How Food Science is Like Transportational Science

Here’s an interesting 57-minute video about how highly processed foods connect to increased levels of obesity. This seems unrelated to motorcycling, but dig a little deeper and it is not difficult to connect a few core ideas to similar considerations involving riding and other personal mobility choices. More specifically, this video indirectly supports what I suspect about the differences between riding and driving, and how riding is comparatively more ‘nutritious’ than driving, even (especially?) during crappy weather and in difficult conditions.  

Like most people, I live in one of those glass houses where one should avoid throwing stones. That’s because I own a car and enjoy driving and eating junk food and many other highly engineered processed foods. And I’m maybe ten pounds over the recommended weight for my height. But hypocrisy aside, I try to do most things with some appreciation for the pluses and minuses involved, especially when it comes to eating processed foods, and driving a car instead of riding there. 

The video reflects a ‘paleo’ nutritional logic - a currently fashionable way of thinking about how the past several hundred thousand of years of human existence shaped us in ways that are now not such a perfect fit with many kinds of recent technological, cultural, and economic advancements. Examples include desirables ranging from central heating to efficient industrial agriculture, Excel spreadsheets, nuclear weapons and power, social media simulacrums, artificial intelligences, and, in this story highly engineered processed foods, and efficient, comfortable, and safe automobiles. The overall conclusion: 1.) For every benefit technology provides, something else useful is also taken away, and 2.) it’s not always clear the overall gains outweigh the negatives.  

Fortunately, nobody is required to live within the technical and knowledge limitations of last week, last year, one hundred years ago, or several hundred thousand years ago. We expect access to the latest advancements in ice cream, pizza, motorcycles, smartphones, medical care practices, and everything else as it exists in real-time. At the same time, more than a few people seek the wisdom to somehow evaluate relative +’s and  –‘s involved. Including yours truly.  Also, it’s not so easy to improve artisanally crafted pizza and ice cream and thousands of other hand-crafted and traditionally made, raised, or grown items. Like many examples of Aerostich gear.

When it comes to moving myself from A to B, motorcycle riding fits on the continuum somewhere between walking and flying in a jet airplane or helicopter. This is due to a mix of fortunate circumstances, deliberate planning, and compromising. Most importantly, I’ve never lived too far from where I work and shop, and this allows me the daily luxury of choosing between several wonderful personal mobility options. My commute was only three miles (4.8km) one-way between home and work for more than forty years, and during the past five years, I’ve lived only a little over five miles (8.2km) from Aerostich. My routes are also a dream, being mostly via 30mph two-lane surface streets with little traffic. And my errand-shopping-home routes add only another four or five miles and many feature easy bicycle lanes and low-traffic surface streets. I’ve always lived, shopped, and worked in older pre-automobile platted areas, not modern sprawl.

After moving five years ago the additional two-mile distance was important: What I’d been used to, three miles, translated to a one-hour walk, a twenty-five-minute rollerblade skate, a seventeen-minute bicycle ride, a thirteen-minute drive in a car, and a twelve-minute motorcycle ride. Now being five miles from Aerostich translates to an hour and forty-five-minute walk, a forty-minute roller blade, a thirty-minute bicycle ride, a twenty-two-minute e-bike ride, a nineteen-minute car drive, and a sixteen-minute motorcycle ride. 

Riding is always fastest (including putting on gear) and the most fun, but now most of the time I choose an e-bike. Mine is a beat-up four-year-old model having 37 volts and 17amps of battery turning 500 watts of motor, and it's already seriously obsolete, but for this application that doesn’t matter. It was easy to set up when new and now has over 6,000 miles beneath its wheels, though it’s on the second motor and battery, third chain, third chainring, third cluster, and second derailleur. My average speed of pedaling it across level ground is 19-21 miles per hour. Eight months of the year this E-bike rolls on smooth ‘street’ tires and the other four months it’s on different wheels set up with carbide-tip studded knobby tires, which, compared to smooth regular tires are completely terrible. They are noisy, vibrate-y, and feature much lower cornering limits, but I’m living in northern Minnesota where one is forced to make seasonal adjustments and sacrifices. 

