My dad played craps only three days before he died. He had fun. He had lots of friends around. And he won lots of money. But I think he knew he was about to die. And as he looked at the money he had won, he said, “I might as well just rip this up.”  He realized in that moment that money would no longer be required where he was going. It was about the moment, not the money. It was about all the people who came out to play with him. It was about life, not money.

We read a poem at his memorial. It is called The Dash by Linda Ellis. I think it is so true. What matters in our life is how we choose to live it. How we choose to write that that space between our birth and our death.

It seems to me that beauty is whatever is most difficult to achieve, and therefore most profitable to push by the beauty industry. When most lay people worked outside in the sun, having tanned skin was a sign of poverty. Nowadays with most people having office jobs, keeping a tan is a signal of wealth and luxury to either be able to travel to warm places or go to tanning salons.

Being thin is the same way. It used to be that skinny people were that way because they didn’t have much money to be able to eat. Plump was the “in” thing -just look at all the masters’ oil paintings. Now it is the opposite: the less money people have, the more they weigh in developed nations. So now there is a premium on thinness. And then to make it just a little harder for the naturally thin women to easily slide through the societal beauty contest, they need to have huge breasts -something most naturally thin women lack.

And while white women are at an advantage over other races in terms of what society has deemed beautiful, most white women don’t have large pouty lips, so this becomes the next hard-to-get beauty feature.

This Playboy Bunny has to do a lot to maintain America’s beauty standard. Even in the “before” photo she has dyed her hair from brown to blonde and only goes blonder as time goes by. In the “after” photo, she has an orange tan glow, thicker lips, thicker hair, a more refined nose, and dark eye-defining makeup.

So, in order to achieve this standard, you have to diet, dye your hair, use all sorts of lotions and potions, wear makeup, wear “slimming” and “boosting” clothing, go tanning and maybe even have plastic surgery -especially if you are going to be a model of what beauty is -like in the example of the Playboy Bunny. All of these are huge money makers.

And then, if that weren’t enough, not even the very few people who have what society deems to be the right stuff, are left alone. No one is perfect unless they have been “photoshopped”.

This video shows some of this process. I find it ironic that Dove sponsored the “Real Beauty” Campaign because they are in the very business that their ad campaign seems to condemn. However, it is still a good video of some of what goes on to make even the models “presentable” as models of American beauty.

And after all this is done and you have the perfect photoshopped image what becomes of you? Well, for women over about 30 -MAYBE 40, that’s the end of the line. You are tossed out as not even a contestant in the pagent and a new group of girls are indoctrinated into the male-dominated world of beauty.

Even in magazines for older women with good jobs and a family, there is still this unattainable beauty standard. They may put more “real world” celebrities on the cover, but they are dramatically photoshopped as well as in this example of Faith Hill.

I was thinking about this topic because I recently saw a quote by make-up magnate Helena Rubenstein that said “There’s no such thing as ugly women, only lazy ones”. Which on the surface sounds reasonable -all people are  born beautiful and stay that way if they work at it, right? Well, there are so many things this quote assumes.

For instance, why is this only limited to women? Why shouldn’t men have to work to be seen as beautiful? Why are women automatically judged first based on prettiness, second on anything else (their job, their wealth, their family, their personality) whereas for men it seems to be the other way? And is this limited to external beauty or should we work to be internally beautiful as well? I don’t think compassion, kindness, generosity and other “beautiful” personality traits usually just appear, but take some time to work on too.

I do think that with both external and interal beauty there are things a person can do to be more beautiful. For external beauty, you shouldn’t stop caring completely in order to rebel from society’s mandate. Taking care of your health, having good posture, keeping hygeinic, and sprucing up extra nice every now and then all can help with confidence and keep you happier and healthier -and may even help with your internal beauty if you feel good about yourself.  Attractive people are also at an advantage in society: They’re more likely to be hired, earn more money, have better grades, have more polished social skills, and even commit fewer crimes. And other people are more likely to help them.

But overall, beauty should not be purely dictated by outside forces where the standard for beauty changes based on how easy it is to achieve and dangles like a carrot on a stick, never to be truly reached. You should not feel beholden to beauty.

So what does it take to live a long, fufilling life where people die comfortably in their sleep with their family and friends around them? According to this research from across the world, it takes a variety of things.

Here are a few of the traits that I really thought were worth capturing here:

1) Move naturally. This is different than exercise. It is incorporating physical activity into what you do with your life.

2) Eat in moderation and eat naturally. Do not stuff yourself with food. Eat food that is in your local area. In the Italy (Sardinia) example it was a lot of sheep, Mediterranean plants and red wine. In Japan (Okinawa) it was fish, fermented soy and vegetables. In the California 7th Day Adventists it was a vegetarian diet.

3) Surround yourself with people who love and support you. This one should be easy, but it is increasingly difficult in our detached, technologically driven society. Belonging to a faith or reverence community is very supportive to this. Surrounding yourself by other people who are living in a way that will extend and improve their lives will help yours!

4) Have a purpose to your life. This, again, seems easier said than done. But a purpose can be anything that makes you get up in the morning…preferably something you are looking forward to waking up for.

5. Decompress, daily and weekly. Meditate, pray, and otherwise “downshift” from stress-mode, to peace mode.

These seem like relatively simple things, but in industrialized nations, the number one killers (cancer, heart disease) are usually a reflection of not doing many of these things. Smoking, overeating, lack of movement, high stress for prolonged periods, and social isolation are all killing people 10-20 years earlier than they should be living. And it is also taking with it the good quality of life we are looking for.

