The Tarahumara may be the healthiest and most serene people on earth, and the greatest runners of all time.
The ancient saying of the Tao Te Ching—“The best runner leaves no tracks”—wasn’t some gossamer koan, but real, concrete, how-to, training advice.
Next time you line up for a Turkey Trot, look at the runners on your right and left: statistically, only one of you will be back for the Jingle Bell Jog.
Only the face and hands compare with the feet for instant-messaging capability to the brain.
The Tarahumara geniuses had even branched into economics, creating a one-of-a-kind financial system based on booze and random acts of kindness: instead of money, they traded favors and big tubs of corn beer.
And if being the kindest, happiest people on the planet wasn’t enough, the Tarahumara were also the toughest: the only thing that rivaled their superhuman serenity, it seemed, was their superhuman tolerance for pain and lechuguilla, a horrible homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses and cactus sap.
He seemed to live off the land when he ran, depending on korima, the cornerstone of Tarahumara culture. Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It’s your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with.
Iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca—“chilly chia.” It’s brewed up by dissolving chia seeds in water with a little sugar and a squirt of lime. In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re superpacked with omega-3S, omega-6S, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants.
I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations.
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone. —Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100
Ultrarunning seemed to be an alternative universe where none of planet Earth’s rules applied: women were stronger than men; old men were stronger than youngsters; Stone Age guys in sandals were stronger than everybody.
The lion can lose and come back to hunt another day, but the antelope gets only one mistake.
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else.
[Joe] Vigil could smell the apocalypse coming, and he’d tried hard to warn his runners. “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
Strictly by accident, Scott [Jurek] stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go. You get to know it so well, you’re not afraid of it anymore.
The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.
Leonardo da Vinci considered the human foot, with its fantastic weight-suspension system comprising one quarter of all the bones in the human body, “a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
Running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.
Painful truths:
The Best Shoes Are the Worst
Feet Like a Good Beating
Even Alan Webb Says “Human Beings Are Designed to Run Without Shoes”
Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40.
Blueprint your feet, and you’ll find a marvel that engineers have been trying to match for centuries. Your foot’s centerpiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot’s arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy—but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault. The company was founded by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner who could sell anything, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach who thought he knew everything. Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe didn’t exist. Neither did most modern running injuries.
Vegetables, grains, and legumes contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch.
You’ve got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last.
According to Dr. Robert Weinberg, a professor of cancer research at MIT and discoverer of the first tumor-suppressor gene, one in every seven cancer deaths is caused by excess body fat. The math is stark: cut the fat, and cut your cancer risk.
The first step toward going cancer-free the Tarahumara way, consequently, is simple enough: Eat less. The second step is just as simple on paper, though tougher in practice: Eat better. Along with getting more exercise, says Dr. Weinberg, we need to build our diets around fruit and vegetables instead of red meat and processed carbs.
Eat like a poor person, as Coach Joe Vigil likes to say, and you’ll only see your doctor on the golf course.
Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily. It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia.
Under [Dr Ruth Heidrich's] Tarahumara-style eating plan, lunch and dinner were built around fruit, beans, yams, whole grains, and vegetables, and breakfast was often salad. “You get leafy greens in your body first thing in the morning and you’ll lose a lot of weight.”
“Hills are speedwork in disguise,” Frank Shorter used to say.
I knew aerobic exercise was a powerful antidepressant, but I hadn’t realized it could be so profoundly mood stabilizing and—I hate to use the word—meditative. If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.
Even though our brains account for only 2 percent of our body weight, they demand 20 percent of our energy, compared with just 9 percent for chimps.
If you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.
A curious transformation came over us when we came down from the trees: the more we became human, the more we became equal. Men and women are basically the same size, at least compared with other primates: male gorillas and orangutans weigh twice as much as their better halves; male chimps are a good one-third bigger than females; but between the average human him and the average human her, the difference in bulk is only a slim 15 percent. As we evolved, we shucked our beef and became more sinuous, more cooperative … essentially, more female.
What else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together. Humans are among the most communal and cooperative of all primates; our sole defense in a fang-filled world was our solidarity.
It’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.
Xiang wei is the character a good dish has when it’s robust, flavorful, and balanced but still maintains a certain light quality. That flavor comes, lingers on your tongue, stays long enough to make you crave it, but just when you think you have it figured out, it’s gone. Timing is everything. Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands—good ones leave you wanting more.
My mom was the youngest and never followed rules in the family. She enforced them on everyone else, but she never followed them herself.
