Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Mass-Produced Food

The New York Times quote of the day for today, from an article saying that the FHA has found that meat from cloned animals is safe to sell to consumers:

"When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same. By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing [for meat]."

It is worth it all to have mass-produced food that is exactly the same everywhere - even if it has all the nutritional value mass-produced out of it, like Cheerios. With that identical meat, people all over the world can eat identical McDonald's hamburgers.

1 Comments:

Blogger Trinifar said...

The implicit assumption in the quote is that it's a benefit to have the Cheerios in NY be the same as those in Illinois. I start right there with my objection. Why is local variation a bad thing?

At one time in my professional life I worked in Edinburgh, Scotland for several years. Within one block of the company's offices were McDonald's, Pizza Hut, TGI Friday's, Burger King, two (yes 2) Starbucks, among others. I didn't take that as a net win.

Whether it is corporate brands or cattle or corn, sameness is not a good thing aesthetically or otherwise.

12:32 AM  

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