Would You Like Lies with That?

I don't think I have yet blogged about the book I am currently reading - Fast Food Nation (PS there is a great preview of the book here, you can even read some of the chapters). As is often the case, I hear the movie isn't nearly as good and apparently it is more of a movie than a documentary - its nonfiction. So read it, don't watch it. Seriously. Unless you are Number4 ... and I have already told her not to read it, but everyone else - READ THIS BOOK. It is amazing. I thought it was going to be spouting out all these statistics and figures and health charts illustrating just how unhealthy fast food is for us. But I quickly realized that, no ... that job is left (rightly and effectively so) to the movie Super Size Me - see it! Eric Schlosser, the author, has even written a kids version of the book titled Chew on This. Check out the cover of the paperback edition:

I love the burger and cross bones - sooo awesome.

Anyway - the book is about the economics behind the fast food industry and all of the food production industries that supply it. Extremely fascinating. I would have blogged about it more as I was reading it, but I was trying to be less preachy and "weighty" in my blogging material. Blogs are suppose to be fun too - right?! But as I am nearing the end of the book I simply must share some of the closing thoughts. Often times while reading all these books that I have been interested in lately pertaining to the world economy, both locally and globally, I keep thinking ... "Ok I see the benefit of capitalism and the concept of the free market. But people don't know the price (environmental, social, biological, emotional, etc., etc.) behind their purchases. We only know that we want stuff and we want it cheap." The idea that the free market checks itself just never seems to sit right with me and I feel like the machine is just going to run its course and should we just let it? I don't know! And then I read this and it all clicked for me:

"There is nothing inevitable about the fast food nation that surrounds us - about its marketing strategies, labor policies, and agricultural techniques, about its relentless drive for conformity and cheapness. The triumph of McDonald's and its imitators was by no means preordained. During the past two decades, rhetoric about the "free market" has cloaked changes in the nation's economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice. [Schlosser goes on to talk about how industries always work hard against the restraints of the market in the name of big profits.]

"The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. May of America's greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks ...

"... The twenty-first [century] will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. The great challenge now facing counties throughout the world is how to find a proper balance between the efficiency and the amorality of the market. Over the past twenty years the United States has swung too far in one direction, weakening the regulations that safeguard workers, consumers, and the environment. An economic system promising freedom has too often become a means of denying it, as the narrow dictates of the market gain precedence over more important democratic values."
(Excerpts from pages 260 and 261 of Fastfood Nation by Eric Schlosser)

WOW ... that is all I can say. Schlosser just articulated everything I was feeling but couldn't quite connect together. The market is amoral! (What a revelation to me - I never even thought about it like that!) It is the people involved with the market that should impose morality onto it - to make it work for us. Just because the market trends may go in one direction or another, doesn't mean its not harmful in the long run - its amoral, it doesn't know or care or comprehend suffering or injustice or damage. A market doesn't have to be unbridled to be free ... we can reign it in now and again and still keep the integrity of competition and choice.

This leads me to my most favorite thought these days ... just because its legal, doesn't mean its right. We can't legislate morality very effectively (nor do I believe we should) but we are responsible for our own actions. When it comes to the health aspects of eating fast food - we have the choice to eat it or not to eat it. But the economic side does not have to roll along the way it is now with low paying and dangerous jobs (seriously read the book). Go with your gut people. Trust your inner moral compass - don't just depend on the market or the government to tell you what is acceptable.

And as for me - I can't wait to get to Oregon where I will have the ease of locating and buying free-range and locally grown food ... those tree-huggers in the Pacific Northwest are big on that stuff.