We all have activities that define us. They say, “you are what you eat”. That’s a phrase with a surprisingly deep history for something that sounds like a modern wellness slogan. The saying traces back to the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in his 1825 masterwork Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste): “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” — “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” He meant it quite literally as a philosophical and social observation. Diet revealed class, culture, and character. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach used a similar formulation in 1850, “Der Mensch ist, was er ißt” (Man is what he eats). That was in a more materialist philosophical context, arguing that human consciousness and identity are products of physical, bodily existence rather than spirit or soul. The phrase circulated in various forms through the 19th and early 20th centuries before becoming a genuine popular slogan in the American health food movement of the 1960s-70s where it took on its modern nutritional meaning. The phrase actually works on several levels simultaneously. It’s biological and literally true since your body is built from what you consume. It’s culturally accurate since food is one of the deepest markers of identity, ethnicity, and belonging. It’s clearly an economic meaning because what you eat reflects your resources and circumstances. And yes, I suppose it has a moral/character aspect to it since older traditions linked diet to temperament and virtue (gluttony is, indeed, one of the seven deadly sins according to Thomas Aquinas).
A natural companion to that phrase… and in some ways a deeper one…is that “you are what you do”. The philosophical tradition goes back to Aristotle’s position, expressed in his own terms as: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” That exact wording is actually a paraphrase by the historian Will Durant summarizing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics but it captures the idea faithfully. Aristotle’s word was “ethos” or character, which he argued was formed by “ethē” , our habitual actions. The English word ethics comes directly from this root. The insight is that identity isn’t what you intend, feel, believe, or say about yourself, it’s the accumulated pattern of your choices and actions over time. You become courageous by doing courageous things. You become honest by telling the truth repeatedly. You become cruel by doing cruel things, regardless of your self-image. And like gluttony, this too connects to the deadly sins. In fact, this is exactly what the seven deadly sins framework captures. It suggests that vice isn’t a single act but a habitual disposition built through repeated choices. Pride isn’t one proud moment; it’s what you’ve made yourself through repeated self-aggrandizement. The medieval theologians and Aristotle were saying the same thing from different directions.
The two phrases actually represent a deep philosophical rift, as much as they sound similar. “You are what you eat” is a materialist position. Identity is physical, biological, determined by inputs. But “You are what you do” is quite different. It says that your identity is chosen, constructed through your actions and will. A serious summation of human nature probably needs both perspectives. We are certainly constrained by our biology and circumstances, but within those constraints we author our own fate through our actions. Jean-Paul Sartre pushed this the furthest saying that existence precedes the essence of who we are, meaning that there is no fixed human nature that we’re born with. We are nothing but your choices and actions. There is no inner “real self” waiting to be discovered, only the self we create through what you do. It’s liberating and terrifying simultaneously, because it removes all excuses. We can’t blame our nature, our upbringing, or our circumstances. We are what we choose, and what we do becomes who we are. The insight in this is simply that behavior is more revealing than intention. People’s actions over time tell you who they are far more reliably than their self-descriptions, their stated values, or their explanations. This is why judges look at patterns of behavior, why investors look at track records, why character references matter. It also means character is always in play and we’re never finished becoming who we are. Every action either reinforces or erodes the person we’ve been building.
I am inspired by this line of thinking to turn to the political resonance of all of this. Given the recent revelations about Orbán, Trump, J.D. Vance, and Pope Leo XIV in the context of all the demagoguery in play, this forces some meaningful political judgments. It’s not what leaders say, promise, or claim to believe, but what they repeatedly do with power. Aristotle would have considered that the only reliable evidence. But I will say no more about that here, since that is not what’s most on my mind about all this.
This story is about doing the things I love to do and how that defines me and how that may or may not change as I get older. In the non-physical realm there is one activity above all others that defines me and that is writing. I’m not sure how or why that developed as it has, but my ability to express my thoughts and to give me avenues for more intensive thinking is central to who I am. I know I am an expressive person who tends to over communicate, so taking up writing has been an important outlet for me. Whatever builds up inside of me…ideologies, emotions, memories, creative ideas…these all need to find their way out like a boiler that needs to release steam. I can only burden the people around me so much by talking, so writing is my release valve. I also like to think that my self awareness and modicum of humility do not allow me to assume that everyone finds my every thought or comment as interesting as I do. This blog and the thousands of stories I have recorded are evidence to the consistency of the amount of steam that my boiler generates on a consistent basis. The good news is that I do not work to market the blog and I do not mind (too much) who does and doesn’t read it or like what they read. It’s not something that I feel posterity needs in its annals, but there it is, should it ever be wanted or required. The added value of the process, besides keeping my skills honed and my aging mind nimble, is that every one of my stories requires some degree of research and through the process I learn something new every day…sometimes a great deal. That all pleases me and will continue to do so.
Among the physical things that have defined me, I always loved to ski, to play golf, to work in the garden and to ride motorcycles. I gave up skiing after fifteen years of owning a home in Utah and getting my fill. Being out in winter weather and snow is invigorating, but had its time and place for me. Been there, done that a lot, don’t need to do it anymore…but solid and good memories. As for golf, I played a LOT of it from age 12 on, and for various reasons, tired of it. I believe that the non-egalitarian nature of the sport bothered me more than it probably should have. One golf course equals over 200 large urban playgrounds, not to mention the water usage. I had also just had enough and found that the obsession that builds in people who come to the sport later in life than I had was a bit annoying. The only justification was that it was a nice five mile walk in the country, but blocking out 4-5 hours to do that became less and less appealing.
So, that has left gardening, which I do every day, and motorcycling, which I do several days a week. My recent hand/thumb problems concerned me in that regard, but I have now tested out both and found that whatever affliction hit me in the thumb two weeks ago, I am still fully able to type on my iPad, garden with spade and gloves and ride my bike for hours at a time without incident. I was concerned and now I am not. I seem to have managed to stiff arm time yet again and continue to do what I do and be who I am.