It’s Not About Ethics, But Pleasure Is Politics

by tristero

In discussing my last post, commenter Dan brought up an important point:

I don’t begrudge anyone their distaste for fast food, but what I detect here is more than a dislike of fast food, it’s a fantasy that the best-tasting food is also going to be the most ethically admirable food, that if it’s produced by a corrupt systems, then it must be corrupt all the way down. But we didn’t evolve to take pleasure in only those things which are available to us through ethical channels.

I agree, but that’s hardly the whole story.

Of course, it is not the case that because it is ethically admirable – a synonym for “politically correct” – that it must taste good. The reason, say, great chocolate tastes so amazing is because of the tremendous care taken to ensure only the best ingredients are used. Furthermore, the chocolate is prepared with exceptional attention to the effects of each step on the final quality of the product. Whether the cacao workers are exploited or not has no bearing on the quality of the final product vis a vis its final taste: it just simply happens that the best chocolate by far (imo) is made by small artisanal businesses and many of the best artisanal chocolate makers today happen to be reasonably honest, decent, and occasionally exemplary human beings.

The problem with fast food qua food is not that the workers that make the stuff are shamefully exploited, although they are. It’s not that the animals involved are treated horribly, although they certainly are. It’s not that all the food grown to manufacture fast food is produced in an ecologically criminal fashion, although that’s mostly true as well. It’s that fast food tastes like shit.

Arguments that center around taste are all but impossible to defend. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. So let me pull back; I’m not gonna defend my claim that fast food tastes awful if you disagree. If you like to eat burgers laced with ground-up cow noses and traces of fecal matter, hey, go for it!

However, I would like to point out that there are tremendous profits to be made from producing processed food as cheaply as possible, from the least desirable ingredients, and in the cheapest/fastest way, which usually means that flavor will get sacrificed. Accordingly, fast food makers, as well as most industrial food manufacturers, artificially flavor and perfume (is that the right word?) the slop they sell. They’ve done considerable research on every conceivable nuance of human appetite; not only what makes you prefer a food, but what makes you crave it. And so, it is no surprise that nearly all fast food is heavily salted, heavily sugared, deep-fried, loaded with fat, and so on. Of course there is nothing wrong with salt, sugar, frying, or fat, unless, for some bizarre reason, you eat extreme amounts of it on a regular basis. That is precisely what has happened. By focusing obsessively on tweaking one single aspect of the experience of food – addictive craving – processed food manufacturers have created a health crisis. Sure, there are other factors that impact our health, but that does not let these people off the hook. Extreme over-consumption of fast food is one of the major causes of numerous, preventable, diseases.

It surely is in the interests of fast food purveyors to train us to crave their product and eat it as often as possible. Furthermore, it is also in their interest to train us not to enjoy food they can’t profit from. So…it’s no wonder that so much supermarket produce is flavorless (and comparatively expensive) or that we are told over and over again by ads and commercials that cooking is a pain in the ass, that it’s hard, and we should leave food prep to the “professionals,” and when we don’t, we should try to use their products as often as we can. Of course, not everyone will like to cook, or has the time, or will ever learn how to do it well. So? That is hardly the point. The meta-message of so much advertising and promotion from the food industry is geared towards actively discouraging the individual preparation of food.

Given the extremes to which Big Food goes to manipulate and control taste, it is more than reasonable to question whether a regular diet of fast food has much to do with an individual’s exercise of his/her “freedom of choice.” It may feel like a choice to the person who scarfs up a Big Whopper three, four times a week, but that doesn’t make it one.*

Now, one can, and many do, make the case that the immoral practices of the present food industry – the sadism towards both humans and non-humans, the near-gleeful rape of the environment – impact the taste of our food. Artificially fattened chickens don’t taste as good as an ethically raised chicken, etc. because of the release of stress hormones or whatever. While a lot of what I’ve read, and my own experience, tends to support this, I nevertheless think the ethics of food production are a separate issue. Whatever it is that organic producers are doing, especially local organic producers, the food often ends up tasting better. Whatever it is that the big processed food producers are doing, the food usually ends up tasting awful – to me, of course. Oh, today’s good food seems often to correlate with good ethics? That’s interesting, but correlation does not necessarily mean causation. There’s nothing to prevent a creep or a crazy person, like the head of an upscale market chain I don’t need to name, from selling good food, or making it.

One more aspect of the food and ethics intersection. IF food was merely about personal taste, it wouldn’t have much place being discussed on a politically oriented blog. But food is not only about taste. It’s about pleasure and that makes it an essential subject.

It’s simply is a fact that there are cultural/political actors in this country who are working hard to severely restrict and regulate our access to things that can deeply enrich our lives. They are active in many areas. Some are trying, as they have since the Dawn of Time, to restrain female sexuality. Others are trying to dictate who we can marry, or what kind of movies we can watch. The reason is obvious: to control both the kinds of pleasure people can experience and their access to it is to have significant control over all their behavior.

I would like to suggest that the people who are wrecking – have wrecked – our pleasure in real food, and who are promoting a regular diet of fast, prepared glop to substitute for it, are all of a piece with the people who are working overtime to convince us that fucking without a marriage license is a crime. In this case, the food fight is all about who controls our pursuit of happiness- large corporations and the government programs that empower them, or ourselves?

I’m still trying to grasp many of the essentials of an incredibly complex subject. Perhaps it has always been the case, but at least in this country and at this time, there is no doubt in my mind that access to delicious food is a profoundly important political issue.

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*I have to hedge here. Obviously, this is not the easiest claim to defend even if you’re an expert on addictive behavior, the concept of freedom of choice, and the psychology of food. However, from what I have learned since I started to focus on food issues, I have every reason to believe the assertion can be defended and it’s definitely one I’ll be looking into further. You readers are often extremely helpful in guiding me to useful information so if you know things I should read, please let me know.