| Happy Sunday, everyone. For what it's worth, I think one of the top 2 or 3 reasons why people can eat wheat in Europe but not in America is that they're walking everywhere, and good things just happen when you walk all the time. For today's Sunday with Sisson, I'm going to explain why I think the US is so bad for walking in most places—why if you want to walk, you have to make it happen with concerted effort. In the comment section from last week's post on the differences between European and American wheat, someone remarked: I’ve definitely experienced this but the other way around as a European traveling to the US. I felt like I was being rushed at the restaurant and expected to inhale my food in 30 min. Also, I couldn’t really walk anywhere so I was basically sitting in a car or in a house(and felt terrible because of it). It felt so odd that if I wanted to go for a walk I had to first drive to a place where I could walk. And then drive back. I was also shocked when I bought butter for my bread at the grocery store and when I opened the butter it was WHITE. Snow white. The fat on the meat was the same. Snow white. Given that this was just a snap shot of one place in the US but if I would compare that place (small town in Ohio) with my home town I can say for sure it is so much easier to live a healthy lifestyle in Sweden than in the US. I bet you can live well in the US too but it takes more effort (and probably more money).” I'm going to speculate here because this is Sunday with Sisson and I don't feel the need to cite or reference everything I claim or posit. Just spitballing here. The European city is hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old. When they were built, cars didn't exist. Horses did, but the average city inhabitant wasn't getting around on horseback. Most people walked everywhere. They had to. It was simply the basic mode of transportation humans used. There weren't any other options, so a city had to be built to be walkable. It wasn't even a decision. It just was. The average American town is dozens of years old and built with cars in mind. That everyone owns a personal automobile is an assumption ingrained in the DNA of the American town. European "zoning" tends to permit mixed use. Shops intermingle with apartments and cafes and museums.
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American zoning often splits segments of the city or town into single use zones. Single family homes over here, shops over there, industry even further away. To get anywhere interesting, you have to drive. Walking is usually untenable. There are exceptions. New York City is walkable. Miami Beach is walkable. San Francisco is walkable (watch your step, maybe). A small town in Ohio is probably not very walkable, nor are the majority of towns and cities in the United States. America is the frontier. It's full of huge open spaces, horizons that stretch out into the future, impossible sunsets, seas of prairie grass that continue on forever. It's the open road. Manifest Destiny. The New World. That's the romantic side of things. It's also reality, but it's the romantic side of the reality coin. The flip side is that everything is spread out. The overarching culture of America is one of individual freedom: to take the open road, the go where no one has gone before, to go 500 miles in a day if you want to, to push out West. And that has its downsides—like everything else good in life. Why do you think American towns are often so bad for walking? Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy. | 
