It's Only Natural!

'Americans are so weird.'

A blunt and simple judgement pronounced by a dear friend, and Canadian, last week in New York's Central Park. The source of her consternation? No, not the Tea Party 'movement', nor our remarkable religiosity in the face of science, nor even our stubborn (and sometimes paranoid) clinging to the remarkably wasteful $1 bill despite the US Mint's best and most creative efforts to break us of the habit. Well, ok, she did remark on the last one in addition to the ugliness and drab uniformity of US paper money.... that, however, was not the source of her pronouncement of Americans as plainly weird.

No, the source of her befuddlement was the sight of a runner who had just bounded past us on a freezing cold day, his feet shod in little more than a thin black layer of some sort of composite material that seemed a strange cross between foot-condom and mitten-esque hospital-footy. Luckily, I had read about this trend and was able to dispatch with her confusion, if not her incredulity, post haste. Its proponents purport that, by mimicking the running conditions of early humans, we can minimize stress injuries and maxmize performance. Now, I'm no physiologist, so am not really qualified to contemplate the merits of this argument, of which there are many. However, I can also see how wearing shoes (something that humans have done for quite a long time) might have advantages as well, especially given the hyper-ergonomically engineered footware available to the modern runner. Sure, we may have spent a good deal of our early evolution running around barefoot, but it's not impossible that shoe wearing has not subtly influenced our ped-evolution in the meanwhile. Peruse the "paleao diet" for another example of the "if the cavemen did it, it must be good for us, because that's how we evolved" thinking. The cavemen also endured brutish existences and often fell victim to toothaches. I think you see where I'm going with this.

This, to me, represents simply one more manifestation of our society's pre-occupation with trying to discover, and then embrace, all that is 'natural' and (implicitly) better for us. The proponents of organic food, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, insist that organic veg is more healthful. I'll grant it is less environmentally destructive, but de facto more healthy? Probably not. Anyone who has been to a Whole Foods Market can see this trend in all its consumerist glory. Whole aisles devoted to homoeopathic 'remedies', with absolutely zero basis in reality. Hyper-diluted  (sometimes tens of thousands of times!) rose-hip water, while perhaps more natural than human engineered chemical compounds, will do nothing for your health beyond the placebo effect. It may be more natural than aspirin, but I'm still going with aspirin for my headache, thanks very much! Chemotherapy might be horrendous to endure, but it saves lives. The bottom line: natural does not necessarily equal better.

Which all makes the obsession with doing, eating, drinking, and being "natural" kind of funny. If you shop at Whole Foods, live in Brooklyn, and run through the completely human created landscape of Central Park.. well, all the homoeopathic remedies and foot-condom running in the world isn't going to give you some mythic natural existence. Appreciation of nature and respect for the natural world is crucial to our survival as a species, but consumerist attempts to live some faddishy faux-naturelle lifestyle do not necessarily represent any step in that direction.

Also, it just makes you seem weird to Canadians, which is quite the feat.