I think my mom is manic, but Chinese people don’t believe in psychologists. We just drink more tea when things go bad.
I don’t think people realize how fucking weird Christianity is if you’re not raised around it.
When you washed your hands, they had hand towels so you didn’t have to wipe your face with the towel your brother wiped his balls with ten minutes ago. For real, if you are a broke-ass kid, you are wiping your face with your brother’s balls.
From a young age, that single event, my grandmother’s unbinding, taught me to appreciate education and challenge conventions—just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t flip it over, look around, poke at its flaws, and see it for what it is yourself.
To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard.
Respect your parents, respect your family, speak Chinese at home, take off your shoes at home, be polite at other people’s homes, don’t borrow money from people, but if other people need it from you lend it to them, as long as it’s inconsequential. Don’t fight, but if someone calls you a chink, fight.
There’s nothing worse than someone who got shit and can’t recognize other people don’t.
By the time I hit seventh grade, I wasn’t the same anymore. My mom noticed, too. The complaints from teachers went from “Eddie needs to stop telling jokes” to “Eddie purposely threw a basketball in another student’s face when he wouldn’t let him play.” I didn’t take shit from anyone at this point. I only had one rule: don’t pick on people who were already being picked on.
I didn’t need Howard Zinn to know Christopher Columbus was a punk-ass stealing from colored people and I let it be known.
Instead of being singled out and laughed at for being Chinese, I was being laughed at for totally sucking at football. It was a relief.
Other people couldn’t compete. They were playing a game but I treated it like life and death.
People say kids always tease and that it’s an innocent rite of passage, but it’s not. Every time an Edgar or Billie called me “chink” or “Chinaman” or “ching chong” it took a piece of me.
We didn’t talk like the other kids, but we still had things to say.
He respected his dad for how far he’d come, but didn’t want to eat off his pops.
There isn’t a God in the sky that pulls the string. I told myself that there is something bigger than us but that it was egotistical and presumptuous to personify what that was.
I remember not having money, I remember having money, and neither had a bearing on who I was as a person. It affected how others saw me, but not how I saw myself.
When you feel like you're the only one in the world going crazy, it’s probably not you, it’s them.
It wasn’t enough to be right; you had to know how to argue.
If you really wanted good employees that would have your interests at heart, they needed to buy in. You needed people who wanted to grow with your business and see themselves as valuable members on the team.
Very important lesson every good cook learns early on: master salt.
Fuck countries and boundaries; you can call me international.
He loved it ’cause everything was half off after 11 P.M., but I couldn’t subject myself to the shit. I don’t do coupons or Reeboks. Life is too short to half-step.
It’s not about rounding up all the seasonal ingredients you can find, it’s about paying close attention to the ones you already have.
Patience, attention, and restraint are the keys to good cooking.
“The welfare of the poor is of course a serious problem that affects the condition of the nation, but it’s debatable how to solve the problem while properly incentivizing people to participate in a capitalist society. You don’t want a situation where your tax dollars are incentivizing stagnant behavior.” READ: I don’t care about poor people and I’m assuming that everyone on welfare is some single mom with five kids who keeps having them to get more money on her EBT card.
Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. Then white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow.
I was finally “authentic” to white people, and it made me realize it’s all a trap. We can’t fucking win. If I follow the rules and play the model minority, I’m a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling. If I like hip-hop because I see solidarity, I’m aping. But, if I throw it all away, shit on my parents, sell weed, pills, and strike fear into unsuspecting white boys with stunt Glocks, now I’m authentic? Fuck you, America.
It would suck if you looked at my recipe and never made your own, ’cause everyone has a beef noodle soup in them.
NEVER EVER EVER back down if you’re right. If you have evaluated all the perspectives, gone around the round table, and come back around with the same opinion, then walk right up to the offending party and tell ’em why you mad.
That was the answer. You can’t idolize and emulate forever. At some point, you gotta cut the cord and go for dolo.
No one wanted the stereotype of an ignorant white dude to represent them and white people policed themselves.
To this day, someone tells me to go back to China at least three times a year and I live in downtown New York.
I realized that if I wanted to see change in the world, I need to make dollars first.
Shortsighted kids didn’t understand that we voted with our dollars. Instead of supporting the brick-and-mortar stores that started the culture, they would try things on at stores and then cop online.
Some of us understand how powerful self-deprecation is, but others want no part of it.
I tell people all the time. Whether it’s a girl, a skirt steak, or a record, you know in the first five seconds if it’s a hit.
