It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

The miracle we stopped noticing

We tend to see cheap fast food as something to feel guilty about—and there's real substance to that concern. But Pollan's pointing at something we actually don't stop to notice: the sheer logistics of getting affordable calories to millions of people, instantly, is genuinely wild. Your great-grandparents couldn't have imagined it. A century ago, feeding a family required hours of shopping, prep, and cooking. Now you can feed yourself for pocket change in five minutes.

The trick is that this achievement comes with hidden costs we don't see on the receipt. Industrial agriculture, labor practices, environmental corners cut—they're all baked into that price. So Pollan isn't exactly celebrating. He's more like a magician explaining how the trick works: yes, it looks miraculous, but only because we've successfully exported the real expense somewhere we don't have to look at it.

The takeaway isn't that cheap food is good or bad. It's that when something seems impossibly affordable, it's worth asking what's actually being paid for elsewhere. That's true for fast food, but also for cheap clothes, discounted electronics—anything priced lower than we'd expect.