This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:
The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.
This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.
Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.
All of that might be true.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.
Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!
Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.
Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.
Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)
So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfaitâ„¢.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.
And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.
Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
