OKLAHOMA CITY — On April 22, 1889, at the firing of a pistol, 10,000 men, women and children rushed into the Indian Territories to claim pieces of the land that overnight became Oklahoma City. Some rode on wagons and carriages, some came on horseback, some even hoofed it in cracked leather shoes.
And that, until recently, was the last time most of the folks here got out of their cars.
For most of its existence, Oklahoma City has been an oil-fueled place, ringed and riveted by superhighways and boulevards unsullied by shoulder or sidewalk. It was a city built to make cars happy. Parking was effortless, walking unnecessary and suburbs sprang like fungi across the unfruited plain.
In tectonic terms, Oklahoma City is a culinary plume where the Southwest plate of deep fried dough meets Southern barbecue and Texas-sized burrito formations. It has the most fast-food consumption of any city in the country. Sonic, the drive-in chain, home of Day-Glo milkshakes and SuperSonic double-bacon cheeseburgers, has its headquarters here.
With all that driving and guzzling, the city became ground zero for the national obesity epidemic. In 2007, Men’s Fitness called it the 8th fattest city in America.
Mick Cornett had been mayor of the city for three years when he noticed that magazine listicle. The driven, metrics-obsessed former sportscaster had just shed 40 pounds in 40 weeks by reducing his daily caloric input from 3,000 to 2,000.
“I didn’t know anything about obesity other than being obese,” Cornett said. But he sensed that while oil had powered the city’s growth, grease might stop it dead.
On New Year’s Eve, Cornett summoned the news media to the city zoo for an announcement: He was putting his whole city on a diet. The city’s residents needed to look more like ferrets and less like elephants, he said (elephants, notwithstanding the bad publicity, are just big-boned).
A friend of the mayor created a website to track the city’s progress and most of the big corporations in town signed up their employees. Some 47,000 residents enlisted in a campaign to lose a cumulative 1 million pounds. Cornett acknowledged it was a risky move. “I just put my wife on a diet,” he said.
In taking this on, Cornett was wading into a challenge that has preoccupied, and vexed, a lot of political leaders. America is heavy. A third of us are overweight, one in six obese. The numbers have more than doubled in two decades—in Oklahoma they tripled. Being too fat costs us billions in health care dollars—a cost borne by individuals, employers and local health care systems. But people’s behavior is notoriously difficult to change and almost all obesity-fighting campaigns, whether personal or public, fail. Of populationwide approaches, “the few that do work have small effects, and often when introduced in a new setting they tend not to work a second time,” says Tom Baranowski, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor University.
Policymakers scramble for the right behavioral “nudges” to get people to lose weight. And it’s here that political philosophy comes into play. If you’re a mayor, do you impose a sugar tax, or just “encourage good choices”? Do you portray the obesity epidemic as a nightmare of rampant capitalism, or a failure of personal will and self-discipline? Do you ban hamburgers and pizza, or make their crusts whole wheat?
For Cornett, the path was straightforward. He didn’t have the resources to launch an attack on corporations, even if that had been his political persuasion, and it most definitely was not. He was the conservative mayor of a conservative city with a staff of three, himself included.
Cornett, who had no background in health, became the city’s low-calorie Jeremiah, a stern voice for thinning on the plains. The campaign was called simply, “This city is going on a diet.”
As to how to do it, New York, Mexico City and Berkeley could impose sugar taxes or ban Big Gulps to lower sugar consumption, and they might succeed. “I have an MBA. I understand supply and demand,” Cornett said. “But that’s not my style.”
“I made a distinct decision early on that we weren’t going to take on the fast-food industry or the private sector,” he tells me in an interview at his office. Cornett is slim, friendly but serious, speaks in well-punctuated complete sentences and oozes drive, his blue eyes darting under sharply peaked eyebrows.
“I took a realistic approach that people are going to eat fast food, but there are some choices are better than others and people need to realize that. Just because you’ve made the decision to eat at that restaurant doesn’t mean there aren’t further decisions to be made.”
The mayor’s message of self-abnegation played well in the city of 1.3 million. Neither of his two reelections since was truly contested.
