Adjustment Reflections: Junk Food Attitude

In his book, I am a Stranger Here Myself, Bill Bryson raves about his excitement of the junk food he found available for pure ravishment when he returned from England. Having spent more than twenty years abroad, frozen pizzas, hot pockets, and smore flavored pop-tarts were all novelties for him. He ate it all, and at once, becuase it what everyone was doing and was the greatest thing.

I experienced the same when I came back from Panama, only with a modern twist. The junk food that so ravaged Bryson's digestive system (the temptation of so many new pleasures was just too much to resist) has now been replaced by the exact opposite: one runs the aisles of stores lined with "healthy options", "lite choices" and "energy booster that will taste good and still help get rid of that pesky cellulite". Flavored water now comes in "lite" and I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone say, "honey, this isn't low-fat toilet paper." Even McDonalds, not known or even meant to be slightly, the least bit, in the smallest fashion "healthy", now offers lite salad dressings, and salads that I don't even think most grazing animals would find appetizing. After much hustle and bustle to "healthen" their image, it would be no surprise to find that happy meal toy options now include two free hours of personal training, an appointment with Bob Greene, Oprah's miracle worker, or a entry ticket in a drawing for a treadmill (or more approriatly some more modern contraption that is a more effective calorie burner than those treadmills that are so 1990s.)

Not that these healthy options get to me. The thing is the attitude behind it. Are all these healthy options any healthier anyways? I mean, grocery stores fill their shelves with healthy options, but really, aren't they still frozen dinners? And Tyson's organic chicken breasts are still bigger than my head, and I don't think there are such things as Philistine chickens. Even Bob Green seems to have plumped up and changed his rhetoric to "its not how you look but how you feel." And lite water? I didn't think water had calories, but we have figured out not only how to pump it full of them, but then how to reduce all those calories to make it healthier than before, but still not as good as the real thing.

But disdain the person who buys regular soda. I mean, really, don't you know that soda is bad for your health. At least you are only coating your teeth with fake sugar when you drink lite soda. And you won't say it, but you know you judge that person who has the audacity to super size a combo or eats a chocolate bar for a snack, while you eat your power bars or Healthy Choice Devils Food Cake Cookies that has passed through just as many assembly lines.

And it doesn't stop at food. Stamp something "eco-friendly" and consumers will eat it up, even though the fraction ounce of plastic that was in the bottle is just pushed into the plastic celophane wrap around your Sam's Club cube of bottled water. Put "fair trade" on a bag of coffee and people will be willing to pay an extra three or four dollars on top of already-starbucks-highly-overpriced coffee, when the person who really made that cup of coffee will still just be making $3 a month.

I guess all this ruminating about junk food has just lead me to hope that people would make some real change, or at least not live in this lip-service to honorable causes just because they are the fad. Don't say your green because you bought the most expensive made-of-self-sustaining-cork coffee table. Don't say your healthy because you ate a lite Banquet dinner. Don't say you exercise because you walk to the car every morning and after work. Turn off your lights and your computer when you aren't home. Grow your own produce. Walk down the block.

And most of all, don't listen to those fad mongers telling you what to do to be green or to be healthy. :)