Free Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent by Barry Gibbons Page A

fuelling mass obesity, losing a better way of life, exploiting labour and consumers (particularly children in both camps), abusing power, being pathetically regulated, advancing new diseases, unfairly distributing wealth, and over-globalising the planet. After reading it I felt like Pol Pot.
    What an absolute crock.
    I cannot attempt a detailed debate in a few paragraphs. That’s even if I wanted to – and I don’t. The truth is that there is much about the industry that should give everybody in it cause for concern, and objective challenge should be welcomed. But a full debate needs two added dimensions that the book doesn’t provide.
    First, it needs balance. In and of itself, the book is a powerful piece of scholarship – but in my observation a piece of work is better if the conclusions come after the research. In this case there is the strong feeling that the author’s mind was set and the extensive research was an exercise in finding and selecting stuff to support that position. Any industry that provides work and affordable food for many millions of people every day; that creates wealth; that is consistent and relatively safe and that is regulated in the main by elected governments cannot be all bad. That’s all missing, and what the book also fails to do is to define the alternatives. Presumably they are omitted because they only exist someplace over the rainbow.
    The second issue I have with Schlosser’s thesis is that it addresses the symptoms, not the disease. The problem with this planet is that its population has forward momentum. People keep inventing things. People want more for themselves. The strong exploit the weak because they can. These forces drive societal and economic changes, which bring a lot of benefits – and a lot of costs. Sure, it would be nice to pick and choose – but you can’t. The momentum is always forward. The benefits always come, but then we are all faced with managing the costs whether we like it or not.
    Schlosser is right. There are some aspects of the fast-food industry that are hideous and that cannot be defended. But they are not specifically about fast food. They are about the cost of the planet’s development momentum and the imperfections of its population. Here are some examples:
     
Abuse of juveniles as employees – There are regulations with which society feels comfortable, and there will be more. The real abuse comes from those little Hitlers who use their local power to run their operations like something out of a Dickens novel. They abuse regulations and people because they can get away with it, and they exist in every industry.
Abuse of children as consumers – When I was a kid, you could have marketed to me until the cows came home. If my parents didn’t think it was right for me, it was off limits. The crass abdication of parental responsibility is a society-wide disease. Burger King Kids Club is not the real problem here, trust me.
Obesity – In Europe and the USA alone, more than 500 million people need two to three meals a day. The fast-food industry makes millions of meals available at affordable prices. If they didn’t, I don’t know who else would. Now then, it is no big secret that some foods you eat during a week have different dietary properties. Some folk eat too much, have too many meals, and have the wrong mix in their diet. Is this really a supply-side problem? No. So, eat less and/or eat better. It is an entirely discretionary consumer decision.
Low wages – Whether the minimum wage is where it is now, or twenty times higher, or doesn’t exist at all, there will always be a bunch of jobs in society that are (by definition) at the bottom of the pay league. They are defined by where consumer supply and demand, and labour market supply and demand, all come together at one point on society’s welfare graph. And, yes, fast food is there with a group of others. But guess what – it is not entirely a bad thing. It provides a wealth of