In Cornett’s anti-obesity campaign, all were welcome, even the fast-food chains. Many restaurants in town put a healthy “mayor’s special” on their menus. Cornett went on a morning news show with the head of the local Taco Bell franchise and appeared at his restaurants to hand out “healthy” burritos.
People began signing up on the mayor’s website and reporting their weight loss. In 2012, four years after the campaign started, the city passed the 1 million pound mark, according to the website, which registered the numbers reported to it, and whose owner sometimes ran ads for bariatric surgery or vitamin supplements sold by his company.
OKC dropped off Men’s Fitness's list of fattest cities. As for other measures of success, they’re mixed. Gallup and Healthways data in 2012 showed the city’s obesity rate, in aggregate, has continued to rise since 2008.
“I feel comfortable that those 47,000 people did lose weight,” Cornett says. “I can’t tell you there weren’t 47,000 people who gained a million pounds.”
Cornett, energized by the response, began to turn his attention to bigger structural changes he could implement that would could make a sustainable, even permanent difference for his constituents. Maybe not everyone would stop ordering extra sour cream, but he could help build a city where they’d walk, or run, or just think about healthier alternatives.
“Some people want to write reports and collect data, but I’m looking at bigger things,” Cornett says. “I’m looking at creating a city where highly motivated 20-somethings will want to gravitate toward because we understand how to prioritize things like biking, hiking and health. I want a perception that we’re a community that’s fighting for health. I’m less interested in this year’s measurements compared to last year’s.”
***
When you approach tortilla-flat Oklahoma City from any direction, the view is dominated by the 50-story Devon Tower, named for one of five Fortune 1000 energy companies that, with the banks, dominate the skyline. Energy still leads the city’s economy as it has for a century, although tech-oriented companies like Dell and Boeing have built major plants in recent years.
Cornett could see that the “built environment” was key to continuing the momentum of his campaign to lift up Oklahoma City. People tend to weigh less when they live in places—case in point, New York City—that encourage them to move as part of their daily routine; when they can use safe and efficient mass transit, parks and other amenities. And the right surroundings, experts say, are far more effective influence on their behavior than finger-wagging from their doctors.
“The one thing we know that gets people to walk is to create places that are enticing so they want to walk there,” says Dick Jackson, a UCLA medical professor and former director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Environmental Health. “Telling people to exercise, to go to the gym, doesn’t seem to work. You have to build it into daily life.”
When he became mayor in 2004, Cornett had one big tool to work with: In 1993, then-Mayor Ron Norick had gotten city residents to approve a 1 percent, five-year sales tax to fund refurbishment of the downtown area; it was restored in 2001, and rolled over again in 2009, and has helped build a music hall, a baseball stadium, and school and library improvements. Cornett made sure that some of the money went to help rebuild the city around physical activity.
Cornett’s first year, the city dammed seven miles of the North Canadian River. Before then, that stretch of river by the railyards—since renamed the Oklahoma—had been an occasionally flooded ditch that was mowed twice a year. Now it became a permanent body of water, and, with a bond issue and corporate donations, Cornett and the city in 2006 built, with private assistance, an Olympic-class rowing center that is connected by a canal and walking paths to a refurbished area of downtown.
The $100 million boating district, soon to be augmented with a $44 million whitewater training and recreation course for kayakers and canoeists, is the crown jewel in the city’s rejuvenation. The sales tax and a $68 million bond issue have funded hundreds of miles of sidewalks, bike and walking paths, along with new health and senior fitness centers.
On a recent Monday morning, after rising before 6 a.m to do his one-hour, 7,500-step treadmill workout, Cornett was at the Amtrak station, signing a memorandum of understanding for a regional transit authority with five mayors from surrounding communities—Norman, Edmond, Midwest City, Moore and Del City.
Commuter rail in redder-than-red Oklahoma, whose state capitol sits on an active oil well, is only a vision, for now—years away, if ever—but it’s part of what Cornett hopes will be the other big revolution, which is how people get around.
The novelist Mary Kay Zuravleff, who grew up here in the 1970s and returns often, has a distinct, recurring image in her mind from many teenage trips to an outlet mall near her home. She remembers an ageless man in Wrangler jeans stepping out of his pickup truck in boots and a greasy-billed cowboy hat—a rangy guy, leathery and smoked as beef jerky.
