Ronald McDonald epitomizes the fast food industry's practice of marketing to children
Photo from Fast Food Nation
['Fast Food Nation': Catching America With Its Hand in the Fries Regina Schrambling / New York Times 21mar01 below]
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Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "The American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible, and that ultimately calls for the boycott of one of the most powerful and lucrative industries in the United States.
This is the stuff of PR department nightmares. Exhaustively researched, frighteningly convincing, this book seeks no less than to peel back the smiley- face image that the fast-food industry has worn for decades and reveal what lurks behind the Happy Meals, secret sauces and fries. Schlosser's subtitle pretty much says it all: "The Dark Side of the All-American Meal."
"Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases," writes the National Magazine Award-winning Schlosser. "They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. . . . The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten."
Beginning as a two-part article in Rolling Stone that generated the most mail of any piece published by the magazine during the 1990s, Schlosser's journalism successfully expands into a comprehensive, sobering book-length account of the historical and cultural rise of fast food, an industry that within a relatively brief period of time has "helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. "
As if channeling the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson, as well as drawing upon the work of such contemporary cultural critics as Mike Davis, Schlosser traces the "hamburger hegemony" from its current globalization back to its origins in postwar Southern California, where brothers Richard and "Mac" McDonald's San Bernardino restaurant eventually became one of the world's most famous brand names.
But it wasn't until Ray Kroc, "a Willy Loman who finally managed to hit it big in his early sixties," bought the right to franchise McDonald's that the Golden Arches and the companies that followed began to spring up all over the country, and then beyond. Interestingly, the men who created these empires were traveling salesmen, high school dropouts and iconoclasts -- which is ironic, considering the homogenization and regimentation their companies imposed with fanatical rigor.
With an unapologetically leftist perspective, Schlosser presents a litany of charges against the fast-food companies and their practices: marketing to children, establishing the indentured servitude of franchising, manipulating a minimum-wage workforce (primarily young, unskilled, recent immigrants) by withholding medical benefits, perpetuating turnover to deter unionization, yet taking full advantage of government subsidies for nonexistent "training." These are just a few of the greed-is-good tactics employed to keep profits high.
What's most revealing is how the fast food industry has single-handedly altered American agriculture. Companies such as McDonald's, the nation's largest purchaser of meat, have encouraged consolidation and centralized production. Today very few companies supply the vast majority of the nation's beef, poultry and potatoes, the staples of the fast food diet; small businesses, ranchers and farmers are disappearing. Most alarming, says Schlosser, is how changes in food production and cattle raising have increased the likelihood of widespread outbreaks of food-borne pathogens, such as E. coli.
Yet despite high-profile scares such as the 1993 Jack in the Box case, Schlosser contends that the real health dangers remain hidden from the general public, while the meat packing industry continues to vehemently oppose further regulation of their food safety practices. Moreover, the meat packing industry enjoys a rare immunity from federal intervention. Although the U.S. government can demand the nationwide recall of a stuffed animal or toy, according to Schlosser, "it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves. "
Schlosser's research is impressive -- statistics, reportage, first-person accounts and interviews, mixing the personal with the global. Repeatedly he returns to the bellwether town of Colorado Springs, Colo., where many of the fast food-related issues he discusses are being played out.
But of the book's many memorable images -- visits to a slaughterhouse and a Willie Wonka-like "flavor" factory, Mikhail Gorbachev addressing a fast food convention in Las Vegas, the suicide of a Colorado rancher -- none is more indelible than Schlosser's description of Eastern Germany, where "in town after town statues of Lenin have come down, and statues of Ronald McDonald have gone up."
Like other works of its ilk, "Fast Food Nation" runs long on analysis and short on solutions. Rather predictably (but certainly justifiably), Schlosser advocates greater government intervention and industry accountability. But he concludes by urging readers (that is, eaters) to send the chains a message: Stop buying what they sell.
Andrew Roe is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in Salon and other publications.
For an enterprising writer, the worst of times can be the best of times. Certainly Eric Schlosser could not have chosen a more opportune moment to have his first book stacked in stores.
With cattle and sheep carcasses being incinerated all over Europe, with fear of mad cow disease spreading, with obesity and diabetes on the rise, especially among children, the American allegiance to fast food was ripe to be challenged. No wonder Mr. Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, $25), an elegiac exposé of how burgers, fries and sodas came to symbolize America, is steadily climbing the best-seller lists.
But what makes his examination of a high-calorie, low-wage, car-driven phenomenon so compelling, beyond its deceptively upbeat cover, is that it is not just another screed from the usual suspects, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or the food police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (movie popcorn equals death).
It comes from a relatively novice writer who set out in 1998 to produce a pop feature for Rolling Stone, a magazine that seems to exemplify a Whopper lifestyle, and wound up developing it into a deadly serious book. It comes from a father of two young girls who used to eat fast food nonstop on the road himself and now unflinchingly denies them Happy Meals. It comes from someone who has given up ground beef (for ethical, not health reasons) but still eats French fries with ketchup and abandon. And it comes from a true believer in the possibility of change for the better.
