RDH - The Two Percent Doctrine

The Two Percent Doctrine

January 22, 2007

In my "essay" of the twenty-first, I promised a return to lighthearted satire. So here goes . . .

I will never understand money. I like it and all, but I've never had any luck making any. Worse, I work for publishers, and everybody knows how hard it is to get someone to read an entire book. Most people don't even read any books at all, and among those who do, most limit themselves to one book, which they read over and over, preparing for some sort of afterlife. Still, it's no secret: publishers prefer to make money. In fact, all works that see the light of day are expected to make money.* The key, I guess, is to sell lots of different kinds of books.

Ideas are one thing: they can be ignored. Food and drink is another.

Burger King: not as good. The food at Burger King is not as good as the food at McDonald's—unless, of course, you absolutely must have bacon on your cheeseburger.

McDonald's is an easy target, but when people criticize them, they are right. Not because of the food, which is delicious, but because they make billions of dollars according to a business model that should be illegal.

McDonald's is just plain wonderful. I'll never forget the trips we made when I was growing up. Those were the days when you pulled into the restaurant parking lot, got your food, and ate it in the car. The enclosed space would fill with the warm smell of burgers and fries (and onions and ketchup and pickles), the peace disturbed only on occasion—by the inevitable spilled milkshake. Depending on the family dynamics (and finances), this would either ruin the event or result in a new shake.

And of course all American children were fortified with vitamins by that time, and most people didn't overeat, so we were nice and thin and destined to grow bigger and stronger than our parents. McDonald's food was healthy too: a veritable surfeit of all the major nutrients.†

What happened since the halcyon early 1970s, however, was that McDonald's had to continue to satisfy its shareholders (it went public in 1965, and its first overseas restaurant opened shortly thereafter, in 1967), so it was obliged to open more and more restaurants—many thousands more, the world over. The food was so good that of course even people who don't normally eat hamburgers and french fries were converted. But that's when the fun was basically over. In order to feed all those people, many millions of additional cows had to be produced, through artificial insemination. So many new cows would naturally overrun the pastures, so they were moved indoors, where they were fed subsidized rations of corn. Antiobiotics were added to insure that their systems—not accustomed to such a diet—could tolerate the new regimen. The USDA rewrote its standards to favor the marbling typical of beef produced under such conditions . . .

All of this is now common knowledge, thanks to the likes of Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. And of course the explanation for all this activity is simple: there are too many people in this world, many of them the accidental and unintended byproduct of the push to satisfy the shareholders of the great corporations. (As I've suggested elsewhere, this huge population surge has moved in lockstep with the growth and multiplication of "dead zones" in the world's oceans, produced by the runoff of artificial fertilizers—otherwise known, to the ocean's microscopic organisms, as free food.) It would be great if an avian flu wiped out one-half to two-thirds of the planet, and if McDonald's went out of business. Because anybody can make a hamburger and french fries, and anybody can do it better than McDonald's. They're good, yes, but they're not nearly as good as they could be if they shut down most of their restaurants and concentrated on quality instead of quantity. And those plastic backlit menus behind the counters would have to go too. As for all the jobs that would be lost among those spared from the flu? The displaced workers could turn to prostitution or spend their days in the public libraries, feeding on the free surplus of canned foods that would have otherwise fed their compatriots, now dead.

In-N-Out Burger, by the way, is better than McDonald's—but only because they refuse to grow. Is there anything that can be done to reverse the damage done by the worldwide chains? Well, if you get very rich, you won't have to worry that much about it.

*"What about university publishers, Mr. Harper?" Good point. Universities publish unreadable and unsellable books all the time. But each time they publish, for example, Tenth-Century Assessments of Charlemagne: Tall Tales in an Age before Streaming Video (Harvard, 2004), they hope to increase their prestige and therefore fortify their endowments.

†"But what about fruit and vegetables?" In those days, our parents gave us fruit and vegetables in the summer and early autumn. My ancestors, for one, weren't adapted to eating fresh fruits and vegetables much more often than that, and it's absurd and greedy to expect year-round garden and orchard fare in, say, Duluth, Minnesota. To sustain that, you'd have to have today's extremely industrialized and centralized distribution system and untold, faceless numbers of itinerant labor. Fortunately for those who must have their fresh salads in January, that's exactly what we have. Rich and American? There's no limit to what you can have.