“When I go back now and people get out of their trucks I can’t believe how large they are!” she says. “In one generation, since I left for college—one and a half, I guess—the whole body type has changed.”
Back in the 1970s, Zuravleff’s mother tried to get sidewalks built in their suburban development and couldn’t. Her parents walked around the block every night after dinner, conspicuously: “People thought our name was, ‘the Walkers.’”
“We went decades without requiring developers to put sidewalks in,” says Cornett. “That started to change in the 1990s but the damage had been done. We had built the entire city around cars. We’re not the only one that did that, but I can’t imagine a city that did a better job of it.”
This was also the city that raised Jeff McCanlies, who is kind of a poster child for the mayor’s wellness campaign. When it started in 2007, McCanlies was 41 years old, 6 foot 2, and weighed 250 pounds.
He was single, worked in IT on the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences campus, ate lots of bad food and drank a lot of beer in front of his TV, and pretty much was going nowhere, fast. But he was searching for something: “You reach a point in your life when you gotta do something about being fat.”
The new boathouse was offering a two-week rowing class for $125, and before long McCanlies had caught the bug. The river, with its breezes (Oklahoma gets windy, as Rodgers and Hammerstein discovered), is the ideal setting for summer exercise in a place where Southwest heat meets Midwest humidity and temperatures can rise above 100 degrees for 60 days running.
McCanlies would row in the cooler mornings, when the water was black and calm. He was sore at first, with magnificent blisters on his hands until they calloused. “Once you get used to rowing, it’s a nice fluid movement on your old man’s body,” he says. “There was something romantic about it. I could get up there and disappear if I wanted, in a one-man boat all by myself, or go with two, or a quad or an eight.”
McCanlies befriended his future wife, Laura, at the boathouse, and since marrying in 2012 they’ve moved out of the suburbs and into the central city—the embodiment of a national trend of reurbanization that is still in its earliest stages here. They have a baby boy, and when they aren’t competing in rowing competitions around the country, they jog.
McCanlies’ weight has stabilized around 190 after falling to 168 at one point. “Once you do exercise for a period of time, if you can’t get your heart rate up after a few days you start to get a little strange,” he says. “Uneasy, unsteady. Same thing for eating. If I slide and eat junk, I just feel it. You don’t feel good.”
McCanlies still has to drive, but soon will be able to get across town without a car if he wants. A new, 20-mile hiking-and-bike corridor that will link the river with manmade Lake Hefner is to pass just a block from McCanlies’ house, part of a network of trails that will encircle the city. Amenities like this are starting, slowly but noticeably, to reshape the city and even its population. As the trails expand, and more people get on their bikes, whose tires they can patch or inflate at new bike stations, the district north of downtown is starting to fill with trendy cafes and young, childless people.
“When I grew up, downtown was a ghost town,” says Mark Myers, who works for the schools. “Now they’re filling the doughnut hole.” People from the wealthier northwest suburbs—with Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Kevin Durant in the vanguard—have started to move into the area, Myers says.
***
Most of the city, though, isn’t made up of young urban professionals with access to the downtown recreation. Since 2000, the city’s population has grown 22 percent, to 660,000. Most of the newcomers are Mexican immigrants, whose kids fill half the schools.
At one of the schools, Eugene Field Elementary, Principal Paige Bressman says rents are starting to push out Hispanic arrivals whose children make up 90 percent of her student body. “I lost 100 students last year,” she said.
Schools like hers are a sort of ground zero for Cornett’s health campaign. Philosophical debates around the best approach to kids’ eating habits end up in the laps of people like Deborah Taylor, a child nutritionist who’s part of a team the city school board hired last year.
Taylor is constantly faced with pragmatic dilemmas: Should she take away “bad” food choices, or serve healthier versions of them? Should she focus on “homemade,” or leave cooking in the hands of companies experienced in food safety?
