Fast food and vegetarianism

There is a really interesting discussion about how the criticisms of the fast food nation are quickly spiraling into mean-spirited fat-bashing and thinly disguised arguments that the working class are somehow morally inferior over at Alas, a Blog. I think it's a real shame, because I feel very strongly that fast food companies are wrecking havoc on this nation and something needs to be done about it. See, the thing I really liked about Fast Food Nation was that he made it very clear that he was not trying to moralize about eating the fast food but more trying to describe how the business of it was changing our nation from head to toe. I haven't read it for awhile, but I remember that he clearly stated that he liked to eat fast food himself, and then he proceeded to focus on labor issues, agricultural issues, and health issues that were more than, "Ohmidgod! There's fat people around!"-type critiques.

I'm glad that people are finally speaking out about the shallow-minded fast food critiques that are nothing more than fat-bashing and fear of the working class. But I do sometimes wonder if some critics of that war aren't engaging in the same ol' beat-on-the-intellectual-snob pseudo-populism that the conservative movement has perfected. I mean, obviously the ones shilling for the fast food industry have. But people who want to criticize the fast food nation AND the war on fat people have to be conscious, I think, not to guilt-trip people who choose vegetarianism or whatever for reasons outside of weight control.

I eat a little bit of fish (brain food), but I don't otherwise eat meat. I was never the biggest steak-lover to begin with, so it was pretty easy for me to give up eating meat altogether. (Except of course seafood. Yum.) After reading Fast Food Nation and especially after reading some of Jim Hightower's stuff on the agriculture business, especially this book, I realized that the way the agriculture business in this country is run is unconscionable. The poultry, pork, and beef industries are hands-down the worst--all three of them have fallen prey to the worst kind of corporate interests, who make no bones about buying off politicians and gleefully ruining the lives of the small farmers who used to dominate. Corporate ag has very little oversight because it's pretty much invisible to your average urban American. It's understandable--the ag wars are being fought out in the country whereas the visible corporate threat in the cities is mostly the retail and manufacturing industries.

Sitting down to a steak meal suddenly turned into an exercise in allowing those corporate farmers to get away with ruining the livelihoods of ranchers and polluting the countryside with cow shit. Nonetheless, I realize that's a slightly hysterical reaction, so I am not about to moralize to others who don't see it my way. And yes, now that I pretty much don't eat meat, I'd say I'm healthier--but I'm not thinner. It's not a Diet, just a diet. I know a lot of fat vegetarians and vegetarians who have diabetes from eating too many sweets and vegetarians with cholesterol problems. The diet can help some of those problems, but only if you are careful with the sweets and other ways of ingesting animal fats that contribute so much to cholesterol issues.

I get particularly irritable with PETA when they use sexual imagery to imply that vegetarianism=thinness=sexual attractiveness. Tricking people into thinking that eschewing meat is a fast track to have a supermodel's body is not going to make long-term vegetarians out of anyone, because as soon as the newly converted realize that they aren't really losing weight, they'll go back to their old habits. Hell, they may even go on the Atkins diet.

All this is to say that it's critical that the snotty moralizing about health and weight not let us get distracted from the real issues at stake in the fast food wars--that the quest for ever-cheaper meat has become an excuse to let Big Ag rip pollution controls to shreds and create monopolies for themselves. The people that are primarily hurt by this are in fact the working class people that are being disdained in the shallow fat critiques--rural people who live near factory farms and/or cannot get decent ag work because corporate farming has destroyed all decent ag jobs. (If you've read the part in Fast Food Nation about the meat-cutting lines, you know what I mean. Meat-cutting used to be and should be well-paid work.)

And it seems to me that the only way to get this into people's thick skulls that we are paying too high a price for "cheap" meat is to first make people understand that they don't need to eat meat morning, noon, and night. The rapid spread of vegetarianism has helped, but it doesn't have to be that extreme. If people could get their meat consumption down to 2-3 times a week, or even 5-7 times a week, it wouldn't cause panic to start passing regulations that might bring meat prices up. There's obviously a lot more groundwork that needs to be done before these industries will be put under stricter control, but I still think that the all meat all the time mindset is a national mental block. And yes, in my paranoid mind, I think that the whole Atkins diet getting revised and becoming a trend overnight was no accident. If an expose ever comes out that shows that the meat industries funneled money into propaganda for that diet, I will not be surprised one bit. It's just too much a coincidence that it became the "thing" right in the middle of a huge rise in the number of vegetarians.