Khaled Desouki

“Everyone who wears shoes walks wrong,” says Adam Sternbergh, who wrote about shoes and human feet for New York magazine. AFP/Getty Images

I love the reasoning behind why we started to wear high heels–to avoid one another’s excrement!
My grandmother always encouraged us to go barefoot. Her son–my Dad– taught me to do the same though he wore moccasins around the house as my mother insisted upon it. I celebrate warm weather and immediately switch to flip-flops and for more “serious” walking to Birkenstocks.

One of the best memories I have of staying at Maple Lake, Ontario all summer each year is that no one made us wear shoes–even to the small market on the other side of the lake. Many children and some adults went barefoot so it was no big deal.
The only “big deal” was that every night–without exception–we had to get out the wash tub and wash our feet before bed.————————

“The Bryant Park Project, April 22, 2008 · It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the foot, and humans have been wrecking that perfection with every step since they first donned shoes, New York magazine’s Adam Sternbergh says.

“Everyone who wears shoes walks wrong,” he says, echoing the headline of his recent article, “You Walk Wrong.”

Sternbergh calls the ubiquity of footwear a “conspiracy of idiocy.” He points out the probability that at no point did any shoemaker say, “Let’s design something that works with your foot.” In the Middle Ages, for example, people began wearing shoes with higher heels to avoid stepping in other people’s excrement. Today, high heels are considered sexy. Whatever their reasons for wearing the shoes they wear, people don’t usually consider whether a shoe actually works with their foot, he says.

The human foot works pretty well on its own, Sternbergh says, and it doesn’t need a lifetime of help from shoes. He explains the basic illogic of footwear by comparing the concept to a perpetual cast. “Imagine if someone put a cast on your arm when you were 3 years old and you never took it off,” he says. “Your arm would stop working. That’s kind of what’s happened with our feet.”

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Tags: barefoot, behaviour, happiness, health, me, news