On a recent Wednesday, kids at Eugene Field were being served a lunch of mesquite barbecue chicken legs, low-sodium turkey-bacon burgers on whole-wheat buns, cabbage, cornbread, mixed fruit salad, apples and pears. The kids have to take three of five items grouped into protein, grain, milk, fruit and vegetable. The cabbage is surprisingly good—mildly crunchy and well-seasoned—and a good half of the 5th-graders seem to be eating it.
In the days before health consciousness arrived at Eugene Field, the food— burgers, fries, pizza—was “really greasy—good, but bad for you,” says Bressman. In 2011, a food service company took away all the bad stuff, but the new menu was bland and kids didn’t like it. In 2014, activist school board member Laura Massenat got the city to fire the company and hire a chef and three nutritionists, who started curating the menu more carefully.
“You have to take food they know and like, and you change the way you make it a little to make it healthy,” says Taylor. If the food doesn’t appeal to the kids, they won’t take it.
“They cry in the line,” says Karen Smith, the cafeteria manager.
Most of the kids’ parents work in convenience stores, restaurants, construction sites. Some are school janitors. A lot are unemployed. Many kids live with foster parents or grandparents. Mostly, they take what they can get.
But school nutrition programs are a tough racket, especially in high schools. When a popular teenager declares something “nasty,” the 10 kids behind her in line all toss it in the garbage.
“Whatever you make from scratch, the kids don’t want,” says Taylor, who’s in her 24th year in school food service: “The barbecue chicken comes from Tyson.” The turkey bacon is also from a concessioner, and they serve Indian Tacos, too—fried dough topped with vast quantities of beans, cheese and other ingredients—though the dough is baked instead of fried, and the portions are smaller.
Massenat, an entrepreneurial Oklahoma City native who runs an industrial-chic coffeehouse not far from the school, has a “basic philosophical difference” with Taylor, although she was instrumental in getting her hired.
“I think we have to steer kids away from fast food,” she tells me over some of her slow-drip brew. “If every high school kid can have pizza, hamburgers and tacos every day of the week, it doesn’t matter what the quality of that food is, or ingredients. You’re still telling them, ‘That’s what we eat every day.’”
“You have to start where people are,” responds Taylor. “You have to adjust, take one step at a time. You can’t go from Indian Tacos to salad in one day. What a nutritionist does is take food that people eat and make it healthy.”
Rosalba Martinez, an outreach worker in a Cornett-led community wellness program that started in 2010, concurs. One of her tasks, during house visits to her poor Latino clients, is to bat down common myths, like the idea that drinking gallons of atole, sweet corn porridge, is good for nursing mothers.
Martinez, a 29-year-old Mexican immigrant, gave birth to her first child when she was 16. She was obese and had high blood pressure at the time, so she knows whereof she speaks.
“My clients work from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., and they are hard-headed. They won’t change their eating habits, so you have to adjust,” she tells me as we travel through Oklahoma City’s south side, which Martinez calls “the ‘Hood.”
“You can’t tell a Hispanic, ‘Stop eating beans and tortillas.’ They’ll blow you off completely. But if you tell them, ‘Add a tomato and a cucumber in there,’ that gives them the idea of how to do their same food but adding vegetables for it.”
***
Bob Waldrop, a full-bearded, church organ-playing radical Catholic do-gooder with diabetes, had been saving up his calories for our morning meeting at the Grill on the Hill. It’s a charming dive on the south side, a high-crime area, and it would be criminal to breakfast there on anything but chicken-fried steak.
The meat in this dish is only about a quarter-inch thick, but it’s swaddled in batter, the whole concoction drifting in a moat of creamy gravy. The meal includes fried eggs and hash browns, and a gravy-blanketed biscuit, washed down with coffee. Both of us could easily finish the whole glorious assemblage, but we’re too old to pretend we don’t know better.
“It’ll take me a day or two to get my blood sugar down below 130,” says Waldrop, who has an uncannily high-pitched giggle for a big man, as we waddle out to his unheated beater. “I won’t be able to stop for apple fritters at my local bakery tomorrow. Though I like to think the calories don’t count if the food is homemade.”
Waldrop has promised me the “anti-Chamber of Commerce tour” of OKC, and we roll down the “hill”—more of a slope, really—through an area whose residents have come in recent decades from places like Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and Guanajuato, Mexico. Low-slung houses with toys and cars in the yard abut rutted streets.
