Recent years have seen several attempts to peer down the rabbit hole of our industrial food system: two books, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as well as a feature length documentary, Supersize Me, by intrepid filmmaker and self-experimenter Morgan Spurlock. Schlosser’s social history of the McMeal exposes its hidden costs: obesity, cancer, heart disease, animal and worker cruelty, soil loss, industrial and commercial waste, habitat degradation and so on. Spurlock reiterates some of the same themes on his personal quest for a coronary, his thirty day McDiet that provides the narrative structure of his film. However, his focus remains on the personal and social ‘health consequences’ of McFood. Finally, Pollan sets his discussion of “our national eating disorder” in the context of the larger question “what, exactly, should we eat?’ In some ways his account is the most thought provoking, if not the most disturbing.

Pollan illuminates the origins of the fast food holy trinity – Burger, Fries, and Cola – with the help of a mass spectrometer! The carbon isotopes reveal that over fifty percent of this meal was derived from corn! Corn makes the beef (indirectly) as well as the fillers and stabilizers in the patty. The high-fructose corn syrup in the cola accounts for 99% of the drink’s calories and the syrup is in the bun and condiments too. Even a big chunk of the French fries’ calories come from the beef-tallow flavored corn oil used to fry them. Talk about children of the corn! These facts came as a bit of a surprise for this omnivore. After taking all this information in, I reflected again on my own ‘fast food moments’ hoping to explain my own eating behaviors to myself.

The contents for my ‘moments’ usually come from Braums and those contents are typically consumed in a moving vehicle on my way to work. I order the #3; 1/3lb Bacon Cheese burger, medium fries, and a drink. Often I substitute a shake for my normal unsweetened Iced Tea though this is a corn-ucopia as well; think milk-cows-corn and high-fructose corn syrup. Usually the shake is half gone by the time the burger is in the car due to the fact that they give it to you first and the fact that overpowering hunger and perceived time shortages are typically the proximate causes of my dietary malfeasance. The fries follow in their turn with an empty packet at the bottom of the sack before I hit the interstate. This is a necessary consequence of the situation. I’d prefer to eat the fries along with the burger, liberally drenching them in a salt-encrusted puddle of catsup, but it takes ten of the little packets to make the labor of tearing and squirting worth while, so I skip it altogether. Then, cruise control set and left knee guiding my two tons of hurtling metal down the highway, one hand forms a plate on which wrapper and burger rest. The other methodically and mechanically inserts burger into mouth for regular and measured bites. From start to finish the whole thing takes about eight to ten minutes depending on traffic but the experience stays with me for the rest of the day in the form of the previously irresistible but now merely undeniable “fast food smell.” How efficient!

What, exactly, is this “industrial meal” that I’ve consumed? Well it certainly is not a salad your granny threw together out of things growing in her yard. It’s a coolly calculated industrial artifact perfectly designed as the precise antidote to my hunger; every quality enhanced and embellished to produce the immediate effect of absolute satiety. Further, it’s a contrivance designed to tap into our evolutionary wiring and exploit it; designed in its smallest details to keep us coming back for more. After all, there’s nothing our big brains like better than a glucose shower. Ostensibly, McFood perfectly meets the deepest human physiological need!

Allow me a brief digression: we must be honest about needs! No oxygen results in a quick death, while sex, is, after all, optional. But hunger is different. It can be lived and experienced over time as chronic deprivation. Just ask the billion or so people living on the planet for whom hunger is a basic fact of daily existence. Obviously here in fatty fudge land nobody, or a least nobody but the nobodies, has ever really experienced hunger in any way other than as something to be squelched with a burger at its first nascent appearance.

I’ve come to realize that this meal, this emblem of our age, exemplifies what the French sociologist Jacques Ellul called simply “technique” in his important book The Technological Society. The relentless pursuit of an absolute efficiency of means for achieving some narrowly defined purpose characterizes technique. It involves transforming what was unconscious, spontaneous, and natural into what is fully conscious and completely calculated. Technique creates itself as a self-augmenting system of necessary linkages of means and it remakes everything it touches in this image. In short, technique replaces all value with efficiency and all action with the one best way.

The McMeal is the one best way to end my hunger and it tastes good too. It efficiently consumes a cheap and abundant commodity, number two field corn, breaking it down and reassembling it in all its various guises. It employs titanic economies of scale that produce cost efficiencies. It centralizes and refines the means of production ever reducing the time from birth to slaughter. It prescribes a precise preparation plan executed on cue by interchangeable automatons beholden to timers and buzzers. It can be eaten and is intended to be eaten alone, with one hand, while driving. It gives us two-thousand calories for only six bucks in a form that we can quickly and enjoyably consume. It makes Ray Kroc smile in McHeaven!

This absolute efficiency is, however, a hollow achievement precisely because it systematically displaces all other possible relationships that humans might have with food or one another for that matter. Pollan points out that the supermarket has become, in essence, only an extension of the drive-thru. This system relieves us of the need to bake our daily bread or “meet our meat” and, thus, alienates us from our most basic life activity and from the sharing of this activity with others.

My burger reflects the deeper logic of its creation – the desacralized mechanism of the one best way endemic in our culture. The same mentality behind the creation of our industrial food system also makes possible industrial production, industrial education, industrial religion and industrial war. This mentality is enacted in mass-production and planned obsolescence. Our education system, having industrialized, has largely given up on the crucial project of the transmission of culture in favor of baby-sitting, job skills and football teams. Fundamentalism is the industrial form of religion. The formulaic salvation of the born-again reduces life’s mystery to the certainty of the machine. The TV and the mega-church allow our contemporary charlatans to take advantage of economies of scale in the salvation of souls. The efficiency in killing other humans achieved in the 20th century through the complete industrialization of war is unprecedented in human history. The machine gun and the smart bomb both exemplify the calculating rationality of technique through the economy of effort by which they achieve their macabre goal. Not so long ago we had to endure the blood stain of the vanquished. Now that we’ve discovered the one best way to kill each other, it is possible to imagine self-induced extinction!

By replacing natural efficiencies with artificial ones, the industrialization of agriculture diminishes and destroys our basic relationship with the land, plants, and animals that nourish our bodies as well as the cultural relationships that make eating a sacred activity and thereby nourish our souls. Every bite of that burger is an act that turns away from the ancient mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, of revering the miracles of bread and wine. These mysteries lie at the heart of the human condition. While that burger may satisfy me, it will never sustain us.

Matthew S. Miller, Ph.D (MMiller33@ucok.edu) is a lecturer for the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma.

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