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The hardest thing about driving across U.S. isn’t the long hours in the car, the motel stays, or the gas prices. It's eating.
Weekly Three
HEAR: “Mother Nature’s Bitch” by Okay Kaya
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No. 64: Default
The hardest thing about driving across this country isn’t the long hours in the car, the motel stays, or the gas prices.
It’s eating.
Your most accessible options on the road are reliably reduced to handful of fast food restaurants, regardless of where you are.
Here there are a few gas stations, a Carl’s Jr., a McDonalds, a Taco Bell, a Wendy’s, a Subway, a KFC, and a Popeyes. Ten hours down the road, the same.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, this monotony is disappointing. If a person wanted they could easily subsist on nothing but double cheeseburgers and fries from San Francisco to New York City. Forget regional tastes and customs.
It's important to say this is a strictly manufactured sameness. In each state, the open areas between these roadside sprawls are beautiful and varying. Arizona is mountainous desert and red rock bluffs. Texas is grassy prairie and light blue skies. Oklahoma is woodsy flatland. Missouri is rolling hills. Illinois is snow-covered farmland that turns to quaint towns and villages.
So if these states are so beautiful and different, the Decision Makers must have had good reason to enter each of them, flatten the land, lay concrete parking lots, and build the same restaurants with the same fluorescent signage raised high in the air on metal poles, right?
Yes, if ensuring the whole population is fed the same unhealthy food is a good reason.
Americans by default lead one of the most unhealthy lifestyles in the world. If a person — adult or child — were to innocently follow all that American culture promotes, they would:
Purchase and eat mostly processed or pre-cooked food
Drink liters of soda per day
Patronize fast food joints
Never exercise
Drive their car for trips greater than 100 yards
Spend hours watching TV
Eat when they’re not hungry
This isn’t something to scoff at. Rather, it’s a moment the calls for empathy, compassion, and action. This is American lifestyle. We are doing our best with what we’ve been given. And that's the problem: we’ve been given so little. The burden of being healthy in this country is entirely laid on the individual. This wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t also have to endure a non-stop cycle of advertisements for consumables that are killing us. The first step, then, is becoming conscious of how our environment leads us to make bad health decisions.
Evaluate yourself or someone in your life as a case study. No American has lived a life entirely free of American social coercion.
I’ll go first.
During childhood, I played outside a lot, but I also watched a lot of TV. What did I see in between Spongebob episodes? The latest happy meal from McDonalds (featuring a toy!) or the new chicken fingers from Burger King.
In elementary school, I joined the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program, where I had to log a certain amount of reading hours in order to earn one free Personal Pan Pizza. This on top of whatever it was they fed us at the school cafeteria whenever I didn’t bring a bag lunch. Start 'em young.
I always played sports, but I didn’t know anything about eating. High school was probably the height of my athletic career, and during this time my food habits were worse than ever. Students were released at lunch to choose from any of Dublin’s restaurants. With only 45 minutes to eat and five dollars in my pocket, I almost always frequented a taco truck, Jack in the Box, Little Caesars, or Taco Bell.
Enter college. I continued to be active, playing basketball, surfing and skateboarding, and spending days swimming in the ocean and running around the beach. But my eating habits were still pretty terrible, and my drinking habits were . . . lots of beer.
After college, I went to Europe. This was probably my most eye-opening event in terms of health. Sure, Europeans smoked a lot, but the food there was almost always whole and nutritious. Not only that, but there were no clusters of fast food restaurants. In fact, there was no fast food at all besides the occasional McDonalds. People commuted by foot or bike. The mood was, in general, more energetic and less lethargic.
But apparently I took that knowledge and simply put it in my pocket, because on my return from Europe I made terrible health choices yet again. I was focused on finding a job and building a career, and this entailed a lots grind and little exercise. At the end of the day, I “rewarded” myself with many late nights at the bar with friends followed by fast food binges.
Then, the pandemic. It changed everything for me in a positive way. This is one of the awkward ways in which the pandemic can be perceived as a blessing in disguise. With a wave of sickness coming my way, I revised my eating somewhat to improve my immune response, and with stay-at-home mandates implemented, I hopped on an old bike a began to ride around for hours to get out of the house.
In short, the pandemic catapulted me back into my previous life as an athlete. This brings us to today. And even now, right now, at 27 years old, I’m still trying to decode my nutrition and diet, a task so monumental that I’ve quickly become buried in fitness, wellness, and nutrition textbooks. Exercise is a given. But when it comes to food the reality is: you either need to have the money to hire a coach/nutritionist, or you need to spend lots of time doing your own research.
The point? It’s really, really hard to be healthy in this country. It’s far from natural. It takes effort, and that’s tragic.
But it can be done, with the first step being to raise our awareness.
When we gain a little knowledge and start challenging assumptions, the amount of unhealthy choices we make are hard to miss. And once that state of increased awareness is achieved, we have to make sure not to blame ourselves or each other for the damage being done.
If there’s an entity to blame, it’s the government and their leniency towards ill-intentioned corporations. The message from leaders is loud and clear: money is more important than the good health of people.
Along with the unhealthy American lifestyle, there is an American psychology that helps rationalize it. It goes something along the lines of, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time,” or “We’re all gonna die anyway,” or “I feel fine now. I’ll deal with the consequences later.”
What else can this be but an existential coping mechanism, an attitude that avoids looking at our 21st-century human condition for what it is? Instead, we should try acknowledging the importance of health as a method to make peace with the fact that one day we will die — that we have complex bodies made up of a number of components, each of which require care and attention.
By making our health a priority, we pay death the respect it deserves; we engage in that combat as old as time, the one between life and death; in effect, we say with a smirk on our face, I see you, Death, but I won’t go down without a fight.
There is peace in that unlike any I’ve ever felt. ♦
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