It's one of those "who knew?" things. MacDonald's was just an American meal (burger, fries, milk shake) that would feed your family of four with change back from a dollar. Ray Kroc was a great operations manager who knew how to keep the cost of dining down. His franchises were duplicatable. His management training let a lot of earnest kids make a white-collar career. The lure of agricultural science was that it make robust-looking field products such as unblemished potatoes.
The moral dilemma came when the science revealed its dark side. The nice, smooth potato was clearly destructive to its own fields and the people who ate it.
It's a US corporation's character test. To be sure, there are people like the tobacco barons that walk away from the family evil-doing, but that doesn't kill the corporation. Why? Because the corporation is owned by a bazillion shareholders (it has almost a billion shares), and its only aim is to keep the share price up. Any dissenter, no matter how valuable to the corporation, won't be needed once he blows the whistle; he'll fade into anonymity and the shareholders will be happy again.
"Better living through chemistry," was chemical company DuPont's slogan and the motto of every American in the 20th Century. That attitude even convinced most American mothers to abandon breastfeeding her children. Our American Dream has clouded our judgment. No one company is to blame, but the US is an oligarchy, and the power brokers are the oligarchs, so it's hard to dethrone them.
I think the American Dream has to change. I think we don't know what our dream is anymore.
