I read an article in the New York Times that explains how large food companies engineer most of their processed food offerings in order to create the optimally appealing and delectable product. They employ Harvard psychologists, legions of food scientists and human test subjects in order to gather vast amounts of data and then plug it all into computer programs to determine what constitutes the perfectly optimized potato chip or spaghetti sauce. One company even employs a robotic device that determines the “crunch point” of a chip, the amount of force required in order to reach the breaking point of the chip. They can then engineer their chips to have the most desirable possible degree of crunchiness. Something as seemingly innocent as a Frito has been crunch-tested to increase its addictiveness.
Unfortunately, this kind of food engineering can lead to some fairly disastrous overeating on the part of many customers. I don’t think the point of all this research is to encourage moderation on the part of the consumer. In fact, the favorite customer type of any of these companies would be that person who buys and eats the largest quantity of their product, regardless of whether they may end up weighing 300 pounds or develop diabetes or any of a number of other unfortunate medical problems. The food manufacturers, as you might expect, keep themselves entirely innocent of any considerations of the long-term effects of their products on people. Their raison d’etre is making big profits for their company, and it seems in the corporate culture there is no such thing as moderation in this pursuit. Presumably the FDA prevents them from selling products that kill you outright, but slow death is perfectly OK.
In the Times article, one of the major players of food engineering was able to justify his complete lack of regard for the health of customers with this: “There’s no moral issue for me,” he said. “I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature.” Besides reminding me of the Nazis who “just followed orders” this is just another way of saying “anything that makes money is OK.” I believe that there are countless thousands of people in corporate America today (not to mention Mafiosi) who similarly distance themselves from any possible moral implications of their work and thus from any collateral damage that they may cause. Their excuse may be that no one is forcing people to overeat junk food or to smoke cigarettes, but this is just a rhetorical trick. It’s not a question of “forcing” people; it’s the morally questionable and certainly cold-hearted use of every scientific tool at their disposal in order to make the maximum amount of money by exploiting weaknesses and basic instinctive desires of human beings, with absolutely no regard for any harm it might cause.
When a construction worker strolls into a 7-11 looking for something to eat he has no idea what he’s up against; it’s like a caveman with a stick versus a Predator drone. Every instinct in his body will make him want a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a Coke and, unless he’s a Phd nutritionist, he’s going to walk out with about 1200 calories-worth of optimized sugar and fat. Remember, those Doritos have been engineered by teams of scientists and food psychologists to have optimal crunch, optimal mouth feel, optimal spiciness, optimal saltiness and optimal everything else. The advertising and marketing people have done their work too; the chips are carefully placed in a very visible part of the store and have lovely packaging. My 7-11 example may seem trifling but suffice it to say that the trucks go out laden with high-fat, high sugar foods and the obesity levels continue to rise alarmingly; I don’t think it’s coincidence.
This Orwellian degree of exploitation of people’s potentially self-destructive desires didn’t happen overnight. Things started out innocently enough when some innovator back in the mid-nineteenth century tried slicing a potato really thin and deep frying it. The apocalyptic obesity epidemic sort of snuck up on us just lately here in the U S of A. But at what point in the game did people start saying “I didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature?” I think that the phrase “didn’t have the luxury” is just more rhetorical sleight-of-hand, as if a person could only behave morally under certain luxurious circumstances. In fact, morals and variations of the golden rule are laws without which our society cannot function. I’d hate to think about a judge in a court of law using such sloppy and self-justifying illogic in handing down legal rulings. To flip the meaning of the phrase around, a judge “doesn’t have the luxury” of just making up the rules as he goes; he must follow a set of moral and ethical guidelines that have been slowly developed since the dawn of civilization.
At this point I want to question the sanctity of the “right to make endless sums of money” that all of the scions of business seem to have arrogated to themselves. Those who benefit from corporate greed will always argue that it’s a cornerstone of freedom for them to be able to pursue wealth unimpeded by laws or the inconvenience of morality. I disagree. There are many laws in this country that put limits on all sorts of other behavior that might be considered dangerous or unfair. Who is really to say what can be thus sanctified?
In the history of any corporation, no matter how giant and self-servingly greedy, there must have been a small beginning when some person set about to market his or her sincere idea or product. I don’t think that person would have envisioned teams of scientists in huge white laboratories on a mad diabolical quest to create the one irresistible snack food. Nor could that person starting up a small business have imagined three fourths of Americans fat and diabetic. Something clearly went wrong between the innocent beginning of an American company and the hyper-efficient ruthlessness of its present incarnation. We’ve got cute pictures of Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottles but I’m thinking that if she actually existed she’d be somewhat aghast at the corporate henchmen. “You see, Aunt, we’ve optimized the syrup and we’re moving 30 million cases a year; we did away with the sugar and the maple, put in some HFCS, and we’ve got a four year shelf life on this stuff, it’s a gold mine!”
I will also point out that there is some irony and more than a little hubris in the great profits being made by corporations who have sworn off morality because they imagine that they don’t have the luxury. There’s little doubt that these profits will be more than offset by the massive health-care costs they will necessitate, not to mention the incalculable human suffering that goes with them. In fact a giant health-care industry has grown up to service the ever-increasing sickness engendered in a society that places profit above all else. The food companies get rich making the problem and the doctors get rich fixing it.
If this country is not to be a self-parody of capitalist excess, we have to find a way to keep the corporate juggernauts from making their own self-serving laws and bulldozing over common sense in their ever-more-neurotic pursuit of money.
When we’re surveying the devastated landscape of the future, when fish no longer swim in the ocean and a dull sun beats down on the ruinous and searing desert, how shall we justify it? Will the gaudy unhinged wealth of a few fat and corrupt billionaires be of much comfort to us?
