waltondammerung

Who really likes leftovers, anyway?

All of my loyal readers will soon be reaping the dubious benefits of my boredom from being sick with the flu for almost a week and a half now. Not only is my brain rebelling, keeping me awake at night even when I tell it I need to sleep for my health, but it has been pouring out copious amounts of delirious musings, such as the following additional thoughts on the documentary Supersize Me:

Director/eater Morgan Spurlock mentions at the beginning of the film that things have changed drastically since he was a child, when his mother made almost every meal at home and his family ate out only on special ocassions. An important observation, if you ask me, yet he neglected to pursue the idea at all. Sure, McDonald's food is bad, but what about the culture that creates the demand for fast food? Fast food wouldn't be around if there wasn't a demand for it. Sure, McDonald's has good advertising, but you can't attribute all of its sales to mass hypnosis. There must be some cultural force driving that demand that wasn't there 60 years ago, before McDonald's and all the other fast food franchises hit it big-time. Why don't we cook at home any more?

"Well," you might think, "Things are more fast-paced than they were back then. We're just busier." We don't really have any less time in the day than our grandparents did, though. We just spend it differently. We think we just don't have time to cook for ourselves and our families, say, but it has to be because we're doing something else. There are still 24 hours in the day.

Now I raise the question, and a few hackles with it: who used to do this almost mythological home cooking before the advent of fast food? It's not an unfair generalization to say that women did the vast majority of it. What if I said that women need to stay home and take care of their families instead of working full time, plus overtime?

I'm sure quite a few people would get really worked up and tell me I'm being anti-feminist and delete my blog from their bookmarked websites. (Quite a few being two or three, since my readership is about ten people, including comment spammers.) That only goes to prove the point I am about to make. Our society values money far above the health and well-being of its members, particularly its children. Even the idea that everyone must have a career in order to have a "sense of self" is based on the assumption that personal value is derived from one's ability to earn cold, hard cash. What does it say about our culture when we indicate that being a corporate lawyer is a much more valuable use of time than cooking at home to make sure that the food our children eat is not going to make them have serious health problems before they're 25? Or that any job at all is probably better than the odious task of staying at home to see to the nutritional, educational, and spiritual needs of our offspring?

The underlying problem behind fast food is not that McDonald's will do anything to make money. It is that we value our health and our children's health so little that we are willing to do almost anything (including eat at McDonald's-ugh!) to get rid of our own responsibility for it so we have just a little more time to make more money. (Yes, we're busy doing other things, too, but if you have a full-time job, that pretty much takes up the biggest chunk of your day, doesn't it? Quitting your weekly yoga class wouldn't really buy you enough time to make dinner every night.)

Near the end of Supersize Me, there's a segment bemoaning the state of school lunches. Kids line up every day for all varieties of fatty, nasty processed foods. Shots of kids eating heaps of french fries are interspersed with shots of school nutritionists saying that the kids generally choose to eat a healthy mixture of good food and junk food. The implication seems to be that the schools have fallen down on the job by not ensuring that these kids have healthier diets, and that kids have been brainwashed by fast food advertising to make poor choices. While I do not debate either of those points, I think Spurlock is missing the big picture here. What about the parents who can't find the 5 minutes it would take to pack healthy lunches for their kids? Or who let their kids grab a bag of chips for dinner and eat them in front of their favorite (advertisement-rich) television programs? How come no parents have said anything about the nutrition programs in these schools in the documentary, if they are so bad? Have they even bothered to ask what their kids are eating? Do parents really have the right to expect to be able to drop their kids off at 7:30 and completely forget about them until 4 pm, leaving everything in between to the teachers and school nutritionists, as the movie assumes that they do?

I do not mean to be overly critical of all families in which both parents work. I know it is often hard to make enough money to meet a family's basic needs with only one income. But there are needs that are not met only by money. A healthy diet is a case in point. You can't eat quick meals at restaurants or schools almost all the time and expect to have your nutritional needs met. Nutrition requires some time and effort, not to mention closer attention to individuals than a school nutritionist can provide. I honestly have no problem with two parents working, as long as those other needs are met. If a child's health or education or behavior is suffering because her parents spend too much time at work, maybe it's time to rethink what "enough" money is. You would be surprised at what you can do without. I know quite a few working-class families who live on one income. In Southern California, no less. (Hey, it's expensive here!)

While fast food is really, really bad, it meets a need embedded in our cultural values. Fast food may be a major immediate cause of the obesity epidemic, but both fast food and obesity are symptoms of our culture's underlying priorities. As long as we value our jobs over the health and well-being of ourselves and our families, as long as we only give important needs like nutrition only the time and energy that's left over at the end of the day, McDonald's will be here to stay.

Posted by waltondammerung at November 23, 2004 5:28 PM