Dispatch from Kentucky

I took a very interesting trip last week. I went with a colleague to Kentucky to work on a childhood obesity prevention project in eastern and southern Kentucky. It was fascinating stuff. I think as well-educated, well-resourced adults, we around here already have a difficult enough time preventing obesity - or in some cases, just trying to get rid of 10 pounds of beer weight or resisting a bagel or whatever.

But out where we were working, there are no sidewalks, there are very few ball fields, and there are a lot of mountains and winding roads. Apparently the only folks who go walking in the woods are the ones that you don't want your kids to be near anyway, so hiking is out of the question. The economy is tougher than in many places. The main money makers are found in coal mines and meth labs. We were told that marijuana is one of Kentucky's largest cash crops these days. The nearest place to go grocery shopping isn't close, and if you are lucky enough to get there, you may not have money or food stamps left by mid-month anyway. So trying to tell people that they should exercise more or eat more fruits and vegetables really doesn't work very well.

Pretty much all of the kids in the areas where we worked get school breakfast and school lunch, but it's not always healthy either. For lunch on the last day of training, we had fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy (real gravy!), cornbread stuffing, peas (canned), and coleslaw. What makes this way of eating especially hard to change is that, in an area where parents are poor and want to spoil their kids however they can, good parenting is symbolized by one's ability to feed their kids traditional comfort foods. Talk about a tough habit to break!

It's not that I haven't seen this sort of setting domestically before. When I was in high school, the church youth group went to the Virginia part of Appalachia every year for work camp, so I've seen these settings before. Still, in a way it's even more difficult to see in this country because as a country we are so wealthy, yet so many people live like this.

For what it's worth, though, I should tell you that Eastern Kentucky has a beauty to it that I bet most people don't see. The air is clean, the mountains and forests are damn scenic, and we happened to have great weather too. I'd love to go back. After all, those really are my neighbors out there, and I'd like to give them a hand.