Society has changed a great deal since our move from a pre-industrial/pre-capitalistic society to a capitalistic industrial economy that is moving further away from local economies to one that is global. The way in which we live day-to-day and the ways in which our economy and politics operate would be unrecognizable to someone who lived two hundred years ago. Technology has changed the way we travel, the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we spend our leisure time, the way we consume, and all of these technologies have made a tremendous impact on our natural environment. Knowing our society has impacted the natural world in such a colossal way, it should be no surprise this new way of living has also affected our bodies, because after all, our bodies are a part of a larger ecosystem that includes the natural world in which we live. And since we are so greatly impacted by the ecosystem we live in, should it not be common knowledge that what affects us even more than the environment around us, is what we choose to put inside our bodies. To understand the change in our health, it is imperative to understand the change in how our food in produced and consumed.
There are many reasons for the change in diet among Americans. Modern society has reached the peak of what Max Weber saw as the rationalization of society and what George Ritzer later called the McDonaldization of society. That is characterized by a focus on efficiency, quantification, predictability, and control through the process of replacing humans with nonhuman technology. Weber noticed a shift from substantive rationality to a more formal rationality that put profit over product and morals, and he noticed this long before we reached the level of “rationalization” in which we currently operate. This idea of formal rationality pushes us to decide what we eat not on substance or quality, but what is cheapest and fastest, being that those are the “rational” things to consider when making such a choice. This is how the fast food industry has grown to be such a powerful force in today’s economy and social organization. Producers have perfected the art of one key item and can make that item cheaply, uniformly, and quickly, thus allowing a greater profit. This process of uni-product sellers is not something that has been restricted to restaurants though; our agricultural system has become this way as well. Policies within the Farm Bill encourage overproduction of a certain handful of crops, namely corn, and when a surplus occurs (such as the seemingly permanent surplus America is now dealing with in corn) producers must find use for it. And so in true American fashion, producers put the surplus to use in a manner which is cheapest to them and makes for bigger profit in the supermarkets. The selling of just high fructose corn syrup might not be that lucrative in small increments; it by no means sells at a high price. When producers can market a product like high fructose corn syrup so well that it gets placed in almost every item we see today in the grocery store, it does however make profit due to the sheer volume being sold.
Michael Pollan blames a lack of a stable culture of food for the state of America’s poor nutrition and diet. He argues that this collapse of nutrition “would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating". When many American’s still have yet to acknowledge there is a problem with the fact that we “eat a fifth of [our] meals in cars [and] feed fully a third of [our] children at a fast-food outlet everyday”, it is hard to even begin to propose solutions to such problems. Therefore, before we begin to fix our national diet, we must first fix our mentality and acknowledge the McDonaldization of our food as problematic. We must start to reconnect with our food and undo what Brewster Kneen (a Candadian agriculture economist) calls distancing. Distancing, according to Kneen, is “the process that separates people from the sources of their food and replaces diversified and sustainable food systems with a globalized, commoditized system”. Ideas like distancing and McDonaldization are all supported further by our own consumption patterns, local government decision makers, and larger pieces of government legislation like the Farm Bill.
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