Salad f$@*#ing drive-thru?

warning actual swears coming

When I started writing this blog I said my main purpose was to vent, and if I could educate a little along the way maybe that was a positive byproduct of my writing, but really its to blow off steam in this massively uphill battle against car culture here.

I’ve tried to keep the educational stuff pretty front and center lately, and had a list of some other topics I wanted to hit, but then I was perusing my emails and reading an update from an Ames based start up that grows vegetables indoors with some new state of the art technology and whatnot. Cool right?

Well this week they announced an expansion into the prepared foods world (welcome to MY world hommies) that would take the form of - my words not theirs - a salad fucking drive-thru.

This is your brain on car dependency. This is get in the car to drive to the gym culture. This is everything that is toxic about how we build our communities.

Look I get it, this is Iowa, and Clayton and his team can’t change the entire built environment of Ames in 1 year. In fact I’m guessing they don’t give two shits about car culture or even have given it a moment of thought, they just want to sell more greens. Good for them.

But it’s such a perfect metaphor for life in modern America.

We complain about our health, how we need to lose weight, that it’s hard to find time to exercise. We complain about our communities, how everyone is isolated and lonely now, how bad our collective state of mental health is. We complain about the children, they don’t socialize properly, they never go outside. We complain about global warming and climate change, “somebody should really do something!”)

All of this gives us such anxiety!!

This is from an actual car commercial I shit you not

So what do we do to feel better?

We get in our gigantic SUVs, we drive 1 mile down the road, we go to the drive thru, and we buy a fucking salad.

Cars, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

OK obviously I know that America’s mental health crisis is not entirely caused by car-centric culture (only mine is), but hear me out - maybe our car-dependent lifestyles are contributing a lot to these issues….and our car-centric solutions aren’t exactly doing a great job of solving the problems.

The link between physical health and car dependency is pretty easy. I wrote in my newsletter just last week about how I’ve managed to lose 10 pounds in 2023 just from committing to living an active lifestyle of walking and biking to as many of my destinations as possible. Americans are fare more sedentary than our European developed nation counterparts, and that is a direct link to our car-based culture. And guess what? When you move your body and get some exercise, even just walking, that’s good for your mental health too!

Car-centric communities also don’t facilitate togetherness and social interactions. More space for cars mean less space for people. Car based planning has also helped eliminate our public third spaces. We don’t have parks or public spaces with cafes (go drive to the mall assholes!) or places to stroll and to linger and take in the world, perhaps have a chance encounter, meet someone new, or just fee like you’re a part of something.

And won’t somebody think of the children! Yes my generation grew up playing in the streets until dark….and guess what we had video games back then too! (I know cause my parents wouldn’t let me have one…). Why don’t kids play in the streets now? Because back then the average vehicle wasn’t a gigantic lifted truck or SUV with huge front and rear blind spots and a distracted driver on a cell phone. Not only is a kid today more likely to get hit by a car, but its much more likely to produce a deadly outcome as well. How is that the kid’s fucking fault?

And yes the environmental issue….sprawl is just soooo bad for the environment, and electric vehicles barely move the needle on improving on that. It’s all just such as waste. of. space.

So as we sit in the salad drive through line, doom scrolling through news about climate change, listening to the NPR story about childhood obesity rates, stressed about finding time to get to the gym, maybe that’s a good time to reflect on how we arrived here, both physically and metaphorically.

**For the record I’m not anti-salad, just anti-car**