Dear Marjorie,
Thai food! Now you’re talking. Colorful, crisp, crunchy vegetables; elegant slivers of succulent meat (or better yet duck! shrimp! scallops!); spices that sing and zing. It’s delicious, it’s fresh, it’s not very fattening. (If it is, don’t tell me.) Why can’t we have delicious Thai fast food? Maybe we can. Today’s Wall Street Journal tells us the Thai government is preparing to open a staggering 3,000 Thai restaurants around the world, including 1,000 in the United States. There are to be three kinds of franchises–Elephant Jump for fast food, Cool Basil for midpriced cuisine, and Golden Leaf for high-end meals. “We want to be like the McDonald’s of Thai food,” says Mr. Goanpot, the genius behind this fantastic idea, which is intended to boost the image of Thai cuisine as well as tourism and sales of Thai special ingredients like kaffir-lime leaves and galangal. One does wonder if there isn’t something incompatible in Mr. Goanpot’s ambition–won’t the exigencies of the fast food business mean that the pad thai at Elephant Jump will have to be freeze-dried, reformulated glop sprayed with flavor additives and manufactured in some lab on the New Jersey Turnpike?–but good luck to him, I say. Away with gray burgers, limp pizza, fried chicken that might as well be fried rat!
It turns out that the burgeoning popularity of Thai food in America is not just the free market’s invisible hand sprinkling garlic and ginger across the land. Spreading the joy of Thai cooking is an official Thai government policy. Since l990, says the WSJ, it’s been training chefs in huge government-funded cooking schools, sending cooks abroad, organizing innumerable cooking demonstrations and food festivals around the globe, and setting up “vast networks of food and tableware suppliers.” As Schlosser details in one of his book’s most fascinating threads, our own indigenous fast food industry is equally dependent on government help, despite its ideology of rugged individualism. You mentioned the labor angle–every time a fast food restaurant hires a “low-wage worker,” it gets an up to $2,400 tax credit if the worker stays on the job for a mere 400 hours, even though fast food work does not pay a living wage and is basically unskilled labor that prepares a worker for nothing but more of the same, and even though government studies suggest that 92 percent of these workers would have been hired anyway. Essentially, the government is subsidizing the churning of a dead-end labor force. Government helps fast food companies locate abroad, backs loans for franchise expansions and permits fast food to be sold in public schools; Nebraska has granted important tax breaks to ConAgra, the nation’s largest meat packer, to keep it from moving out of state. If you go further back a step, government subsidies underwrote the whole way of life on which fast food depends: Government water projects made Southern California bloom and irrigated the privately owned farms of the West; government mortgages made the suburbs affordable while the cities were redlined, and taxes built the highways needed to get there. (Urban trolley and rail companies had to lay and maintain their own track, but car companies got the government to take over the onerous task of road building. They used their own funds to buy up urban trolley lines and destroy them.) Ironically, the region most shaped by government and dependent upon it, the eight Western Mountain states, is today the region most devoted to right-wing, anti-government politics. Schlosser sums up:
There is nothing inevitable about the fast food nation that surrounds us–about its marketing strategies, labor policies, and agricultural techniques, about its relentless drive for conformity and cheapness. The triumph of McDonald’s and its imitators was by no means preordained. During the past two decades, rhetoric about the “free market” has cloaked changes in the nation’s economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice. From the airline industry to the publishing industry, from the railroads to telecommunications, American corporations have worked hard to avoid the rigors of the market by eliminating and absorbing their rivals. The strongest engines of American economic growth in the l990s–the computer, software, aerospace, and satellite industries–have been heavily subsidized by the Pentagon for decades. Indeed, the U.S. defense budget has long served as a form of industrial policy, a quasi-socialist system of planning that frequently yields unplanned results. The Internet at the heart of today’s “New Economy” began as the ARPANET, a military communications network created in the late 1970s. For better or worse, legislation passed by Congress has played a far more important role in shaping the economic history of the postwar era than any free market forces.” (Page 260.)
Schlosser wants the fast food industry to be regulated in the interests of health and safety and labor rights, and he wants the industry to bear the costs of its own growth instead of it being born by you and me. It’s hard to argue with that, although it’s not likely to happen in the current political climate.
Back to the food itself. You call the “yearning for a known quantity” a “universal” human instinct, Marjorie–but if it’s so universal, how come people try new things? Sushi is now an all-American food–10 years ago it was far out and weird–raw fish! Arrgh! Quiche used to symbolize everything red-blooded American men were not (i.e. French, which is to say homosexual)–now you can buy OK frozen ones at the supermarket. The American diet is much more varied now than in the 1950s–it’s multiculturalism’s greatest triumph. And the higher you go on the income scale, the more the quest is not for sameness but for novelty: the new cuisine, the new restaurant, the new dish. Similarly, the affluent are all for the organic and the artisanal–microbrews, not Budweiser; Kona coffee in the bean, not Folgers Crystals. It’s really the people on a budget–working-class families, teen-agers–and people in a hurry (and harried parents) who keep fast food raking in the billions, isn’t it? As you point out, fast food is closely connected with the growth of the labor force–and, I’d add, the speed-up of work. It’s what you have when you don’t want to cook after a tiring day, and it’s what you have when you only have 15 minutes for lunch. It’s in these contexts that the predictability becomes attractive, that a Big Mac or a bucket of KFC seems like comfort food.
You mention education–naturally, I’m all for it. But instead of, or in addition to nutrition and healthful eating, I wish schools taught kids to appreciate food. They actually do this in France–schoolchildren are introduced to all sorts of wonderful French foods, like Camenbert. (Oh no! Mom! It’s disgusting! It smells like feet!)
Maybe Elephant Jump could get into the high schools? I can’t wait for one to open up near me.
Now I’m really hungry. Cheers,
Katha
