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On the Go
- 04/24/10
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Yesterday I read Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. In the book she shows how life today offers many more distractions than at any other time in history and how this may lead us into a new dark age. While I’m not quite sure I agree with all the talk of a dark age, certainly she makes many valid points along the way.
One way this societal distraction manifests itself is in the way we eat. Meals are no longer times to be spent with family savoring good food. Rather, they are times to quickly and effeciently refuel. In 2006, she points out, 1,347 products with “go” on the label debuted on the global market, a nearly 50 percent increase from the previous year. We can get our coffee on the go, our cereal on the go and everything else that we find we need.
She writes about Dr. Rapaille, a French-born consultant with a doctorate in medical anthropology who says, “Americans say ‘I’m full’ at the end of a meal because … [their] mission has been to fill up their tanks; when they complete it, they announced that they’ve finished the task.”
Here are a couple of other noteworthy and ponder-worthy snippets of her screed against eating on the go:
We need handheld, bite-size, and dripless food because we are eating on the run-all day long. Nearly half of Americans say they eat most meals away from home or on the go. Forty percent of our food budgets are spent eating out, compared with a quarter in 1990.3 Twenty-five percent of restaurant meals are ordered from the car, up from 15 percent in 1988.
…
Now we’ve left the fork behind, the casualty of a time-pressed age. But while we again eat with our hands, we’re rarely touching our sustenance. Wrappers, packaging, cans, straws, and the pace of life keep us from directly connecting with food until it’s halfway down our gullets. And the food itself, of course, is many steps removed from the drippy, messy, and sometimes wholly recognizable fare that graced many a groaning table of the past. In the name of civilization, we’ve moved toward clean, processed, and unobtrusive foods. A quiet fill-up, that’s what people tell [researchers] that they want. Nothing smelly, crackling, or noisy. We want food that takes a backseat to life-and we want it solo.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
Releasing on April 1, The Next
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Comments (7)
No wonder why there’s so much cancer in the world. All that very-processed food and the “on the go” distracted life is making so much harm to our bodies. This is not the way God meant it to be :(Thanks for sharing!
Numerous reasons exist for this change . One is the changing nature of work . I know of very few that work a 9-5 type job where the family is together to eat at the same time. Shift work , long commutes to get a viable job all destroy the ability to be together which gives way to fast , on the go food. The other change is the over extended family. This is the scenario where the kids and parents are into way too much outside activity . I have never bought into the notion of quality time over quantity either. You need to be with someone to really know them and care .As I get older I’m moving more and more to simple, down sized life and its been freeing . I have free time for my sons, my wife and friends . We have given up quiet time . Did not God say be still and know I’m God.
the book sounds interesting, and her observations about meals and distractions are right on but not entirely new. however, the book title, with regards to distraction and dark age, makes more sense in that we live in an age of information saturation. we continually grow as a society that accesses information instead of ingesting (soaking, appropriating, living out) that information—the difference between knowledge and wisdom. the ever widening gap between what is known and what is applied could lead us into another dark age due to our own folly. of course, i don’t know this for certain; my own mere speculations.
She needs to define “dark age”. When I think of the dark ages, I think of them as being primarily defined by a lack of technological advancement. Basically society “forgot” everything it learned during the Greek/Roman period about medicine, physical science, government, literature, etc.
The thing about today, though, is that we have a larger population. Suppose 100 years ago only the top 1% of “thinkers” were capable of achieving significant scientific or technological innovation. Let’s say today’s modern society is so toxic that only the top 0.5% are now capable of that feet. Since the population is twice as large, though, you have the same total number of people capable of achieving those types of things.
Of course, one argument against this is that scientific advancements continue to become harder and harder to achieve as we progress further along the scientific/technological scale. So the “pace” of scientific/technological advancement might slow down. But for there to be another “dark age” you’d probably need some sort of cataclysmic global event. Nuclear war, a global pandemic that kills off a huge percentage of all people, etc. Otherwise I don’t see us “losing” all the science/technology we’ve accrued so far.
Without having read the book, I’m assuming the author’s idea of another “Dark Age” is more metaphor for what she sees as an ever-increasing desensitization of all that makes us loving, feeling, delightful and reasonable persons as society moves farther and farther away from upholding the value of the God-given institution of family, hearth and home.Food was never meant to simply be a means to a mechanical physiological end. Although it is a basic need, it was meant, optimally, for man’s reward and enjoyment in light of the fuller and more glorious expression of God’s bounty, as stated in Psalm 104: 14-15,
He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate— bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.
As our information-age society rattles on and the technological future hurtles closer in view, we as Christians are faced with the question: Will we live our lives by the light of the Word of God or by the dim moonlight of my Blackberry?
Tim if you have not read it as of yet and sometimes like to reach into the past a few years and pull out a gem, I would like to recommend the book “Margin” by Dr. Richard Swenson. This book covers a slightly different perspective of the same topic and though it was assigned in a freshman class at Bible College 12 years ago I still pull it out to read occasionally to remind myself of my need to leave a “margin” in my life.