Movement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement by Katy Bowman

Author:Katy Bowman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Propriometrics Press
Published: 2016-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

A SEDENTARY CULTURE EATS

I often write about the physical weaknesses that persist in a sedentary culture and also how many of those weaknesses are part of a reduction in necessary biological functions and are normalized and/or explained by things other than a lack of movement.

The Washington Post published an article6 highlighting a pilot and follow-up study on how American kids are throwing away the apples given to them for lunch. As it turns out, they throw the whole fruit away because eating it is too much work. Slice it, and they’ll eat it.

According to the article, “A child holding a whole apple has to break the skin, eat around the core, and deal with the hassle of holding a large fruit,” and older girls in particular found whole fruits messy and unattractive to eat.7

In 2014 Americans ate 511 million sliced apples, and this statistic is driving the food industry to focus their attention on pre-sliced, treated, and packaged apples. If we’re considering only dietary nutritional value here, then “at least they’re eating apples, and that’s good, right?” applies. But if we broaden our scope to an ecological perspective, we’ll see that the cost of our children not being practiced or strong enough to eat a whole food includes the work necessary to slice and often package the food (typically with plastic).

This is why I find it increasingly relevant to consider movement from an ecological perspective. Without framing our movement habits relative to the world, it’s easy to miss the cost of outsourcing work necessary to meet our own biological needs. Our children are too weak to eat whole apples; they were not provided with an environment necessary to develop strong chewing skills; and now other humans and the planet are burdened by their unnecessary weakness. This is a matter of movement and is also why movement matters.

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