An Urban's Rural View

Texting while driving, watching television while ironing, trying to hit 98 mile-per-hour fastballs while blowing bubblegum bubbles -- multitasking, it seems, comes naturally to human beings. We bore easily. We love to think we're being efficient. Of course we succumb to the temptation to try to do more than one thing at a time.

As that admittedly banal thought drifted through my daydreaming mind, a brainstorm struck: Why not put a treadmill inside the tractor?

OK, sounds silly. But think about it for a minute. Tractor cabs are getting so big they'll soon be able to hold a treadmill. And today's tractors practically drive themselves, so farmers are already multi-tasking in them. Even as they till or plant they're watching movies on DVD players or talking on the phone to commodity advisers or playing video games. They could just as easily knock off a few laps.

The key thing is, farmers could use the exercise. They work hard, sure. But more and more of their work is managerial. Less and less of what manual labor remains requires walking. And walking, we keep relearning, is central to health.

The latest study to confirm the importance of walking to health compared cities, especially cities with narrow roads and lots of intersections, to suburbs (http://tiny.cc/…). Result? "More compact and connected street networks with fewer lanes on the major roads are correlated with reduced rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease among residents."

Why? In a word, walking. In the burbs, people drive everywhere. City dwellers walk. The harder it is to navigate the streets by car, the more they walk. I can attest to this from having lived in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Tokyo, Brussels and Hong Kong.

It's not a matter of working out -- city dwellers are no more likely than suburbanites to visit the gym. Walking is just an inherent part of the urban lifestyle.

Or to put it another way, as the Atlantic did in its report on the study (http://tiny.cc/…), the suburbs are making Americans fat.

And the countryside? The study didn't look at rural America and certainly not agricultural America. You have to wonder what the results would have been if it had.

In some ways the country is like the suburbs: No one walks to the store or the pharmacy or a restaurant; they're too far away. In other ways a farmer's life is different, involving far more physical activity. Maybe it's enough physical activity to compensate.

But, hey, wouldn't it be fun to be able to work out in the cab anyway? Walk or run a few miles while getting chores done? I mean, even the healthiest of us can afford to be healthier.

Are you listening, John Deere? It wouldn't take much to expand the cab's size and install a mini-gym.

It's contrary to my own interests to admit this, but I haven't filed for a patent yet.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES/)

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