McThoughtProcess

Aside from the almost insanely, historically inaccurate implication that pre-industrial agrarian societies were consuming larger daily calorie loads because they were working so hard in the fields, what strikes most about Yglesias' encomium to market-based nutrition is that it marks him as the last Liberal on earth not to have read Michael Pollan's charming children's science text, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which can be read over a lunch hour. Well, he may not have read anything else written about food and agriculture in the last thirty years either.

If he had, he would understand that Fast Food is the business of selling unhealthy food. It's the business of delivering calories to consumers at higher margins than the nice little restaurant down the street. Food is expensive. Preparing fresh and healthy foods is expensive and time consuming. The industrial processes that turn corn, beef, and potatoes into "billions and billions served" do not produce healthy meals, or low calorie counts. They produce unhealthy meals with indigestible additives. They produce foodstuffs that are chemically engineered so as not to sate hunger as effectively as a nice bowl of pasta at the nice restaurant down the street, so that you will buy more. Fast food is the business of short-circuiting normal gustatory desires in order that you eat more of it. The marginal cost increases of increasing fast food serving sizes are less than the increase in revenue from tacking on an extra fifty cents or a dollar for a Supersize. Saying the the fast food industry is not inherently about selling unhealthy food is like saying that the petroleum industry is not about selling hydrocarbons; saying so because there are some "healthy" alternatives or nods in the direction of other people's national tastes is like saying the petroleum industry is not about selling hydrocarbons because you saw one of those ads that tells you BP means beyond petroleum.

(I am not inherently opposed to large-scale agriculture, although I am opposed to the deranging influence of state subsidy on what gets produced and what does not. Industrialized production of grain staples combined with far more localized production and consumption of produce and meats seems to me to be something worth pursuing, at least until Roland Emmerich's 2012 destroys the world . . . or, at least, America.)

In any case, the conviction that consumers want something, ergo The Market produces it, is fine for undergraduate economics, but here in the fourth dimension there is a remarkable science of advertising, which unlike its chiropractic counterpart, psychology, has demonstrably proved itself capable not only of regulating human behavior, but of creating and modifying human desires, and it is this science in partnership with food science that guarantees many more years of fat people eating thousand-calorie burger combos. America. Fuck. Yeah.