Life Back in America

My life has changed, dramatically. I’ve been thrown back into the American mainstream, knocked on my keester, right smack back into my old life. I mean literally, back into our old house, back into my old position at work, back into my old desk, computer, right down to the my old coffee cup that they saved, “just in case”.
How do I feel about this? Pretty good, I guess. Actually, pretty pulled. I love being back in the “land of plenty”, but really miss the simple life. I have these whimsical daydreams about how my life was a few months ago—low stress, good food, great people, hanging out in the hammock, no work. But quickly, I realize you can’t live in America this way, unless you are independently wealthy, which I am not, but even if I were, I think you would really have to train yourself to not want all the latest greatest, gadgets, and try to live simply and eat simply. I imagine it’s harder than we think.

I’ve delayed writing a blog for two reasons; I’ve been in reverse culture shock, not sure exactly what to write and the second delay comes in the form of having two kids.

So, here I am back at the keyboard ready to write…I think. Here are a few things that shocked me once I de-boarded from my third and final airplane.
America is RICH! America is CLEAN! America is OBESE!

First off, if you complain that we have too many poor people in American, you don’t know the meaning of poor. I walked and talked with people who live off of meat bone soup because they are too poor to buy the meat that once fleshed out the bones; I saw women begging with their children on the streets; gave food to children who were homeless and parentless traveling in little gangs addicted to huffing glue from bottles. Americans are wealthy, even if our poor are wealthy.

Everything here in America is very clean--the streets, the houses, the yards, the stores, the public restrooms, even the dump! It’s nice to be able to wash my floors twice a week, instead of everyday. It’s nice to go for a run and not have to sidestep discarded animal bones, and, yes, it’s nice to have a paved road again. Gracie, my 3&1/2 year-old, after going to the potty at the airport asked where she was to put the toilet paper after wiping. I was happy to inform her that, “here in America, we can flush the toilet paper”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can lose a few pounds. But while living in Brazil I saw about 3 obese people and absolutely no obese children. I mentioned this to my pediatrician friend and he asked, “The poor weren’t obese?” Because we all know the correlations between low income and obesity, right? If not, check this out http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/01/040105071229.htm
Trying to eat the way we did in brazil—grass fed meats, fresh free-range corn-fed chickens and their eggs, local veggies—is really hitting us hard in the pocket book. The really healthy foods in America are very expensive. Sure, the high-fructose-corn-syrup products are cheap and in abundance, but I really don’t want to feed my kids that stuff, or eat it myself. Lately, I’ve been engrossed with Michael Pollan’s book, Omnivore’s Delima (2006). He explains why Americans are bigger and “stronger” than the majority of people inhabiting our world. If we follow our industrialized path to pudginess, like Pollan did in his book, we can easily see where America diverged from fresh to fabricated. What is so bad about fabricated I asked? We’ll everything we can buy cheaply is loaded with HFCS, and due to this cheap sugar source, we see the rise in larger portions of foodstuff. Ie: the supersized nation. Supersizing is a way for the big fastfood chains to make an easy buck. HFCS is so cheap it costs pennies to supersize an item, while to customer pays 30 or 40 cents more. Huge profits on a large scale. Therefore, American’s, on average, consume 500 more calories a day than they did two decades ago.

So, going back to Dr. Mark’s question, “the poor weren’t obese?”. If there are so many poor in the area of Brazil that we lived (approx. 80%), why was obesity absent?
I’m thinking this must be due to absence of cheap prefabricated foods and fast food restaurants. For my neighbors, a quick fast meal involved walking to the corner and purchasing a spit full of barbecued meat with a plate of rice and beans for R$2 (roughly a US dollar).

The weight problem for America is the only thing that really jumped out at me. It’s quite alarming when faced with creating good eating habits for my kids. It becomes difficult when you have limited time to prepare foods and shop. As my girlfriend says, and I'm sure she mimicks what many other mother's would say, "McNuggets are just sooo easy". Looking at her, I decided not to tell her that those little clusters of "easiness" are sprayed with butane (i.e. lighter fluid), to preserve "freshness"--ha, how the meaning of "fresh" has morphed. Bon appetite and as Gracie says, "napkins in your lapkins".