An Italian design group called Molleindustria has produced the McDonald's video game. Using Flash, they've created a SimCity-style representation of the McDonald's corporate structure. You must oversee grain and soy production in, cow production, store management, and corporate marketing. The game is clearly anti-McDonald's and is designed to demonstrate how corrupt and evil capitalism is (like most Europeans, these Italians are probably socialists).

Some of the evil capitalist things you can do in the game are:

• Demolish a native village in South America to create more land for cow pasture or grain
• Use genetically-modified soy to increase soy output (soy feeds the cows when they're in the slaughterhouse)
• Add animal waste to the soy when they're isn't enough soy
• Add hormones to the soy to increase beef production
• Reward McDonald's store employees with a trite "badge" for doing a good job
• Use marketing techniques to get people to buy more product (by targeting children specifically, for example) or as damage control, such as when an obesity group claims your product causes obesity

The game is very pretty and very well-designed, but like most European socialist beliefs, I have to take issue with some things.

McDonald's doesn't add animal waste to its feed ("shit" is specifically mentioned in the tutorial). Why would animal waste be nutritious? It's toxic and it doesn't contain any nutrients. Someone at Molleindustria thought this would be a good way to gross people out ("Horrors! McDonald's puts animal shit in animal feed? That's disgusting!") and encourage them not to buy McDonald's, but it just doesn't make sense. Corporations may do horrible things, but only when it makes sense.

That word "genetically modified" is here again. Despite no evidence whatsoever to support their claims, European socialists hate genetically-modified crops, which they call "Frankenfoods." I don't even know what they think is going on when it comes to GM foods: do they think we're creating a race of super-plants? Do they think we're putting mind-control serum into the plants? No, they're just being reactionary, because when a multinational corporation does anything, it is necessarily bad, especially when a multinational corporation messes with Mother Nature. But did anyone mention to these people that we have been genetically modifying food -- by splicing cuttings from plants together -- for thousands of years?

On an economic level, genetically-modified foods increase output and lower costs because you have to plant less. You can engineer plants that are more yielding and more resistant to pests, meaning that you cut down on pesticide use (wait a second, I thought you people didn't like pesticides!) and you can make more money with the same amount of land use.

Second, when it comes to growing food, socialists love organic. It's somehow "better" than regular food growth, because it doesn't use pesticides, and that makes it more "natural." Well, this concept of "nature" is just as fabricated as the old Romantic notion that farmers and poor people are more virtuous than everyone else. Because organically-grown food doesn't use pesticides, there's more crop lost to pests. This means that, to compensate for the lost crop and generate the same yield as non-organic crops, organic growers must grow approximately four times as much as non-organic growers, and this means about four times as much land use. If the world were convinced by the organic argument, then a lot of the world's population would starve. We don't even have enough arable land on planet Earth to allow for organic production. Either the "organic all the way" people (and by this, I mean the people who want to impose organic growth on everyone else, not the organic people who prefer it for themselves) haven't thought much about the issue, or they want a good portion of the population to starve and die. This latter suggestion would be most consistent with the idea of "sustainability," which involves having a much smaller population than we do now. In that case, the organic movement would be very sinister, as it would be encouraging people to die in order to promote sustainable growth.

Third, what does "organic" mean, anyway? Like I said, it's a fabrication. Human beings have been using pesticides since they first starting growing crops over five thousand years ago. They used pesticides because pests were eating their crops and they had to do something about it! (Please read the last sentence with a Lewis Black inflection on the italicized words.) Human beings have the capability to solve problems and use technology. Are we not supposed to do these things? If so, we would have been killed by lions thousands of years ago. There is a difference, certainly, between using a careful application of pesticides to control pests while keeping crops safe and coating everything we see in DDT. Many of these European socialists, I feel, can't see the distinction. All pesticides, to them, are DDT. There is no middle ground. In this way, they're a lot like neoconservatives. Same style of argument.

Problem is, I have to deal with this all the time in Berkeley, since there are a lot of European-style people there. Lousy hippies.