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Food, Cheap and Fast

© Erica Myers-Russo

It used to be so simple. A meal at McDonald's was a treat, a reward for good grades or a much-needed break during the annual family vacation roadtrip from Ohio to North Carolina. I didn't worry about whether the potatoes were raised with pesticides, or whether their genes had been manipulated in a lab. For that matter, I'm not even sure I made the potato-French fry connection. They were just fries, crispy and salty and unparalleled in my kid universe for their goodness. I certainly didn't wonder about the amount of wood pulp needed to make their gaily-colored packaging, or the ingredients of the Fancy Ketchup.

It was, in short, an Experience rather than an Issue; a Gestalt of fast food goodness.

But then I became a teenager, and cynicism replaced my earlier childhood naiveté. I also became a some-time activist, a pseudo-anarchist, and a strident vegetarian. It all seemed like a good idea at the time. I could opt out of the great American middle-class meat addiction, save those poor little veal calves, and eat my soy-lined way to good health all at once. Plus, it didn't require giving up French fries.

None of which, I hasten to point out, is a bad idea, except perhaps the anarchy part. It's just not enough.

I don't mean that it's not enough to be vegetarian, that you have to be vegan or read the Mother Earth News or wear earth shoes. I mean it's not enough to see things so simply. For instance, meat isn't just an animal rights issue, it is also a health issue and an environmental one. Even more perplexingly, it is not a black and white issue. Humans, from an evolutionary standpoint at least, are omnivores, not herbivores or carnivores. To understand complexity is both the challenge and the necessity of living intelligently. What was once a fast-food lunch becomes the burger wrapper that used the wood pulp that clear-cut the forest that allowed the erosion that raised the pasture that depleted the soil that grew the grain that used the pesticides that fed the cow that consumed the growth hormones that poisoned the burger that Jack ate.

I realized this, I think, when I was pregnant with my daughter and therefore even more obsessed (or depressed) with The State of Things. Determined to live "right", I quickly became overwhelmed with the complexity of Good and Bad. It wasn't just the fast food anymore, it was the gas my car used, the fertilizers on my food, the sweatshops where my ugly discount store maternity jeans were made. I wanted to opt out, to buy only organic and made in the USA; but I also had to be practical, and frugal. I confided to a friend, a crunchy-granola simple-living sort, "It just seems like no matter what I do, it's bad." And he said simply, "You just have to do the best you can."

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