Our first stop is a car bomb-sized pothole at 26th and Virginia, which Waldrop first brought to the public’s attention last March while campaigning for a city council seat against a powerful incumbent businesswoman—whom he nearly beat. Given how long the pothole has been there, Waldrop is pondering its potential merit as a fishing hole.
Critics of the Oklahoma City power structure applaud Cornett for raising awareness of the seriousness of obesity, but they feel that too many resources have gone to making the city an attractive destination for outsiders, rather than a healthy place to live for its numerous poor.
About one in four Oklahoma City kids, and one in six seniors, suffer hunger. In two-thirds of the schools, so many families are below the poverty line that breakfasts and lunches are provided free to everyone. “These are schools where, when there’s a snow day, the kids go hungry,” a city official told me.
Waldrop, who started a food bank in 1999 that delivers groceries to about 400 families every month, wonders why more of the city’s resources don’t go to the poor. Bike paths and boathouses are nice, but when the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and buses don’t run at night or on weekends, how are you supposed to enjoy those amenities?
The true scale of the challenge comes into view on a visit to a sparkling new health center that the city completed last year. Located in the northeast side of town, in a low-income, mostly African-American area, you can enroll there for free in an eight-week course, similar to Weight Watchers. But the center has no bus stop and no businesses around it. A sidewalk stretches the length of the center, then ends on both sides in the shoulder of a busy highway.
More than 1,400 people enrolled in the weight-loss classes this year at locations around the city. The day I visited the northeast center, however, the only public use in evidence was a training session for young, mostly white civic leaders.
The lack of sidewalks is a chronic problem in Oklahoma City, one that Cornett acknowledges.
“There isn’t an inch of sidewalk on the whole northwest expressway,” says Waldrop, as we drove along the 26-mile road that passes through a Hispanic neighborhood on its way to the wealthier areas on the outskirts. One recent night, Waldrop says he encountered a Vietnam veteran in an electric wheelchair headed down the road, hoping to get to his girlfriend’s house a few miles away.
“He was tipsy and he didn’t have a cent, and there were no buses,” Waldrop recalled. “I tried to lift his wheelchair into my car, but it was too heavy. A cop stopped, but the two of us still couldn’t lift it. So I called an ambulance and paid for it myself.”
Cornett has put some buses into service in the evening, but major expansions aren’t in the cards because of the structure of the city’s finances, which have gotten only worse with looming budget shortfalls. The city health department lost 25 percent of its employees to attrition over the past three years. Gov. Mary Fallin’s refusal to accept Medicaid expansion isn’t helping.
Oklahoma by law requires city operating budgets to be funded entirely by sales taxes. As a result, sales taxes average 8.6 percent—the sixth-highest rate in the country. A measure on the 2016 ballot to raise money for schools would raise it to almost 10 percent.
Sales tax is “regressive,” meaning the poorer you are, the higher percentage of your income goes to the tax. Yet, reliance on sales tax ties the hands of communities that might want to discourage fast-food restaurants or other businesses of questionable social value.
This opens a wedge for critics of Cornett, who say he’s too much hat and not enough cattle. Among these is councilman Ed Shadid, a spinal surgeon who unsuccessfully challenged Cornett in his third reelection campaign in 2014. Without taking on corporate interests, Shadid says, success isn’t possible.
“I’m not seeing anything on the ground that’s going to appreciably impact the obesity rate in Oklahoma City,” says Shadid. “The first step is awareness, and my hat’s off to Mick for that. He’s a great communicator, and that’s a substantial contribution. But the obesity rate continues its relentless acceleration.”
Yet the mayor of a city like Oklahoma City, whatever his political disposition, would be committing political and economic suicide by trying to impose a sin tax on sugar. A McDonald’s that doesn’t open in your town will soon be paying taxes to the municipality next door.
“The reliance on sales tax leads to competition between cities for sales tax-generating jobs, which often are not well-paid jobs,” says Cindy Rosenthal, the mayor of neighboring Norman. “It creates some perverse incentives. I would submit that that probably extends to not being aggressive about fast-food chains or anything else like that.”
