Post by RS Davis on Apr 6, 2004 21:55:48 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Brian Doherty Wrote:[/glow] The rhetoric was clearly absurd, yet it had the strange assurance of familiarity. I'd heard things like it so often, it sounded like it must be true.
It was in an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times's health section, about portion sizes in America, by reporter Alice Lesch Kelly. McDonald's recent decision to eliminate "supersizing" as a menu option was, Kelly reports, part of "an effort to…offer a balance of choices for customers." This is somewhere between the tribute that vice pays to virtue and newthink: McDonald's knows that its customers want more choices, so it has to evoke the glories of choice even while restricting it.
But do we really—really really really—want more choices? Some would argue, with decent evidence, that the answer is no. Aren't there levels, either deep or lofty, on which it is to our advantage to have fewer choices? After all, as all people whose chins aren't so bulky as to block the newspapers on their laps know, Americans are battered by a gooey wave of obesity, apparently beyond their control. Perhaps we are so unable to avoid gustatory temptation that we are better off making higher-level decisions to deny ourselves even the ability to make eating choices that we know are bad for us? Might those plastic-hatter anti-teleologists, Devo, have been correct when they declaimed, more in sorrow than in anger, that freedom from choice is what we want—even as, alas, capitalism and modernity condemned us to a future of endless freedom of choice?
It was in an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times's health section, about portion sizes in America, by reporter Alice Lesch Kelly. McDonald's recent decision to eliminate "supersizing" as a menu option was, Kelly reports, part of "an effort to…offer a balance of choices for customers." This is somewhere between the tribute that vice pays to virtue and newthink: McDonald's knows that its customers want more choices, so it has to evoke the glories of choice even while restricting it.
But do we really—really really really—want more choices? Some would argue, with decent evidence, that the answer is no. Aren't there levels, either deep or lofty, on which it is to our advantage to have fewer choices? After all, as all people whose chins aren't so bulky as to block the newspapers on their laps know, Americans are battered by a gooey wave of obesity, apparently beyond their control. Perhaps we are so unable to avoid gustatory temptation that we are better off making higher-level decisions to deny ourselves even the ability to make eating choices that we know are bad for us? Might those plastic-hatter anti-teleologists, Devo, have been correct when they declaimed, more in sorrow than in anger, that freedom from choice is what we want—even as, alas, capitalism and modernity condemned us to a future of endless freedom of choice?
- Rick
