Rachel Lauden's essay which recently appeared in the Utne Reader is causing quite a lot of controversy and consternation.  Her essay bears the unfortunate title "In Praise of Fast Food," which is eye-catching enough, but patently untrue; Lauden isn't praising fast food (Big Macs) but industrialized food (canned tomatoes).

Despite attacking a truly surprising number of straw men, Lauden's essay makes some excellent points.  For one thing, there is no mystical "time in the past" when people ate right. 

This is similar to the wistful idea that there is a magical time in the past when people were decent to each other, Norman Rockwell ruled the earth, and everyone left their doors unlocked.  

I like to counter these arguments by pointing out the history of the Civil Rights movement.  In the 1940s, black people were publicly lynched.  In the 1950s you had segregation, with its iconic images of "WHITES ONLY" water fountains.  Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1964.  Look at the racism and sexism in that darling of the airwaves, "Mad Men."  How great could the past have been, if it was such a terrible time to be gay, or female, or non-white?

A lot of her argument seems to be predicated on ad campaigns and magazine photo shoots.  (This is what she seems to mean when she says "they," but I'm not entirely sure.)  The problem here is a failure of the marketing department.  It's hard to market eggs as "these don't come from disgusting battery hen facilities" without adding some kind of nostalgia.  "We're not a giant multinational corporation that thrives on monocultures and the widespread application of Round-Up" makes a terrible photo shoot.  

I can't blame her for pushing back against advertising.  It's a pack of lies, all of it.  But that still doesn't make canned tomatoes more delicious than a pound of fresh locally grown heirloom tomatoes.

One of her points that I think deserves more attention is that this nostalgia for the past overlooks the servitude of women.  All those meals were home-cooked because it wasn't acceptable for women to get jobs outside the home.  She describes women at the time as having lives of "unremitting, unforgiving toil," and she is 100% right on that point.

But this is where she lost the thread.  "Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods."

The thing is, people are, and we're slowly getting some.  Look at the rise of Annie's boxed macaroni meals, Green & Black's fair trade organic chocolate bars, Luna Bars, and King Arthur flour, just to name a few examples off the top of my head.

Very few people are eating nothing but what's produced locally by hand.  Life just doesn't work that way.  For lunch today I ate a dutch baby.  I made it with eggs from my own chickens, apples from my neighbor's tree, and butter from a local creamery.  But I also used store brand all-purpose flour and a pinch of Morton's sea salt. 

Life is a compromise, is what I'm saying.  It's complicated.

Photo credit: Flickr/mnapoleon