Happiness is not found in a bottle or burger or any other consumer item, but in the things we often neglect the most. It is an attitude and lifestyle adjustment. It is when you realize that living long and prospering is about shifting priorities and putting what many people place on the back burner (setting time purposefully for family, friends, movement, cooking and eating good food, and slowing down) to the front.

Pasteurized milk is the epitome of the standard in the commercial model, the “sacred cow” (nice pun, eh?) if you will. It is basically an unquestioned norm that we should pasteurize. There’s bacteria present after all, right? People could get sick. Well, yes. There is bacteria. But there is also bacteria in our salads, in our fruit, in our meat, in nearly everything.

We’ve become trained to be germaphobic.

In general terms, this has led to better sanitation of our water and handwashing has done wonders to stop the spread of major communicable diseases. Public health has come a long way to prevent acute diseases, and many people would say that pasteurization of milk is one of those public health victories.  For the majority of people who have bought into all of our modern world of marvels and mass production, this is probably true. We have become a society of standards, huge factory models and centralization.

For instance, milk that is produced in Wisconsin could become mixed with milk from Idaho and get shipped to California, New York and everywhere in between. In order to manage this scale of things, these manufacturers have found that by essentially boiling it (pasteurizing), then homogenizing, then adding back vitamins and sometimes beneficial bacteria that were lost in the pasteurization/homogenization process that they could achieve two major goals. 1) They could prevent any major acute foodborne illnesses that may be the result of unclean practices at one dairy that contaminates all of the combined milk. 2) That homogenization and pasteurization could incease the shelf-life of milk from about one week to 2 months! Yes, this is a major reason for these practices. The longer something sits on the shelf, the better the chances that it will sell!What’s more is that homogenization has nothing to do with food safety. Non-homogenized milk is completely legal (cream top) but not a standard, mainly for this very reason of shelf-stability.

So even with all these standards, we still have the occasional food sickness outbreaks, we still have E. Coli and Salmonella. So should we take what we’ve learned from pasteurizing milk and pasteurize all of our food? Should we irradiate the salad bar? That is actually what the CDC is pushing! Just imagine, no bacteria in any of our food, ever!

Well, what people forget is that mankind has eaten living food for much longer than we’ve eaten sterilized foods. Without living, raw foods we wouldn’t have ever created cheese, or yogurt, or sour cream, or beer, or yeast-risen bread, or sauerkraut, or even pickles. In France, they leave cheese out on the counters instead of refrigerating it because, to them it is supposed to be alive!

People drank milk straight from the cow or goat or ate produce straight from the field without much processing for most of time. It’s only been in the last few decades that processed food have become a norm. And so we’ve traded acute illness for chronic illness in the form of obesity, heart disease and cancers in order to keep food on the shelves longer and make it more highly palatable and industrialized. We’ve created monster ”foods” that often are 20 steps away from the raw initial product.

At what point do we take it so far that in order to live in a factory model of standards we lose life itself? When we’ve pasteurized, sterilized, homogenized, sanitized and irradiated everything we eat? Just because pasteurization has become the norm, does that mean it is the only way? When everyone can only buy irradiated fruits, vegetables and meats will we look at people who pick a tomato off a plant and eat it as crazy? Will it be illegal? Don’t think it couldn’t happen, after all, don’t we look at people who drink raw milk that way?

So again I ask, should people be able to live without the system? Can they anymore? When 90% of society doesn’t live off the land anymore, it seems strange to do anything that the system does not approve of, even if they do it in their own backyard. And if we as a society will not allow people to drink raw milk, why do we allow them to eat raw, non-irradiated foods (that they want to call “electronic pasteurization” [seriously!] because pasteurization is so normalized)? Eventually we will not be able to get our food except from pre-authorized and approved vendors.

By eliminating (by making it illegal) the sale of raw milk or local eggs, or local produce from neighbor to neighbor the system is essentially saying that you are not allowed to even TRY to compete with the large model. It is not so much about the consumer as it is about the producer. The producer, manufacturer, dealer, MUST be big and follow all the standards (many of which the big guys created themselves to their own benefit like the shelf-stability). If you don’t, you aren’t allowed in the game. This eliminates any small competitor from trying to steal any of their market. However, people -the consumers- are starting to wake up. There is a growing underground movement and revolt in food to go slow and local (and closer to its raw state) instead of fast and mass manufactured.

This underground network of cow-shares, food coops and sharing, Craigslist sales and Farmers Markets is growing stronger every day. People are rejecting the idea that you must obey the big box standards in order to be worthwhile. People are pushing to become fruitful! It is, at the very least, a glimmer of hope in a (milk) box of standards.

Overall, certainly, I don’t think the factory-model should or would be able to sell raw milk because of all the limitations of centralization, but I do believe people should be able to seek out a local source of food that comes straight from the animal or ground. People should be able to have their own chickens for eggs, goats for milk and gardens for veggies. And if they don’t have enough land, they should be able to find a local farmer who can sell it to them.

If nothing else, this discussion makes me want to get some land, and a cow or goat and go live like Dugout Dick! But as yet it seems we cannot live without money in our modern world. The raw vs pasteurized milk debate is a great example of how easy it is to fall into the trap of assuming that just because that is the way it is that that is how it ought to be.