Fast Food Nation

Telling people back home about my journey, it’s amazing how many made comments along the lines of “you’ll get buff”. Well, the opposite is proving to be true. I think many have the idea that I’m over here wandering around wheat fields with a scythe, threshing grain with my hands. Reality is that I sit in a truck for up to 15 hours a day writing stuff like this in my down-time.

Inactivity being one enemy, American food is another. The food we’re provided on the job is great because it’s home cooked and there's a lot of variety. It’s the down-time eating that’s the killer. It’s an exhausted fact, but it is just too easy to buy junk food in this country. Or rather, it is hard to find nutritious food.

If you go to a restaurant, every meal will come with some sort of potato, which can be fried five different ways: French fries, American fries, waffle fries, hash browns or crisps.

Salt and sugar is addictive, which make’s the problem self-perpetuating; the more you have, the more you want; water just doesn’t cut it when it comes to washing down a Double Quarter Pounder.

One night a couple of weeks ago in Scott City Kansas, the neon signs got the better of me. Each time I drove past Dairy Queen, my mouth would water at the thought of an M&Ms Blizzard. Despite being pressed for time, I gave in on one of my last runs; I parked the truck diagonally across the carpark, and ran into the place like a little kid running for the toilet at the service station.

Alarmed by the prospect of having to buy new sets of pants and shorts, I bought some scales the other day. However, I got my weight conversion wrong. Weighing in at 195 pounds, I spent a whole day quietly freaking out about the fact that I’d put on 15 kilos (logic didn’t really kick in). It was in fact only five kilos.

In his book American Journeys, Melbourne author Don Watson points out that as a visitor to America it is easy to become obsessive about staying thin. For the first time in my life, in the Fast-Food-Nation, birthplace of the Big Mac and home of the one litre cup, I am snacking on raw carrots (Watson also points out that this is a nation of paradoxes).