Enough

The last season ended with a bull on a wrestler's shoulders and a story that he ate it. The story comes from Athenaeus, the same ancient compiler of table talk who preserved Milo's appetite for us, and whether or not it happened, it tells you what the ancient world already believed about strength: that the strong are made of what they eat, and that what they eat should have walked.

That belief is older than any theory and it has never gone away. Greek trainers fed their athletes meat when meat was a luxury most people tasted at festivals. Roman gladiators, by some accounts, ate barley and beans and were mocked for it, which tells you the meat rule had exceptions and that the exceptions were considered worth a joke. Every strongman of the nineteenth century, when strongmen became a profession, advertised his dinners along with his lifts. And every gym today has a young man in it drinking a shake made of the powdered protein of cows, on the same theory Athenaeus was recording two thousand years ago. The muscle is meat. Feed it meat. It grows.

This season is about that theory, and its arc has a shape I find almost too neat: the folk belief got a scientist, the scientist got it wrong, two of his colleagues proved him wrong in a single afternoon on a mountain, and the belief survived anyway, more or less intact, into the shaker bottle in your gym bag. Along the way it acquired numbers, some of which are true. The season's whole labor is to separate the true numbers from the story they are wrapped in, because in this territory the wrapping is expensive and the true numbers are small.

Let me state the frame, since it is the volume's. Strength came before its explanations, and the explanations, when they arrived, were sold. Protein is the purest case. For most of human history nobody needed a theory of why meat built muscle; the strong ate it, the belief was obvious, and it was correct in a way that would take another century to state precisely. Then, in the 1840s, one of the most famous chemists alive gave the belief a mechanism. His mechanism was wrong. It was also, almost immediately, a product.

So the season runs like this. First the chemist, and the theory that muscle burns protein the way a lamp burns oil. Then the extract of beef he sold on the strength of it, and the doctor who objected. Then the mountain: two men, a day's climb, tea and starch paste and a great deal of collected urine, and the arithmetic that ended the theory. Then what survived, which is more interesting than what fell: protein as the building material rather than the fuel. And then the modern weighing, with its inconvenient plateau and its inconvenient window, where the shaker bottle finally meets the scale.

The strong are made of what they eat. That sentence is true. Every important error in this season came from someone deciding it was more true than it is.