By Pete Bandel
There is an epidemic sweeping America. The only problem is, this epidemic is too heavy to sweep up, which maybe is why it still exists.
Recently, a movie came out called “Super Size Me.” The premise of the movie involved Morgan Spurlock, a man who documented his month-long experience of eating only at McDonald’s.
What happened to Spurlock was quite gross. He gained a lot of weight, clogged his arteries and attained a very fatty liver. We even saw his body become so disgusted with the food that he threw it up right after the last swallow.
This movie shows a lot of disgusting qualities to eating fast food, and although he eats only McDonald’s, the concern extends beyond the “golden arches.” It belongs to the King and the Colonel, and under the Hut and in red pigtails. It belongs to the Big Gulp and the Slim Jims, the Dunkin’ Donuts and the newly-fevered Krispy Kremes.
I once heard that for the world to sustain the amount of energy, food and comfortable tangibles we love — like TVs and VCRs, etc. — it would take three Earths just to fulfill the needs of our current world’s population. And the population is rising every day.
But, we don’t have additional Earths to fall back on. We were once a nation of underdogs, who pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps with hard work. Through that work, we gained much. However, we gained too much. We gained more than we needed, and although we knew it, we loved every second of it. We have lost sight of the values in our day-to-day lives, and let me just say they don’t belong in value meals.
In the book “Fast Food Nation,” the author, Eric Schlosser, discusses more than just the poor health attributed to our growing need of faster and larger meals. He shows the cultural decline it produces and even the moral drain on society.
Going out to a fast food restaurant used to be a treat, an occasion, something to do once in a while. Now it is an afternoon activity for school kids. Hell, it’s even a daily lunchtime activity in many schools today.
People used to go to restaurants for a change of pace. Now we do it because it is convenient and convenience is the modern vogue. It is just too bad, and far too dangerous, that the need for ease outweighs the need for family bonding, town and city connections and community building.
Children and parents no longer sit at home around the table and discuss their days and the happenings of life because it has now become almost trite to do so. We view this as some quasi-Rockwellian reminder to early times that we can no longer connect to. But, if we do not rectify the epidemic of American gluttony, we will succumb to it.
America cannot sustain the extra fabric in our jeans and the XXL T-shirts that look more like what paratroopers used in WWII. America cannot sustain the “fast” in our “food” because we do not just stop there. We increase the speed and amount of what we eat, and we shirk our responsibilities as we do.
Whatever happened to the chores of setting and clearing the table and the manners of “please” and “thank you” in between? It is easy to set a stack of paper plates and a pizza box on a table, but what does that teach? Fast food and the desire for the quick and easy only produces gluttony, shirked responsibilities, lax morals, gross obesity, lack of patience and an astronomical amount of health problems. Let’s just remember that, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, over 55 percent of Americans are considered overweight to extremely overweight and 31.5 percent are completely obese.
We are a nation of have or have not, eat or be eaten, and we have relaxed all our restraints so much that I hear a friend say, “Well the guy in the movie ate McDonald’s three times a day for a month, that is like, 90 times. I only eat fast food four or five times a week.” Nice job, that is only 208 times a year. Chew on that, America, and taste the fat.
— Pete Bandel is a junior political science major.
