January 12, 2023
Historian Rachel Laudan offers a provocative argument in praise of fast food. From the economists’ perspective, her piece contributes along two margins. First, she eviscerates an important element of the myth that our ancestors lived materially better lives than we do.
She writes:
“For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruits inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured; eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. Natural was also usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible.
So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives–sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye–to make edible foodstuffs.
Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.”
Their lives were actually nasty, brutish, and short, a fact that would be very surprising if their diets were superior to ours.
Second, she demonstrates the central relevance of asking “as compared to what” for the economic point of view. Yes, McDonald’s is bad—no argument from me there. Compared to what, though? Compared to the best modern diets, supported as they are by the best an extensive division of labor can offer. The Industrial Revolution was also bad compared to contemporary air-conditioned factories, but it was a boon for the agricultural workers who fled the fields for the factories.
Laudan again:
“So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale. So what? Certainly no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its own problems. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, local, artisanal, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right?”
”It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.”
Read the whole thing here.
And oh, the concerns about global “McDonalidzation?” They go way back. Here’s my department chairman, Jeff Herbener, from an interview in 1997:
“This is the view, often encountered in the development literature, that adopting capitalist institutions would amount to artificially grafting on foreign ways. It would be "Coca-Colonialism," to use the new left phrase recently picked up by some conservatives. But this is wrongheaded. People best express their cultural uniqueness within the context of private property. When people have their own towns, businesses, farms, and modes of production, traditions have a chance to flourish without being overridden by the state apparatus.
Moreover, foreign investment is never an imposition. No foreign national can make money in a host country unless the consuming public desires the product that is being produced or genuinely wants to work for the company. People tend to disparage the cultural import of McDonalds into the developing world, but these are countries where people have little or no access to safe and inexpensive meat, bread, and vegetables. McDonalds is providing a wonderful service. To me, it seems like cultural imperialism to say these people shouldn't want to eat cheeseburgers.
What's so terrible about the Ex-Im Bank or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which subsidize and guarantee foreign investments, is not that they put taxpayers' money at risk, even if that's bad enough. The real trouble is that they override the voluntary preferences of people in foreign countries, who should be the ones determining whether an investment is worthwhile or not. Ex-Im and OPIC are the culture destroyers. They, not the capitalists trying to test marketability, are the real source of cultural imposition.”