Do you know the importance of weak ties?

People who are looking for a job are more likely to find them through acquaintances. People who are looking for something new can't look too close to home. That's what this site is about: weak ties are the ones that will help you to find new and interesting books, music, tv and movies. (This is expanded on here.)

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Saturday, January 26, 2008

How is Fast Food Nation like Collapse?

Collapse is a book about how societies destroy the environments that make their own survival possible. Fast Food Nation is about the travesties perpetrated by the fast food and meat industries. How in the world are the two alike?

In one section of Collapse, Jared Diamond describes two oil fields. One is everything that everyone loves to hate about the oil industry. The other is operated by Chevron and is what everyone wishes the oil industry could be like: respectful of the environment, minimizes ecological interference, etc. At least in part, it was in anticipation of public perception and legal regulations regarding environmental sustainability that Chevron operates this particular oil field in this way: they know that they're going to have to one day (probably sooner rather than later) and so they set up the oil field from the start to comply with laws that are likely to be passed at some point in the future.

I made the association to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation for this reason: just as there are easily foreseeable regulations in the oil industry, so too is there public sentiment favoring more humane treatment of animals. So the indictment of the food industry is perhaps a wake-up call for that industry to voluntarily become more humane before regulations are enacted that force them to do so.

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