Weblog
04/21/01 07:08 PM: I read To Kill a
I read To Kill a Mockingbird yesterday/today. Very good book, but I’ll refrain from talking about it, at least for now. It did put me in a reading mood, though. I picked up Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal again, reading a couple chapters where I had left off. I came across a particularly pertinent excerpt in the chapter entitled “Why the fries taste good.” This is a theme highlighted time and time again throughout the book, but these couple lines illustrate the point perfectly: “William Heffernan, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri, says that America’s agricultural economy now resembles an hourglass. At the top there are about 2 million ranchers and farmers; at the bottom there are 275 million consumers; and at the narrow portion in the middle, there are a dozen or so multinational corporations earning a profit from every transaction.”
How woefully true. But the analogy extends way beyond the fast food industry and the agricultural economy. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with an industry where this is not the case. I mean, isn’t this one of the main issues we have with “globalization?” Isn’t this why tens of thousands of protesters are in Quebec as I sit in my cozy little Auburn, NY home typing this? I guess that is the definition of globalization. The hourglass has gone from being the ideal figure of Western women to that of the world economy.
