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Summit Up

Daily Staff Writer

Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column with a stomach in love with diversity.As we sit here eating our microwaved Thai food, washing it down with a root beer made down the highway (and trying to come up with a real idea for a column), it strikes us how pathetically boring our forebears’ diets must have been.We like to complain about the ills and dangers of this developing world, of civilization and globalization’s imperiling all that made us what we are in the first place, but the one thing we will say is that, despite how we often wish we were living as a corn farmer under an Incan high priest 1,500 years ago, or how we’d rather be a Greek fisherman 3,000 years ago, we’re glad we don’t have to eat the same crap they had to eat every day of their lives.Think about it: If you’re like us, in the last two weeks you’ve eaten three different kinds of Asian food, Italian twice (if you count the pizza), Mexican food four times and some leftovers from the back of the fridge with enough fungus and blue-green fuzz on the edges to be considered French food.Only in the modern world is something like this possible. Go back even just 100 years and your diet would be more like: Some meat and a beer. Some beer and some meat. Some potatoes. Some bread with a soup made from potatoes, meat and beer. Oh, and don’t forget those exotic spices, like salt. How could you ask for anything more? The sad thing is that, even then, Americans had most of the world beat on a balanced diet – everybody else was eating rice.In that context, it makes sense that it took thousands of years of civilization for humans to invent the microwave oven – why in the heck would you want to reheat the crap most of the world had to eat on a daily basis?Well, we’re done with our lunch now, so we can move on to more important things …***We know our readers love to compare themselves to everybody else, see if they’re normal, average or extraterrestrial. Here’s some new statistics to feed that fetish.According to a survey just released by the Department of Labor (DOL), Americans are getting plenty of sleep and watching plenty of TV. (That’s your tax dollars at work, folks, coming up with these brilliant revelations.)The DOL surveyed 20-some thousand adults of all ages and asked them to give a blow-by-blow of their previous day. Turns out that the average American slept 8.6 hours, worked 3.7 hours and spent 5.1 hours relaxing – half of that watching TV.We don’t know about you, but we’d love to be a little more average. We don’t know where we screwed up, but we’re looking at that 3.7-hour work day wondering if that’s a union thing or what.Think it’s time we go back to our high school guidance counselors and ask them why they pushed us so hard to be over achievers when it looks like being average is where it’s really at. ***Welcome to Sunday. Welcome to one less day before the season. Welcome to more waiting. If you can’t stand it, good readers, consult our therapists at summitup@summitdaily.com, fax at (970) 668-0755 or just tell us you’re waiting patiently on the voicemail at (970) 668-3998, ext. 237.We’re out to eat …


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