McDonald's is a restaurant, but it functions much like a factory. food-prep workers, by some measures the poorest-paid major occupation in America, earn enough to buy more than two Big Macs - that's 1,000+ calories - in just an hour of their work. It is a product of as much automated manufacturing as human labor. The Big Mac takes very little work for any one person. Food output per person was so meager that "British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of forager and subsistence societies." As Gregory Clark explained in his book A Farewell to Alms, up until the 1700s, the English diet consisted, monotonously, of mostly bread and beer, won only after hours that would make a modern i-banker blush. Deep into the late pre-industrial era, unskilled laborers worked grueling hours in fields to earn an income that could often barely feed their family. Their waking hours were spent growing and harvesting crops, and most of their income from growing and harvesting went right back into eating. For thousands of years, families devoted the majority of their lives to food.
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