Life in the fast (food) lane
It was 6:30 am on a Saturday morning and I was a parent volunteer. On trash pickup duty. On over fifty acres of soccer fields.
The word “volunteer” actually gives me far too much agency. I was voluntold. All soccer parents had to help during the big tournament weekend. So, at 6:30 am on a Saturday, I put on my gloves, hopped on a golf cart, and picked up every kind of garbage imaginable.
As families poured into the parking lots and sleepily unloaded children and soccer gear, I couldn’t help but notice how…unhealthy people look. Even kids, and a vast majority of the ones at the park were athletes. They looked tired, pale, and overweight.
These are kids that ostensibly spend a good portion of their week playing a sport that involves running. A lot of running.
Around and around I went, picking up discarded Gatorade bottles and “fun sized” candy bar wrappers. I drove past the fast-food stand, and the food truck with carnival fare. More families parked, and more kids walked past eating McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches, their parents drinking frappuccinos.
Culturally, all of this is normal. Busy families, on the go, picking up food that tastes good on their way to yet another activity. This is just what we do. It’s difficult and time consuming to make food. There is planning involved. It is impractical to be bothered with nutrition when we have places to be.
There isn’t any time to do anything because we need to work. In order to work, we often have to drive a great distance to our workplace. And then again to the soccer fields. So, we take the shortcuts that are available to us.
I reflected on this as I cruised on my golf cart, trash bags in tow. After living and working in Europe for a few years, I could now see the health impact of American culture through a different set of lenses. In our search for a good and happy life, we work to exhaustion, and then must fill in the gaps in time with convenience. And our convenience items are, by and large, unhealthy.
Other modern countries are busy as well, but many find balance. There is more emphasis on leisure, socializing, and eating high quality food. They use their vacation days. They have more restrictive laws on what can actually go into the food. American culture is steeped in work and achievement, socialization is difficult, and food quantity is the proxy for quality.
These were the thoughts I had as cruised past another trashed field. Doritos bags, energy drink cans, soft drink bottles, candy wrappers. The environmental blight mirrored perfectly by families that were clearly heading towards metabolic peril.
And I couldn’t help but think if trash, health, and busyness weren’t all a part of a larger cultural problem.
I studied nutrition in college, then I went to dental school, which included the same classes as the medical students. Between eating and treating, it seemed that no one was minding motivation.
That is to say, we could talk to people about making good choices until we are blue in the face, but if they don’t have a reason to make good choices, they won’t. If they don’t have time they won’t. If they can’t afford it, they simply can’t.
More specifically, if the hard thing (making healthy lifestyle choices) was easier and the easy thing (making poor lifestyle choices) was difficult, we would likely see less unhealthy people. And there would be far fewer bits of garbage flying around the soccer field.
In our pursuit of happiness, I think a lot of us just got…busy. The culture is mired in busyness and companies have filled in the gaps with items of convenience. This usually comes with worse health for us, and more trash in the environment. So far, it hasn’t gotten us any healthier or happier.
I worry about a culture where we feed kids junk because we are too busy (or good food is unaffordable) to do anything else. I worry that the busyness has trumped our health and the health of the next generation. I worry that industry will be ready with more “solutions” that don’t change the root of the problem. I worry that these compounding problems will further harm us, our kids, and the environment.
But, cultural change doesn’t happen overnight…well, not without a seismic shift in status quo. And some organizations are trying to do this in the US based on healthier cultures.
The “Blue Zones” are areas in the world where people routinely live, healthfully and happily, to extreme old age. By and large, these are areas where the culture effortlessly nudges people in the healthiest direction. During a twenty-year study, Dan Buettner, the National Geographic, and the National Institute on Aging studied the Bue Zones. They distilled that knowledge into 9 specific traits that these cultures share.
Taking it a step farther, they considered how this information could be applied in other locations. This created the Blue Zones Project. They have a team of experts that will work with individual communities to recreate as many of the 9 traits as possible. They aim to “nudge” people and the overall culture in a new direction. One that increases the health and longevity in a community.
I can’t help but think they are on to something. Because, even though I put healthy food on my table, and I have a kid who will eat it…he also wants to get school lunch from time to time, which is little better than fast food. Even though we value outdoor family activities, my son’s friends all substitute video gaming for real connection…and he wants to play video games too.
I can’t fight against a whole culture. It would help to have a community on the same page.
It’s time to start changing the direction of our cultural nudges. It’s time to consider ways to make it easy to be healthier, and by extension, happier. Truth be told, I would rather be picking up banana peels than Big Mac wrappers on the soccer field.
And, If I had my druthers, we would be composting them. But, that’s a rant for another day.