Fast Food Nation, Part II

This is for the Nader voters. I know lots of people have been yelling at you and calling you names, and I wish they wouldn't. I know where you're coming from, and I know your hearts in the right place. So rather than being nasty, I want to share something I've come up with just for you.

What I want to tell you refers back to something I wrote earlier about presidential candidates and fast food. Since it has a moral and involves a talking animal (hi), I guess it's kind of a fable. So here we go.

Let's say you've been on a long journey. It's lasted the last four years, let's say. You're very, very hungry, but the only place to eat along your path is McDonald's, and you don't like McDonald's. You're holding out for something better.

Up ahead is a town. It's called, let's see... um, Election Town. So you see a billboard that says Election Town has yet more McDonald's, and also a Subway.

You're disappointed. You were hoping Election Town might have something much tastier than McDonald's. And while Subway might be a smidge better than McDonald's, it's still pretty bad. What you really want is a healthy, organic soy burger.

When you get to the town, you see the McDonald's and Subway, but also a guy standing under a sign for soy burgers. His name is Ralph.

"Thank goodness you're here," you say. "Can I have a soy burger?"

"Well, no," Ralph says. "I don't have any soy burgers yet, because I don't have enough customers. But I'm going to stand here with my sign and raise awareness of soy burgers, so eventually people will become educated enough to want one, and then I'll be in business."

"How many people do you need before that happens?"

"Oh, I don't know," Ralph says. "Maybe 20, 30 percent of the town's population. Right now I have 1 or 2 percent in some areas -- enough to drive Subway out of business, even if it helps McDonald's. But that's okay, because they both suck."

"Wait," you say. "So if you don't actually have soy burgers, what's with the sign? Now I'm hungrier than I was."

"Well, I'm also protesting the lack of options in Election Town," Ralph says. "Subway and McDonald's are too similar. You can barely tell the difference between them."

Now you're even hungrier, and you have a choice. Like many of the choices you'll face in your adult life, it's a bad choice. But during this stop in Election Town, as in many situations, there's simply no way for you to get a soy burger.

You walk over to McDonald's and Subway and study the menus very carefully. You decide there's nothing you can eat at McDonald's. Even the cardboard cutout of Ronald McDonald, in fact, makes you nauseous. Nothing grabs you at Subway either, except maybe -- possibly -- the veggie patty on whole wheat. That might be somewhat edible.

So what now? Do you settle for Subway, or stand outside and protest with Ralph? Bear in mind that if Subway goes out of business, all of Election Town has to spend the next four years choking down what they get from the clown.