America Shapes Up

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its playtime purposeful. On the prairie, leisure hours consisted of quilting bees and barn raisings. In New England, a relaxed weekend in the late 1800s was a practice muster of local fire companies. The country has always blended its fun with self-improvement and dreaming up gimmicks large and small to help. In young democracies like the U.S., Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "each generation is a new people." The cult of youthfulness and the idea of a fresh start have forged the national character.

Nowhere have fresh starts and new attempts to achieve fitness been more evident than in the nation's supermarket basket and at the dinner table. Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham started the bulk wagon rolling in the 19th century with his famous cracker. Later Post and Kellogg began cleaning digestive systems with flakes of bran and corn in their Battlecreek, Mich., sanatoriums. With cheerful innocence, Americans have periodically embarked on reordering themselves, as well as the country and the world. The current obsession with the body can partly be seen as a diminished expression of the old or of unquenchable American optimism. "Here's for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world." So Ralph Waldo Emerson toasted the American spirit. But the "old" Adam, that rugged and predatory individualist, in his current incarnation is caught in a dilemma: how to survive an increasingly imperfect, not to say hostile, environment.

Says Charles Althafer, 49, of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: "Most folks are turned off by the disease of the month, by frightening reports on PCB and Love Canal. It makes them want to go home and suck their thumbs." Disaster seems to threaten through disease or radiation or some vague Apocalypse Now that everyone fears but cannot give a face to. Some Americans still prepare for anarchy by retreating to the hills with automatic weapons, radiation detectors and the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness; a few have taken to storing freeze-dried survival foods in their garages for a well-fed Armageddon.

People have become deeply suspicious of the food they eat. Convenience foods and the microwave ovens in which to prepare them have turned the supermarket into an additive minefield: saturated fat, nitrites, saccharin, sodium and caffeine. Shoppers pause, read package labels, searching for poisons real or suspected. Amid the latest warnings about salt, sugar, too much protein and assorted baneful additives, one current bestseller, Jane Brody's Nutrition Book, sensibly advocates a return to a down-home simplicity: meat, fish and milk in moderation, plenty of green and yellow vegetables, grain and some kind of fruit. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, what's the most carcinogen-free of all?" Thousands of people have even abandoned markets, selecting organically grown guavas and "pure" rice in the nation's 8,000 health-food outlets.

One need not be a granola and beansprout faddist now to question processed foods. In the '60s, when Adelle Davis (Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit) preached against the dangers of good old American "enriched" white flour, she seemed no more than another village crank. To consumers obsessed with the astounding levels of sodium in processed foods, claims Author Brody, the