Some links on fast food nation: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/schlosser-fast.html http://www.thenation.com/special/schlosser.mhtml
This is just an excerpt from an interview with Eric Schlosser…
Unhappy Meals http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-12-14.htm
A passage from Fast Food Nation, journalist Eric Schlosser’s investigation of the fast-food industry, offers the following behind-the-scenes look at the all-American meal:
*The safety of the food seemed to be determined more by the personality of the manager on duty than by the written policies of the chain. Many workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they’d made it themselves. A Taco Bell employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby’s employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald’s restaurant in Colorado Springs independently provided details about a cockroach infestation in the milk-shake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.
*
Schlosser’s book is not just a compendium of kitchen horror stories. In clean, sober prose packed with facts, he strips away the carefully crafted feel-good veneer of fast food and shows how the industry’s astounding success has been achieved, and is sustained, at an equally astounding cost—to the nation’s health, environment, economy, and culture.
Nineteen-forties Southern California, with its recent population explosion, thriving car culture, and post-war economic boom, is the setting for the opening scene of this far-reaching narrative. It was in San Bernadino, in 1948, that Richard and Maurice McDonald invented the Speedee Service System, pioneering the idea that assembly-line efficiency could be imported into a commercial kitchen, and giving rise to the fast-food restaurant. Schlosser chronicles the early days of the industry, when it was populated by self-made entrepreneurs who pursued the American dream with good old-fashioned ingenuity and hard work. Among these was Ray Kroc, who bought out the McDonald brothers and became the driving force behind the hamburger empire that is now the world’s most recognizable brand name.
The first part of Fast Food Nation looks inside this industry that “both feeds and feeds off the young.” Trailblazers in developing marketing strategies to target children, the fast-food chains have even infiltrated the nation’s schools through lunchroom franchises and special advertising packages that answer public education’s need for funds. Schlosser then takes us “behind the counter” in Colorado Springs, a typical American suburb overtaken by sprawl, where teenagers—perfect candidates for low-paying, low-skilled, short-term jobs—constitute a large part of the fast-food chains’ workforce.
In the second half of the book Schlosser examines the ripple effects of the fast-food industry’s entrenchment in American life. “The fast food chains now stand atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control of American agriculture,” he writes. The industry’s massive demand for beef has led to the industrialization of cattle-raising and meatpacking, which has crippled independent ranchers and given rise to “rural ghettos” around meatpacking plants. The conditions in the big slaughterhouses pose a grave threat to worker safety. Schlosser also discloses shocking details about the industry’s impact on public health. (One memorable study concludes that there is more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat.) With respect to both worker safety and food safety, the meatpacking industry, Schlosser contends, has shrugged off accusations of negligence and used its considerable political clout to disable any attempts at meaningful government regulation. Today the USDA has startlingly little control over the detection of pathogens in meat and the distribution of contaminated meat.
Schlosser also reports on other trends attendant upon the enormous growth of the fast-food industry, including the homogenization of the landscape, a rise in obesity, and the development of a robust flavor industry. The chapter on the flavor industry, a modified version of which appears in The Atlantic’s January issue, reveals the extraordinary extent to which the smell and taste of modern foods originate in a test tube.
You write that the market for fast food in the United States is becoming increasingly saturated. What sort of future do you see for the fast-food industry? Might it become obsolete?
That’s a very good question. In a way, the future of the fast-food industry is tied to the future of this country. If we continue to allow the growth of a low-wage service economy, one in which unions are weak and workers have little say about their working conditions—well, then the fast-food chains will have a bright future. On the other hand, if we bring the minimum wage up to the level it was thirty years ago, in real terms, and we enforce the rules about overtime, and make it easier to organize service workers, the fast-food chains will have to change their business model. Or go out of business. Access to cheap labor, and a lot of it, has been crucial to their success.
I also think that the desire for uniformity and cheapness and reassurance that the American people have had over the last two decades, which has really helped the fast-food chains, could wane. People may become more concerned about what they’re eating and reject the idea that everything should be the same everywhere they go. The chains are in a vulnerable position right now, if only because they’ve expanded so far and wide across the country that they’re already reaching the limits of demand for fast food. And if there’s a different consciousness in this country, something less conformist, they may really be in trouble.
Same question from the standpoint of food. Fast food is convenient and cheap. Is the fast-food industry providing a valuable service by catering to the consumer needs of a certain segment of society?
There’s no question that fast food is inexpensive and easily accessible. For people who don’t have time to prepare meals, for households in which both parents work, there’s no question it provides a service. But again, at what cost? As I say in the book, the real cost never appears on the menu. The fast-food companies have directed a large amount of their marketing at low-income communities. They are serving extremely high-fat food to people who are at the greatest risk of the health consequences from obesity. They could be selling low cost food that doesn’t have the same health consequences, especially for children. The fast-food chains, with their kids’ meals and Happy Meals, are creating eating habits that will last a lifetime. And by heavily marketing unhealthy foods to low-income children they are encouraging health problems among the segment of the population that can least afford them.
You expose some shocking things about the fast-food and meatpacking industries. Did you encounter any resistance when researching this book? Were people hesitant to speak with you?
People were very afraid to speak with me. These meatpacking towns in the High Plains, in Colorado and Nebraska, are really company towns in a way that almost harkens back to the nineteenth century. The meatpacking companies are the biggest employer and most influential employer in town. The workers are often fearful, and rightly so, because so many are illegal immigrants. So it was hard getting access to some of these people and getting them to talk. At the same time, their fear was counterbalanced by their pain, and by their anger at how they’re being treated. Once they felt confident about what I was doing and why I was doing it, they were very open with me. Many of them were very brave.
Writing in the September 1998 issue of The Atlantic about mad-cow disease, Ellen Ruppel Shell noted, “[M]ost of the conditions thought to have led to the epidemic in Britain also existed here. Despite official protestations to the contrary, and despite regulatory changes recently implemented, some of them still do. Given current agricultural practices, avoiding an American outbreak of this disease may be only a matter of chance. The question is, how lucky do we feel?” Now, five years later, mad-cow disease has resurfaced in Europe, creating widespread panic. What are your thoughts about the probability of an American outbreak?
Ellen Ruppel Shell’s article was terrific. So how lucky should we feel, right now, in December of 2000? Extremely lucky. But there are so many unknown factors about this disease, and how it’s spread, and how long it incubates, that our luck may run out. Cattle in the United States are still being fed cattle blood, as well as rendered livestock wastes from hog slaughterhouses. They’re still being fed dead horses. And poultry in the United States are routinely being fed the rendered waste from cattle slaughterhouses. The potential for this pathogen to jump from species to species exists. Somehow it might wind up infecting people. We’ve taken a big risk by turning ruminants into unwitting cannibals and carnivores. The European Union is now banning the use of all slaughterhouse wastes in animal feed. We should do the same thing, immediately.
- “Allah extends His Hand at night so that He can forgive the sinner of the day; He extends His Hand in the day so that He can forgive the sinner of the night. He will continue to do so until the sun rises from the West (the Day of Judgment)”
[Related by Imam Muslim]