It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn't really the word, with which I'd grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were--for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren't really their fault--compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside.  Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence.  This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism--ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.--in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality.  It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material--feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice--as altruism: it's not just good for Lucas, it's good for the planet.  But from those who of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children's digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those to happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.

--Ben Lerner, 10:04