We care a lot.

I once met a guy who talks just like Mark Morford writes. Of course, it was three in the morning at a club and I'm reasonably certain the dude was coked to the gills; I don't know what Mark's excuse is.

Anyhow, now he has his pixie dust all worked into a lather about KFC's new Triple Bypass Sandwich, or whatever they call it. He's pretty sure it's not healthy. I'm pretty sure it's not either, which is why I don't intend to live on a steady diet of the things. However I can just about guarantee that you could eat one for lunch a couple times a week with no ill effects, so long as the rest of your diet was reasonably balanced and you engaged in exercise a little more vigorous than, say, playing World of Halo Vice City. It's just greasy chicken, some bacon, and that stuff they call "special sauce" in fast food joints; it's not like it's an Arsenic, Lettuce, and Tomato on toasted Brillo pads.

Avoiding the McGreasewich isn't good enough for Mark, though. Like a left wing version of those guys who worry on the shortwave about the Freemason cattle mutilators hiding out at Area 51, he's sure it's part of a plot by Big Fast Food to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, make our kids fat, and kill us all. Because that's how those corporate fat cats make their money, see; by killing customers. Every time a customer dies... well, something Underpants Gnome-like happens, but whatever it is, it makes fat cats get richer. (It will probably not come as a surprise to you that Mr. Morford went to U.C. Berkeley; I am guessing he wasn't an econ major, but with Berkeley, you can never tell.)

Maybe it's all a silly, futile argument, a fool's game to point up the obvious evil of such products. These items are legion. They just keep right on coming. What's more, it's just capitalism at work. It's about giving the people what they want, right?

And if they don't really want it -- if, deep down, most humans sense this garbage is hugely unhealthy, that it's a form of slow poison and there are far better and wiser options out there -- well, you do what companies like KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's and all the rest have done since the dawn of the free market.

You convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die.

See? He cares. He cares about what these... these... capitalists ptui! are doing to the poorer, and I quote, "classes".

Because he cares about this, it makes him better than you. A more elevated being, if you will. Also smarter. Why, if he was any smarter and more caring, he'd have to go into politics. You know, like Al or Barry.