Hamburger

Sometimes college students escape the cafeteria for other kinds of cooking, and sometimes that cuisine is fast food. Common sense tells us, for example, that eating a Burger King hamburger is no big deal, even if it's a Whopper. But a burger is just a small portion of what Robert Bellah calls "the problem of invisible complexity." This elegant phrase describes the ideological and institutional frameworks that affect the beliefs and behavior of people in a particular culture. These assumptions act as a cultural filter determining what we see and don't see when we look at the world. So if we think about a burger as a part of what Bellah calls "the moral ecology of everyday life," we need to think again. If we are what we eat, then what are we? When we eat a fast-food hamburger, for example, what do we consume?

We consume the all-beef patty, for sure, and the bun that is carefully sized to make the small burger appear big. We consume some ketchup and mustard, and perhaps some pickle slices and chopped onions.

But we are also eating other resources, indirectly but undeniably.

We are eating the meat protein that defines the American diet; the average American gobbles more than twice the daily protein requirement.

We are swallowing the 5 pounds of grain that it takes to make a pound of hamburger.

We are eating dirt, because the grain we eat comes from agricultural practices that cause soil erosion.

We are drinking more water than we take from the tap in a day, because it takes 200 gallons of water to make a pound of beef.

We are guzzling oil, which is used to make fertilizers and pesticides for crops, and to fuel the tractors that cultivate the grain fields.

We are swallowing images of the good life that are sold to us with the ads for fast food, images that promise family feeling and friendly fellowship if we eat under the Golden Arches. We are eating the assumption that we deserve a break today.

We are swallowing a peculiar concept of convenience, spending money but saving time in a society paced to make fast food an attractive culinary option.

We are savoring the predictability of mediocrity, because we know that we always get a thoroughly pedestrian hamburger at any of the company's outlets.

We are consuming the packaging that is a side effect of so much of American business.

At the fast-food place itself, we are eating people underpaid because McDonald's and other fast-food corporations have the political power to keep minimum and sub-minimum wages low. We are eating people who enjoy flexibility in their hours, but who receive few benefits for their work. We are eating people programmed to process each and every customer with the same formula. We are eating the "commercial smile," the compulsory friendliness of service workers in the American economy. We are eating into human happiness because we prefer cheap hamburgers to a society of sufficiency.

Chewing our hamburger, we are also eating institutions-or more precisely, we are feeding them with our business. We are supporting corporations, which are social fictions created to give business people limited liability so they can amass enough capital to pursue their business. Corporations are chartered by the states because these companies are supposed to be performing a public good, but over the last century, they have become to be understood mainly as part of private enterprise . Generally, therefore, we assume that corporations exist to make profits, and not for any public purposes.

In swallowing fast-food hamburgers, we are also feeding other key components of our culture.

We are, for example, feeding the car culture, since most fast food outlets depend on the car for their business.

We are feeding changes in the meaning of meals-including family meals and school lunches-that have changed in response to our demand for the burger.

We are feeding a pattern of corporate philanthropy, including the Ronald McDonald houses that help families care for sick children.

We are feeding a market economy, which says essentially it will meet the needs (and the wants) of people with money.

The ideas and institutions that structure our hamburgers are part of the moral ecology of everyday life. They are ecological, because they are a web of relationships. They are moral, because they are concerned with questions of the good life, and questions of justice. The beliefs and behaviors that institutions like McDonald's represent in our world are the "invisible complexity" of our lives; we do not see them any more than we see air, but they structure our lives and relationships every minute of the day.

For a beautiful essay on the production of meat in America , see Michael Pollan's Power Steer.

For a cartoonish critique of factory farms, see The Meatrix.

For an industry perspective, see the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Cattlemen's Beef Board.