Ta-Nehisi Coates also once wrote a blog post about how for many poor people, food pleasure is the one reliable, affordable pleasure available. Fast food provides that pleasure when lentils or cereal no longer do. But in the US, see poor people aren't allowed to have pleasure until they've stopped being so damn embarrassingly poor.
What bugs me about McDonald's-stigma is that their food tastes good! Their fries are the gold standard, and I hear that their apple pies are pretty good too. Their food can be a little hard to digest, but in moderation, anyway, it's not going to poison you. The evil parts of McDonald's are mostly on the back-end, industrialized agriculture, labor issues, cultural hegemony, and so on. But you'd be hard-pressed to find food at any price point that's not problematic in this way. And one person's individual preference isn't going to make much difference, and the difference it does make is vastly overstated. So to me, sneering at McDonald's eaters always feels like sneering at lower-class or uneducated people for the crime of bad taste.
Or to put it another way, the people who think it's a harmless treat are wrong, but the people who think it's tantamount to child abuse are also wrong. It's a possibly reasonable albeit suboptimal choice among the narrow array of suboptimal choices the market system allows/provides.
Maybe an unwillingness to face this suboptimal narrowness is what motivates the fantasy of consumer-choice liberation among the digerati of the BoingBoing set. Next stop, the Singularity!
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What bugs me about McDonald's-stigma is that their food tastes good! Their fries are the gold standard, and I hear that their apple pies are pretty good too. Their food can be a little hard to digest, but in moderation, anyway, it's not going to poison you. The evil parts of McDonald's are mostly on the back-end, industrialized agriculture, labor issues, cultural hegemony, and so on. But you'd be hard-pressed to find food at any price point that's not problematic in this way. And one person's individual preference isn't going to make much difference, and the difference it does make is vastly overstated. So to me, sneering at McDonald's eaters always feels like sneering at lower-class or uneducated people for the crime of bad taste.
Or to put it another way, the people who think it's a harmless treat are wrong, but the people who think it's tantamount to child abuse are also wrong. It's a possibly reasonable albeit suboptimal choice among the narrow array of suboptimal choices the market system allows/provides.
Maybe an unwillingness to face this suboptimal narrowness is what motivates the fantasy of consumer-choice liberation among the digerati of the BoingBoing set. Next stop, the Singularity!