That is one of the more interesting things about food TV. It’s very difficult to separate race, culture, and food.
When my dad had a steakhouse, everyone questioned whether a Chinese person was qualified to open a steakhouse. We had to have white people front like the chef and owners. It was not OK for my dad to sell steak, but white people cooking Asian get more attention than the people in Chinatown who actually know what the fuck they’re doing.
Restaurants are gateways into New York’s neighborhoods.
When I opened Baohaus, one day we switched purveyors for red sugar and customers noticed. I never thought anyone but myself or Evan would care, but people complained. I didn’t want to switch, but our old purveyor just ran out of stock. I liked how we all took ownership in the city, its culture, and its food.
People who don’t understand something need poles to grasp, but those who truly love and understand something through experience don’t need those training wheels.
When Chinese people cook Chinese food or Jamaicans cook Jamaican, there’s no question what’s going on. Just make it taste good. When foreigners cook our food, they want to infuse their identity into the dish, they have a need to be part of the story and take it over. For some reason, Americans simply can’t understand why this bothers us. “I just want to tell my story?!? I loved my vacation to Burma! What’s wrong with that?” It’s imperialism at work in a sauté pan. You already have everything, do you really really, really need a Burmese hood pass, too? Can we live?
If you like our food, great, but don’t come tell me you’re gonna clean it up, refine it, or elevate it because it’s not necessary or possible. We don’t need fucking food missionaries to cleanse our palates. What we need are opportunities outside kitchens and cubicles.
My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness. It was race. It was race. It was race. Apologies to Frank Sinatra, but I’ve been called a “ch!gg@r,” a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn, and a chink; that’s life. I am obsessed with what it means to be Chinese, think the idea of America is cool, but at the end of the day wish the world had no lines.
Ironically enough, the one place that America allows Chinese people to do their thing is the kitchen. Just like Jewish people became bankers because that was the only thing Christians let them do, a lot of Chinese people ended up in laundries, delis, and kitchens because that’s what was available.
You can’t be clowning people who are actually doing things if you aren’t even trying.
In 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country...That’s about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America.
As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half.
One way the poor pay for government aid is with their time.
There are more avid postage stamp collectors in the United States than welfare recipients.
Even when working full-time, these [low-wage] jobs often fail to lift a family above the poverty line. Even if Jennifer had worked a forty-hour week at Chicago City for an entire year—not taking a single day off (not even Christmas or Thanksgiving)—her annual earnings of $18,200 would still have left her family below the poverty threshold, set at $18,769 for a family of three in 2013. She would have gotten a substantial boost at tax time, thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other refundable tax credits. But even after adding this in, her family would have escaped poverty by only a few thousand dollars. And, of course, it is unrealistic to think that she could have gone an entire year without taking a day off. Beyond holidays, when Chicago City was closed, the chances that neither of her children would need to stay home from school even one day during the year were slim to none. Jennifer didn’t have paid sick leave or personal days.
About one in four jobs pays too little to lift a family of four out of poverty.
Laying the blame on a lack of personal responsibility obscures the fact that there are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. Service sector employers often engage in practices that middle-class professionals would never accept. They adopt policies that, purposely or not, ensure regular turnover among their low-wage workers, thus cutting the costs that come with a more stable workforce, including guaranteed hours, benefits, raises, promotions, and the like. Whatever can be said about the characteristics of the people who work low-wage jobs, it is also true that the jobs themselves too often set workers up for failure.
Barely making it on $13 an hour is Jennifer’s version of the American dream. Yet even this modest aspiration can seem all but out of reach.
In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.”
The white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record.
The average white applicant with no criminal record had to apply for only three jobs to get a callback, while a white job seeker with a criminal record had to apply for six. Contrast this to the findings for African Americans: the average black applicant with no criminal record had to apply for seven jobs to get a callback, while a black job seeker with a felony conviction had to put in twenty applications.
It stands to reason that by moving millions of unskilled single mothers into the labor force starting in the mid-1990s, welfare reform and the expansion of the EITC and other refundable tax credits may have actually played a role in diminishing the quality of the average low-wage job in America.
Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.
The most obvious manifestation of the affordable housing crisis is in rising rents. Between 1990 and 2013, rents rose faster than inflation in virtually every region of the country and in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike. But there is another important factor at work here that is an even bigger part of the story than the hikes in rent: a fall in the earnings of renters. Between 2000 and 2012 alone, rents rose by 6 percent. During that same period, the real income of the middling renter in the United States fell 13 percent.
