My Diet and the Toxic Environment

What do I eat in a typical day? When I first considered the question, I thought that it would really depend on whether it was a weekend or weekday. On weekdays, I eat from the cafeteria at school, which really makes my diet much worse, I think, because I always have a big, greasy slice of sausage pizza, and often a Dr. Pepper. Also, on weekdays, I don't eat breakfast, which I guess is not good. If my wife remembers to actually put a banana in my hand before I leave for work, I will eat that on the bus, but that isn't a sure thing.

Well, this Saturday, when I think about it, my diet was just as bad. I did eat breakfast, but I ate Raisin Bran, which I'll bet has a bunch of sugar in it...and I always put sugar on top of that. I did have the banana too, but I would have been better off just having that. For lunch on my supposedly healthier weekend day? Frozen pizza, three slices! That and my cafeteria pizza? Definitely a product of the "Toxic Environment" described in Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me." Easy, quick, cheesy, and greasy. No dishes to clean, no tupperware to carry to work, no need to actually sit down at a table. I can gobble it down while walking around campus or grading papers. It's not so much a meal as a transfusion of feeling OK. No sausage on the pizza at home, but it's not exactly rice and beans.

Dinner is my saving grace. We cook at least twice a week for dinner, often vegetables, and since it's just the two of us, we have leftovers for the entire week. Plus, cooking and eating as a family is the opposite social situation as the Toxic Environment. If my pizza is about grabbing something because I'm too busy and lazy (and because, I'm convinced, that the cafeteria puts something addictive in that stuff), then shopping and cooking together is about going slow, planning together, talking, accomplishing something. It's really a thing that brings us together as a family, like our hour-long weekend walks. So, though my diet is partly a Toxic Environment situation, I guess I can feel good that at least once a day I break out of that pattern.