E-bikes are ‘gateway drugs’ to motorcycles. Many are enough faster than a regular bicycle you intuit the need to wear a helmet. In some areas, motorcycle rider training and licensing programs are starting to see influxes of students with e-bike backgrounds. E-bikes are more approachable and less threatening to new riders than even small scooters and motorcycles. This is good. But if one wants to be able to ride all the time, and to the widest possible range of destinations, in the widest range of weather, you flat need to have a motorcycle. There is no substitute.  

My relatives, friends, and acquaintances living in large cities all must live farther from their workplaces and deal with tremendously more complex and challenging kinds of traffic environments and transportation infrastructures than I. So, they don’t have the luxury of as many personal mobility options. Separately I’ve visited a few developing countries where population densities are high and the road environment is so chaotic it is frightening enough to discourage daily transportation riding.  Such riding is far more doable where: A) There’s already a reasonable number of bikes in the traffic mix as then drivers expect and accept riders, and B) Where population and traffic densities are low, and C) Where ‘rules of the road’ are highly respected and enforced, and driving behaviors are disciplined. Think places like Northern Europe and Scandinavia. 

Despite all this variability, a classic observation by fishermen, golfers, and other sportsmen and sportswomen goes: “A bad day of fishing (or golfing, etc) is still better than a good day at work.” But setting your life up so you can ride nearly every day is neither easy nor simple. It can be about as difficult as eating a healthy diet of mostly fresh foods. The benefits are similar though because riding is just a lot more ‘paleo’ than driving.

There is no single specific best way to eat properly for optimal health and long life or to logistically organize, maintain, and employ a quiver of personal mobility options. But there are some useful generalizations: When I have enough time and the winds are not high, and it’s not terribly storming, I’ll choose the semi-crappy e-bike, year-around. And for me the worse the weather is, the more likely I’ll choose the comfort of an Aerostich suit around me, a modular helmet covering my head, and a motorcycle under me. Almost any motorcycle. But for my small-town route’s moto-choices are between a very old 1994 650cc bike, an almost very old 2006 400cc bike, or newish 2019 200cc bike. None of these have been modified for higher performance, though over years of use each has been ‘personalized’ in various ways.

Lastly, the more you do anything, the less vulnerable you feel and the more fluent and proficient you become.  Riding in a busy city only a few nice days a year is a far different experience than riding nearly daily.  The old saying about how “a long journey begins with a single step” is never truer.  The first time you try using your motorcycle instead of your car is guaranteed to be stressful. Even getting the gear on is awkward. But a week later if you’ve managed not to get killed or injured everything has become more natural. Rain-or-shine, riding a motorcycle, bicycle, or e-bicycle is good for you, both mentally and physically. It clearly is a lot like eating a ‘paleo diet’ of fresh less-processed food. But it’s never easy and in some situations, it isn’t appropriate. So, use your head and “be careful out there”. (Oldsters may remember that phrase becoming an every-week signature line of dialog in a popular police TV drama called “Hill Street Blues”.)

PS – If you haven’t yet watched the short ‘paleo’ food video linked above, do it. As you watch, think about applying its ideas to your everyday utility mobility choices.

PPS – Here’s a link to a short essay I liked about how most people today tend to “over-consume” and are easily manipulated to do so. This story fits with a kind of mosaic precision adjacent to the above video about processed food and with my personal views about the health and societal benefits of riding bicycles and motorcycles. Warning, it’s thirty pages, so you may want to print it out to read that way. Which is what I did.

PPPS – Here’s a link to a recent story in the New York Times about how overeating highly processed foods apparently has an adverse effect on brain health. 

Mr. Subjective, November 2023