mammals play, too. That is, they engage in some behaviour for no apparent reason other than they like doing it.
     Humans of course do more than that. We invent rules and customs around play, and spend an amazing amount of resources on it. Extend the concept to include the arts, and we humans act as if play is the purpose of life. But we find elements of play in all other aspects of human culture. It’s obvious in fashion, for example. The use of science to create useful technologies disguises that it, too, is a form of play. And all technologies eventually become at least adjuncts to play. Huizinga’s relabelling of our species is apt.
     Like other aspects of human culture, the variety of sports and games tends to distract attention from a fundamental unity. Sports and games range from pure pleasure to intense competition. All cultures engage in sports and games for both purposes. This collection shows that while humans have invented an astonishing variety of sports and games, their use is bounded by this range.
     Recommended. ****

Advice on Aging for Boomers (1975)

     Esquire Magazine, April 1975. How to Get Old and Do it Right.
     Advice for what we now call Boomers, before they began to think of themselves as God's Gift to America.
     “8 Basic Rules” (Stand Up Straight, Learn to Narrate, Acquire a Big Ego, Never Stop Working, etc). “Good Old With Nothing” (Stanley lost his legs when he was ten, is now in his 50s, has been on the road for several decades, meets a lot of people, some of whom put him up in a motel or take him home for a night and a wash, etc. Content with his life).
     “Good Old with Everything” (Samuel Eliot Morrison, historian, professor at Harvard, distant cousin of T. S Eliot, Admiral. Content with his life, and worth reading).
     “Many of Today’s Young will Make Lousy Old” (Mark Spitz, Reggie Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, etc. Fluff. Some of them have died, John Lennon was murdered. So much for predictions). “Alden Whitman’s Golden Oldies”. (Obit writer, gossipy, not engaging). “Where Old Went Wrong” (Shuffleboard in 1913, ‘senior citizen” in 1930, etc. More fluff).
     “The English do Old Best of All”. (Well, yes, but the writer did not realise that what he sees as eccentric insistence of being oneself was really the bloody-mindedness that would result in the current awful politics). “I’m Waving Tomorrow” (Fiction, about two sisters who ride the El to the cemetery every week to tend the family graves, pick the lettuce they’ve planted between the geraniums, and bicker. On the return journey of this particular day, a stray bullet fired from an idiot vandal gun kills one of them. Depressing but accurate portraits).
     Interesting collection, useful data about that era in American life, now 40 years past and feeling like ancient history. If you can find old Esquire magazine, grab them. Besides the fashion and lifestyle puff pieces, they published some of the best journalism of the time. ** to ****

In Defence of Processed Food

In September 2015, a CBC program on school lunches pointed out that "healthy" choices are difficult because standards were set in the 1940s when the US Army found that it had to reject a large percentage of recruits for being underweight or otherwise malnourished. Modern processed food is too good, it seems, and is making our children obese.
                     
That reminded me of the days when a large part of a family's time was spent "putting up" the preserves for the winter. Fruit was dried, or made into compotes, jams, and jellies. Cabbage was converted into sauerkraut. Vegetables were pickled or boiled nearly to death and put into sealers. As these cooled, the air inside contracted and pulled the lids down into an airtight seal.

One of the major events at Rutzenmoos was the making of sugar syrup and molasses. The women in the household chopped and sliced sugar beets, then cooked them in the big washing kettle, a copper bowl inset into a purpose built stove, which was normally used to boil the washing in a soap and lye solution as part of the weekly washday rituals. It was of course perfectly sterile. The syrup was a golden colour, the molasses were a nice sticky dark brown. I don’t know whether the syrup was further processed to make sugar, I paid little attention to it. I  concentrated on the molasses, whose taste was I can still sense in my oral memory. Wonderful stuff!

Without processed food, we would have starved.  People nowadays have no idea how important processed food is for survival, and even less how much time was spent in processing it. The food industry made processed food cheap and plentiful. Most of them made wholesome food. But as recently as the 1940s and 50s, governments had to pass regulations to prevent food adulteration, or to enforce safer (and more expensive) processing methods on the less scrupulous manufacturers.

In fact, it was our ancestors' discovery of how to store and process food that led to our eventual dominance of the ecosystem. Until people knew how to grow grains and process other food, they could not live in temperate climates where fresh food is seasonal. True, some people have learned how to use technology to live in very inhospitable climates, the Inuit for example; but they survive because, as luck would have it, their prey contains vitamins without which they would die. That, not technology, is what enables the Inuit to live in the Arctic.

The present day reaction against processed food comes largely from people who have no personal memories of how important processed food is for us. The fact that we can get fresh fruits and vegetables year-round has also helped distract people from this insight.

There’s another fact, which perhaps should be better known: Human digestive systems do not do a very good job of digesting fresh foods. Cooking is a kind of pre-digestion. It breaks down cell walls in fruits and vegetables, and degrades the proteins in meats, making both more nutritious for us. Without cooking, we would get a good deal less value from the food we eat. True, cooking also destroys some vitamins, but usually there’s more left over than we would get from the uncooked food. The same is true of calories. Many starchy foods are essentially indigestible until they are cooked.

Processed food has achieved a bad rep. I think it’s undeserved. In fact, it’s because our food is generally so wholesome and nourishing that the fearful among us fasten on any smidgen of evidence that suggests food is not as good as it might be, however trivial the failure is in the larger scheme of things.