Michele and Gene Burgese, who own Red's Hoagies across from Southwark, said they are happy to stock more fruit but doubt it will sell.
"Kids are kids," Michele Burgese said. "I don't think we ever sold an apple or banana to a kid," her husband said.
The only hope is to only sell fruit. Damn that free choice! People buy what they want. But if you smell fried chicken and doughnuts when you're walking down the street and hungry, you're going to want something lusciously fatty. I know what a fruit stand smells like. It doesn't make you feel like eating fruit. It makes you think I really should eat more fruit.
The hungry body feels powerfully drawn to foods that will pack on weight. This is the result of evolution in a world of scarce food, where people survived because strong instincts enabled them to zero in on the foods that would keep them going. We're not going to dawdle around this berry bush. We need to get something with fat and full of nourishment. Human organisms with an intense love of fruit died out in prehistoric famines.
The urge to eat fat is entirely healthy and normal. What is abnormal is that food is available everywhere. This is also a wonderful thing. Now, we're left to overcome our own healthy instincts because they've got a bad effect in our new, comfortable environment.
How can we possibly do that? Well, why are we not just saints in all aspects of our lives?
UPDATE: In the comments, there's a lot of discussion about whether it's better -- in fatness/slimness terms -- to live in the city or the suburbs.
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9 comments:
Ann,
That was a marvelous encapsulation of what I tell my patients who are oveweight. I prefer not to play the morality angle that is so often used in the medical press (you are fat because of a moral lapse). It is better that people know two simple facts:
1. we are born with brains designed to keep us from starving
and
2. we are living in a society of plenty, unlike any that has ever existed in the history of humankind.
Thus, losing weight is very hard, not because we are lazy or bad, but because we are successful and very fallibly human.
But the side of the aisle that believes in human perfectibility, the one that brought us collectivim and its attendant horrors (i.e. Stalin, Mao, now Mugabe), now tries to make the "new Soviet Man" in health care. Same ignorance of human limitations, same derision of choice, same desire for power over others.
As Mencken said, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
I'm with JB on that 30 minute sprawl walk (or bike ride) to which I would add someone at home to provide, upon arrival, a kid her/his just reward.
Interesting! Usually the subject of fatty fast food brings out the left-wing anti-business arguments, but the commenters today seem to be developing anti-left themes.
JB, lmeade: Usually people think city-dwellers get more exercise and that suburbanites drive everywhere, including to fastfood restaurants. I did a lot more walking in the years when I lived in big cities. But that might be more true of adults than kids. There's also all that yard work. Do people still get their kids to do yard work?
Pogo: Interesting! I am hearing a lot of this choice-is-bad talk lately. The notion that people need to be saved from pursuing happiness!
Some "acquaintances" of mine actually did an "intervention" on me, to try to get me to lose weight. At first the language is about "health," but when I press them on it, it became clear that it was much, much more appearance-based. They liked my wit at their parties, but couldn't stand to look at me! And they were angry at me when I didn't feel the same degree of guilt they feel about their own weight!
Needless to say, I made them happy and don't show up at their parties anymore.
"But how else do you get around in the suburbs at 13 without a bike?"
From what I've seen, the parent becomes the chaffeur.
I walk much more when I'm in the city for two reasons: I don't want to mess with a car and there's a lot to see as you walk along. Most suburban walks are incredibly boring. There should be shops and cafés and parks. In the suburbs, it's just one yard after another. It can be pretty, but often it's a lot of driveways and vacant swaths of lawn.
Adam: I really identify with your diagonosis. I still remember eating lunch at school at 10:30AM and coming home to a family that thought 8PM was the dinner hour. You would not believe how much chocolate chip ice cream I ate between 3 and 4PM every day!
Googling "strength training," "Mediterranean Diet," and "reel mower" provides information on three powerful tools that can readily lead to health and happiness for nearly anyone. No lawn? -- google "bicycle." Can't ride a bike? -- "walking shoes."
Adam: I doubt the validity of their concerns, because I doubt their motives. They were all quite concerned about their appearance; in several cases, I would say that it was close to their self-definition. I feel they were'nt concerned about my health, it was just that I did not share their own mutually-reenforcing neurosis about one's physical appearance. It's not like I became Howard Hughes or something; I just didn't give a damn how much weight I gained or lost either way.
I think that the amount of work/dieting that one needs for one's health is not really correlated to the appearance-based assumptions about weight. If I were exercising, and eating modestly, but didn't lose weight, I am completely convinced that they would not accept this; I would need to do more, eat less, etc. until I met their body image standards.
I reject the whole approach, kit and kaboodle...
I think the idea of walking more in suburbs is weather-dependent. I live outside Boston and the weather is miserable 6 months out of the year. I grew up in a New York suburb and there was no way I was walking 45 minutes to school in the snow while carrying a very heavy backpack and a violin.
It also depends on exactly how suburban (or exurban, I guess, to use the trendy new term) your area is. In the Bay Area and in New England (probably other places too, but that's where I've lived) towns have walkable downtown areas. But where I grew up, there was nothing for miles except one busy street with strip malls. So there wasn't much incentive to get out.
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