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So, increase the minimum wage (or mandate increased benefits for part time employees, say) to make fast food less appealing? How do you propose making raw materials and energy less expensive without subsidies (note that these currently enjoy subsidies)? I think that an urban planning approach is needed to address the "food deserts" where it is difficult to get healthy food, but that would rely on local authorities getting economic incentives and regulations right to encourage that in a piecemeal fashion.
A good balance of temporary subsidies and correctly placed taxes could encourage the development and growth of a more sustainable and healthy food market. The food market can be very well guided by the legislation. And once sufficient improvement is made subsidies can be slowly recalled and incentives not to use the previous means of production either banned or taxed accordingly so as to prevent them from re-emerging.
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Some things shouldn't be fed to humans, but what's wrong with mechanically separated meat?
That meat by itself is not a problem. Since it provides a very valuable source of somewhat nutritious food. The problem with it is how hard it is to control and enforce most standards in it. Which is why it's so easy to bypass the standards and limits as to fat content and many other regulations with this kind of meat. A lot of the meat that litters the food market with unhealthy fastfood is MSM. Keep in mind MSM was only labelled as meat for human consumption in 1994. Which seemed to overlap with a new increase of obesity rates in the US. Now, correlation does not imply causation. But a relation between these events is likely.
Also, not gonna waste time on this silly little debate about corporations being good or evil, since I find it stupid.
But...
MetsFan wrote:
Corporations have given the common (Westerner) man everything he could ever want and more.
cheap food
cheap cellphones
relatively cheap computers
affordable videogames
book stores
wal-mart
planes
lotsa cars
trains
relatively cheap guns
the internet
everything i could ever pirate
Not for a single one of these things should corporations get the majority of the credit imho. Not to mention that not a single one of these things, except maybe for Wal-Mart, which IS basically a corporation, can only be effectively provided to the public by corporations. Unless you never heard of sustainable development.
You see if it was my post, I would credit Henry Ford and his invention of the assembly line for our supply of cars. Same with food, planes, trains and video games. Most of these are produced by big companies and corporations, that is true. But none of them have to be in any way. A family run small business can, and often does, produce any of these goods.
You see, what makes a corporation big and powerful is either capital or acute innovation. Often a mix of these two factors. Microsoft got its money through the innovative thinking of its founder, and grew to become the giant it is now. And that giant managed to lose a good deal of shares due to another man's innovative thinking, which allowed their competitor, Macintosh, to rise as well. Both of these examples were small businesses at the beginning. The problem with corporations growing too big is what you pointed out yourself. They end up making everything. Which means that it is very difficult for new innovative and small businesses to rise up and steal some production from them, due to their vicious advertising campaigns and aggressive take-over style marketing. Not to mention some corporations actively inhibit the technological development of the world in order to prevent such innovations to arise, or to hog them to themselves, in case they would undermine the corporation's current marketing model.
Companies and corporations are useful as long as one knows how to play them. They are actually very simple in operation and thus highly predictable in the general sense. They want to make profits. It's not a good or bad thing, it's just their goal. It's clearly stated. What is discouraging is that so often people who are supposed to be regulating them fail to remember what these companies are after.
