Super Size My Monopoly Money

The following is an excerpt from my essay on Super Size Me, for fitness class:

American public schools provide American children with terrible food that is basically the same as fast-food. This is because large food corporations have payed lobbyists working for them in the government and probably even the educational system. These lobbyists help ensure their patron’s wishes, such as the position as primary food provider for a school district, etc. This allows their corporations to sell low quality food to our children at high prices with government educational funding taken from our tax dollars. Various huge companies have a monopoly on the industry, such as Aramark – the company that produced horrible lunches at my high school way out in New Mexico and continues to produce horrible lunches at my college all the way in New York – there is no escape! I spent a brief period here at FIT working with the Foreign Films Club (now shutdown due to bureaucracy) and was really frustrated by the fact we were forced to pay Aramark for food during our movie showings. We were forced to spend over $12 per person for crappy Aramark boxed lunches, while we could have purchased high quality natural food from a small local restaurant for significantly less.

The terrifying thing is that this sort of corporate bureaucracy exists all the way up in all aspects of today’s global society. Not only are we forced to eat unhealthy food, but little by little human beings are losing more and more of their personal freedoms. We accept that we are in a rush running to school or work and can only spend a few dollars on an unhealthy McDonald’s cheeseburger. We don’t bother trying to customize our sandwich just like we don’t try to order customized shoes from Wal-Mart or a customized car from Ford. We accept it as it comes because we know we cannot change it. Fast-food is assembly-line cuisine and we live in an assembly-line society. With every generation a little less personal freedom becomes the accepted norm, and the eventual outcome is scary. We live in a world where the machine of humanity is so large that the individual gears are of little significance, as long as we spin and spend our money the machine can and will continue to give us the little dirty drop of oil that we need to survive. And when we get sick from it’s impurities we go to the doctor and make the medical and pharmaceutical industry gears spin – in sickness and in health we will make the machine run, even if it kills us. The end.