This afternoon, I was out in West Hyattsville, MD with a Palm Pilot, collecting data on restaurants and sidewalks. The data that we collected will help our high school kids to make maps of the factors that may influence obesity in their community. The kids themselves have been going out weekly with some graduate students. Since the grad students are about to finish their semester, I wanted to learn how the Palm’s work so that I (and several colleagues) can take over, starting next week. Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the adult team outnumbered the high school kids. Life is always chaotic at the school, and you never know how many students will show up. So we adults cheerfully picked up Palms and joined in the data-collection.

I’d love to write something insightful about the commercial strip that we mapped. Any place is interesting if you observe it closely, and this happened to be a solid, working-class district of bodegas, barber shops, speciality stores (and empty lots with gang graffiti) that would provide lots to write about. Unfortunately, my eyes were glued to the screen of the Palm the whole time, so I saw nothing interesting. I did get very efficient at data-entry and rolled through a whole extra block on my own while the high school kids had an ice-cream break.

I haven’t posted lately about our work with high school kids, because I’ve missed the class for several weeks in a row due to scheduling conflicts. With help from my colleagues and grad students, the kids have explored the issue of obesity, learned some geography skills, and deliberated about what maps they should make that will help explain (or even reduce) the obesity problem in their community. They have decided to select one small area that contains both food sources and exercise opportunities. They will collect data about food quality and price, the exercise options, and the “walkability” of the streets in that area, and then they will make GIS maps for PrinceGeorges.org This will be a pilot study that should lead to the comprehensive mapping of the whole community.

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On Monday, I was with 45 high school kids, talking about the causes of obesity. Then the Centers for Disease Control announced that excessive body weight will soon be the leading cause of death in the US; and the House of Representatives passed legislation to shield fast-food restaurants from being sued for causing obesity. (This is the so-called “Cheeseburger Bill.”)

I have never made a serious study of nutrition, the politics of food, or body-image and gender. But I can report that the minority adolescents in our project mostly think of obesity in psychological terms. They ask: Do we have enough will-power? Do we know enough about nutrition? Do we have appropriate body-image? What are the effects of the entertainment media on our health?

Meanwhile, some research shows that our geographical environment affects our body weight. Connected sidewalks help by encouraging exercise; convenient grocery stores increase the odds that people will cook vegetables; and so on. In our project, we are drawing kids’ attention to these factors instead of the strictly psychological ones. Originally, this was simply because we wanted to teach geography–and you can’t make maps of body-image or TV ads. However, I’m starting to think that we are making a radical move. Our project will locate the cause of weight gain outside of kids’ heads and bodies, in the local community–and it will suggest that adolescents can understand and change where they live. In other words, this approach could be very empowering.

I have the same ambivalent view of the “Cheeseburger Bill” as Calpundit. He says:

On the one hand, I don’t think much of using civil damage suits aimed at a specific industry as a way of changing social policy. Down that road lies madness.

But at the same time, I also don’t think much of Congress exempting specific industries from the civil justice system. That can lead to some madness of its own.

Those in favor of the “Cheeseburger Bill” say that we should be personally responsible for our behavior; eating too much is our own fault, and suing McDonald’s is a cop-out. I disagree in part: a rapid increase in the obesity rate is a social problem with political solutions. However, I agree that lawsuits aren’t the right response. There are much more constructive, positive, participatory responses to obesity. For example, a community can work to make its streets safe and walkable, to identify and publicize existing assets, and to provide new food and exercise options.

In the areas around Hyattsville, MD, there are no full basketball courts. This is a political issue (the authorities don’t want young Black men hanging around, so they don’t build courts); and it may affect adolescents’ body weight. It shows the limits of conservative arguments. You can’t exercise if there are no sidewalks, no basketball courts, and no grassy spaces. If the only place that lets you hang out at 10 pm is McDonalds, then you’re going to eat a lot of fries. Still, that doesn’t mean that lawyers will ever solve the problem by suing McDonalds on behalf of the American people. Communities have the power to take their fate into their own hands.

This is a rambling post, badly in need of reorganization; but let me add a quick summary. There are not just two ways of thinking about obesity: either individuals are responsible for what they eat, or huge corporations are responsible (and deserve to be sued). Instead, we can take responsibility as communities. This third choice is more productive and realistic than either of the others.

I just spent a whole day with 45 high school students, eight college students, and eight colleagues, talking intensively about the causes of obesity in Prince George’s County, MD, and planning a map-making project that will take us all spring. I have overall responsibility for the project, and this first day felt like a constant crisis, starting at 7 am. The tables we ordered didn’t seem to be there; we didn’t have recorders for some of the focus groups; we thought we’d lost a kid; the pizzas didn’t show up; sleet began to fall while the kids were outside learning how to use Global Positioning devices; and on and on. Actually, all the problems were solved and no damage was done. Once we go over the audiotape, videotape, written notes, and the maps that the kids made, I think we’ll find that it was a rich and highly informative day–a window into the lives of these young people. (Or perhaps a better metaphor would be a mirror, to show the kids what they are like as a group.) But for today, I’m too tired to think straight.

Today, I rode with two colleagues up and down the streets of Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, and Riverdale, Maryland–communities northeast of the District of Columbia. We are planning a high school course for later this spring, in which students will make maps to show features of the local geography that might contribute to healthy or unhealthy living. This is a fairly complex and ambitious project, now involving six graduate students or colleagues from the university, one high school teacher, and a colleague from the Orton Foundation in Vermont. Today we were simply trying to decide what precise areas we should map. The landscape is largely suburban, with strip malls, big highways, and used car lots. There are also patches of older housing on urban grids, and some large apartment complexes. Although the topography is suburban (and sprawl is an issue), the population is stereotypically urban: most people are African American or Latino, with a low-to-moderate income level, and there is a sprinkling of mostly White graduate students and artists. Although I suspect that even most residents would not describe the setting as attractive, there is great cultural diversity. Planning to make maps of an area forces you to recognize the complexity and the wealth of human assets that it contains.