The Pursuit of Happy Meals

Kender recently published a rant in which he asked whether we urbanites would like migrant workers to be paid a "living wage," in which case we would then be paying four dollars for a tomato. And he's absolutely right about this. Four dollars at the very least.

Only I'm not sure that it would ever get to that point. I doubt that many Americans would be willing to do the work of migrant farm workers, even if it were to pay as much as working at Wendy's or Starbucks, at least as long as the Wendy's and Starbucks options remained. Fruits and vegetables would likely rot on the vine long before any of us would work those hours in that heat and risk daily the loss of digits. Besides, most Americans just aren't in good enough physical shape to do that sort of work.

I believe that this is the unacknowledged motivation behind the Minuteman Project.

Whatever else might come of immigration across the southern border of the U.S., we know that these are the brown people responsible for cluttering America's supermarkets with fruits and vegetables and taking valuable shelf space away from Cheetos and Steak-ums and Oreos, putting in their place inedible crap like broccoli rabe. Betrayed by the federal government, the Minutemen have courageously taken matters into their own hands, halting the artichoke monkeys in their tracks.

It remains only to find a method of mechanical harvesting of tomatoes, still, regrettably, a crucial ingredient in ketchup.