***
At 4 p.m., Mick Cornett is at the state capitol, where he’s picking up the George Nigh Public Service in the Arts Award for his inclusion of artists in the city’s renaissance. Cornett created an office of arts and cultural affairs, and required that 1 percent of budgets for projects go to public art.
About 400 people are on hand in the capitol rotunda, whose pastel blue, green and pink dome is ringed with the names of the wealthy families and corporations that funded its construction in 2002: Halliburton, Chesapeake Energy, Hobby Lobby. The dais, incongruously, is laid out next to paintings of Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers, whose prairie populism seems a bit outdated.
Philanthropy and sales taxes is how things get done in Oklahoma. The 1 percent sales tax that’s been charged for city improvements over most of the past 22 years has built bike paths and public art, but most of it went to create highways, convention centers, urban renewal and a new NBA arena that persuaded the SuperSonics (now the Thunder) to move from Seattle in 2008.
In America, if you don’t have a major-league pro sports team, you aren’t really on the map. And if you aren’t on the map—or so chambers of commerce everywhere will tell you—you can’t attract the young free-spenders who make a city successful. You can’t be a mayor who gets reelected.
As for the poor, Cornett says, his city offers them opportunities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. About one in six residents live below the poverty line in his city, whose 3.6 percent unemployment rate compares well with a national urban rate of 4.8 percent.
“The government isn’t really capable of handling complex social problems,” Cornett tells me. “My goal is provide jobs, to encourage people to find work and start businesses.” While the poor may not find it as easy to move up the ladder of success as they used to, he says, “In Oklahoma City I think the opportunities are pretty much available to you. I don’t think it’s good for government to send a message that they are not."
So Cornett seeks out the corporations. Most of them already had wellness programs when his program started, but some have expanded. Devon Energy offers a discount on healthy meals in its cafeteria—salmon, asparagus and salad for $4.50 was a recent offering.
Then again Sonic, the drive-in company, hasn’t put much on its menu that anyone watching their waistline would eat, but Cornett drinks their diet soda from large cups all day. The corporate logo appears on broadcasts of City Council meetings.
I encounter Cornett two days after the ceremony at a meeting of the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments, where he’s leading a steering committee to explore light rail. Traffic, which has never been much of a problem in this area, is just starting to be noticeable during certain rush hours, which might actually be a sign of the city’s increasing vitality.
The mayors view a PowerPoint presentation showing bright-colored rail lines of the future, moving out of a hub at the Amtrak station. It looks good on paper, but it’s not clear that central Oklahomans, who would have to pay for the rail system, are ready for it.
“I’d like to bring in some consultants to start polling on this issue,” Cornett says. The other mayors agree. Without public support, it’s all a pipe dream.
Cornett, the only Oklahoma City mayor to have four terms, won’t say whether he’ll run again in 2018, but he says he has no plans for higher office. “Politics are pretty ideological here,” he says. “I’m more about getting things done.”
The city pays Cornett $24,000 a year, hardly a princely sum (Rosenthal, in Norman, gets $100 a month—and is docked if she misses a council meeting). To supplement that income Cornett gives speeches, hosts a public affairs show and runs a film production company.
In 2011 he was hired for two years by a PR firm whose clients included many of the top corporations in town. Recently, he produced, with funding from those corporations, a documentary about Oklahoma City’s recent history that celebrates the vision of those same funders, whose business is constantly before the city.
Cornett doesn’t hide his boosterism, nor does he deny the conflict of interest. “It’s inherent in the system,” he says. “There’s not a mayor or city councilman or school board member in the state who doesn’t moonlight, unless they are independently wealthy.”
He asks a visitor to look at the results—the growing urban life, the kids and middle-aged duffers sculling along on a reborn river, the 5K races that draw up to 250 runners. As for the underpaid cops and firemen and teachers, the carless immigrants working two jobs—well, he’s doing what he can for them, but change here will take a generation, he says.
For now, Cornett’s methods seem to fit Oklahoma City’s sensibilities like an old pair of jeans. The kind you wore when you were younger—and thinner.