As long as her iron, blood pressure, and temperature are okay, she’ll donate as often as she is legally allowed. But no one could reasonably think of a twice-weekly plasma donation as a job. It’s a survival strategy, one of many operating well outside the low-wage job market.
For the $2-a-day poor, America’s private charities are the difference between shelter and no shelter, a meal and no meal, a new backpack for school and none at all. And yet they can provide only an incomplete patchwork of aid, with numerous holes. Even in Chicago, where there are more charities than in many other places, a life dependent on private charity is a life of insecurity.
Alva Mae and her ten children living at home constitute the “official” SNAP assistance unit. She gets $1,600 in food stamps each month, but she has no cash to pay the utility bills (electricity, water, and sewer), to buy clothing, and so on. In a climate where the temperature has ranged from 9 to 109 degrees in just the past six months, it is clear that electricity is essential to heat and cool the apartment. The thirteenth of each month, when the family’s SNAP card gets replenished, always feels celebratory. But with bills that can only be paid with cash, the relief is short-lived. When asked how much of their monthly SNAP gets sold, Tabitha says, “She sell enough to get the light bill paid. So if the light bill comes to three hundred dollars, she take . . . enough out to get three hundred dollars left over.” (At the Delta’s going rate, it takes $600 in food stamps to yield $300 in cash.) Then “whatever other bills she has [she’ll sell more]. But the food stamps don’t last because of it.”
To put it simply, not having cash basically ensures that you have to break the law and expose yourself to humiliation in order to survive. And when some among the community leadership—teachers, shop owners, public officials—prey on the poor by charging too much for decrepit trailers or by offering food or vital cash in exchange for sexual favors, the line between good and bad blurs even further, especially in the eyes of a child.
At this writing, three of the parents who appear in this book have a child who has attempted suicide. Another—Tabitha’s older brother Mike—may have successfully ended his life. Yet another, only age nine, is being treated with antipsychotic drugs because he threatened his sister with a knife. Two of the girls whose families we describe have ended up selling their bodies in exchange for food and money. One had to be treated for multiple sexually transmitted diseases at age fifteen. Certainly, this is too high a price for children to pay.
Our approach to ending $2-a-day poverty is guided by three principles:
all deserve the opportunity to work;
parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own;
not every parent will be able to work, or work all of the time, but parents’ well-being, and the well-being of their children, should nonetheless be ensured.
One could make a strong argument that government itself ought to create a substantially larger share of the jobs than it does now—jobs like those provided by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Certainly, there is ample work to be done in our communities. The nation’s infrastructure is badly out-of-date in many places—often crumbling, sometimes downright dangerous. The National Park Service and state and local park districts are underfunded; this limits hours and upkeep. Safe, stimulating day care centers—the kind of environments our toddlers and preschoolers require to thrive—are too few. We need many more after-school programs for school-age children. There are too few tutoring programs. There is too little elder care. Our public libraries, pools, and recreation centers—vital institutions for the safety and well-being of our children—sometimes limit their hours due to lack of funding. Trash litters our rural byways and our city streets. There is a widespread need for treatment centers for the chemically addicted and shelters for the homeless. There is enough to do.
Most economists now agree that the minimum wage could be raised to at least $10 per hour without driving down the supply of jobs to a meaningful degree, and that doing so might modestly boost economic growth. All of the adults we have written about in this book have worked for less than $10 per hour for much or all of their working lives. Boosting their wages may make their personal circumstances less precarious, which in turn may make it easier for them to stay in their jobs and avoid falling into a spell of extreme destitution.
Researchers estimate that American workers lose billions of dollars each year to what is referred to as “wage theft”—clear violations of labor standards that include paying less than the minimum wage, forcing employees to work off the clock, and failing to pay mandated overtime rates (like what happened to Jennifer Hernandez at Catalina). If one tallied all of the losses suffered by victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined, the figure wouldn’t even approach what is taken from hardworking Americans’ pockets by employers who violate the nation’s labor laws. And the victims are generally the most vulnerable among us.
In no state today does a full-time job paying minimum wage allow a family to afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.
No American should have to resort to the lengths they must go to in order to generate that critical resource. Most Americans cringe at the idea of fellow citizens having to spend hours scrounging for aluminum cans or to take iron pills to ensure they can donate plasma twice a week—just to keep their families barely treading water. Selling your SNAP, your kids’ Social Security numbers, or your body are strategies that the $2-a-day poor believe are immoral, not merely illegal. Parents should not be forced to cast aside strongly held notions of right and wrong simply to keep their kids in socks and underwear.