"Nobody is being forced to buy this food," Mr. Schlosser, 41, said recently over a lunch of salmon (cooked through) and fries at Brasserie 8 1/2 in Midtown. "These companies are doing focus groups even as we speak. They will respond with healthier food if they feel that's what people want. The same thing is true in the slaughterhouses. If McDonald's were to lay down rules for the ethical treatment of humans, it would be the same thing as Kathy Lee and the sweatshops. Everyone wants to sell to McDonald's."
"Fast Food Nation" is routinely compared to "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking look at the Chicago slaughterhouses. But Mr. Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, takes a much broader view. His book touches relatively lightly on the usual indictments of fast food, that it's a heart attack on a bun and that what news reports call E. coli contamination really means, as he puts it, "there's manure in the meat." He gives enough gruesome details to titillate the casual reader, but he has a far bigger bone to pick with the whole industry of instant gratification.
And he works less like Sinclair and more in the vein of the Canadian writer Margaret Visser. In 1986 in "Much Depends on Dinner," she took nine ingredients that made a common meal, from corn to chicken to iceberg lettuce, and explored all the ways, culinary and sociological, they came to dominate the table. "Fast Food Nation" does the same thing by analyzing the real price exacted for 59-cent hamburgers.
Mr. Schlosser draws the lines that connect fast burgers, a car culture, suburban sprawl, industrial agriculture and illegal immigration. Mostly there's a sadness to it all, a sense of what Americans have lost in gaining thousands of bright and shiny stores selling essentially the same food.
He brings to his book the perspective of someone relatively insulated from the bleakness he describes. On the Upper East Side, where he lives with his daughters and his wife, Shauna, a painter, he prefers Italian and Japanese foods. "Fast food has less impact here than other places because there is so much other, ethnic `fast food,' and because real estate has gotten so expensive," he said.
And yet he has spent so much of his writing career traveling that he knows intimately what lurks beyond the city. His story starts with orange groves blanketing Southern California and ends with Disneyland covering the same acreage and much of Colorado under asphalt thanks to unchecked growth. Seeming both admiring and appalled, he discusses how the McDonald's officials' unfailing ability to spot a new location inevitably leads to sprawl as other companies rush in. He tells how the slaughterhouses of Sinclair's era moved into rural areas, away from unions that might have improved conditions, and how easy it is for impoverished immigrants knowing little English to be exploited.
Several chapters read as if they had wandered in from a how-to-succeed-in-business best-seller. There's no way not to be awed by the stories of Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers, and of Carl N. Karcher, who built a hot dog cart into the Carl's Jr. chain and eventually took over Hardee's to create CKE, the fourth-largest burger business.
Mr. Schlosser's discussion of "why the fries taste so good" is a gripping lesson in science versus nature: because most fast food is so heavily processed, it has lost real flavor and needs the help of the same companies that produce "the scent in shaving cream." He describes a flavor factory where he can conjure the aromas of sautéed onions and grilled burgers by dipping a paper filter into a test tube. You can't taste without smell, and it's easy to imagine how chains could dispense with the meat and just give the tomatoes all the beefy flavor.
But the dark side is never far from the sunniest pages: slaughterhouse workers injured on lines moving at an accelerated pace to meet the demand for burgers, teenagers working for low pay and few benefits in jobs that leave them vulnerable to robbery, independent farmers and ranchers and restaurateurs squeezed out of business.
Mr. Schlosser credits a writing class at Princeton taught by John McPhee with showing him "how to approach a story, the value of intensive research and the idea of only putting into a story the tip of the iceberg of what you know and letting everything else you know inform what you write." Continuing what he sees as "a history of America of the last 25 years," his next book will be on prisons.
He said he got very little help from the industry. And so, he said: "I went into fast food restaurants and I spent tons of time with high school students in Colorado Springs. I went into slaughterhouse communities. On the one hand, these are closed company towns where people are fearful. But they're also places that don't have journalists come to talk to people. People have good reason to be fearful in these towns, but it's amazing how eager they are to make people aware."
Most media coverage, not surprisingly, has focused on what's in the meat. Mr. Schlosser cites a 1996 Agriculture Department study that found 78.6 percent of ground beef samples from processing plants around the country contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. This is meat that could as easily end up in a supermarket as in a fast food hamburger. No wonder Mr. Schlosser quotes Upton Sinclair: "I aimed for America's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach."
"What people are turning to in the book is, `What about me?' " he said. "It's not to the part about the poor Latinos in Colorado. And that's O.K. I just think it's important that people know where the food is coming from and what the consequences are."
"The industry has instituted high technology in these plants," he went on, "but as long as you have a turnover of 100 percent or more, as long as you have some of the most impoverished people on the planet in these plants, you're going to have meat contamination."
Some reviewers have accused Mr. Schlosser, who has been writing professionally since 1994, of playing fast and loose with the facts. But the book closes with 55 pages of footnotes, and he said he worked for seven months last year with a fact checker to be sure everything was documented. And he points out that no one has directly challenged his reporting.
The National Restaurant Association has posted a short attack on its Web site www.restaurant.org, with partial quotations from newspaper reviews cited with links that often fail to bring up the articles.
Janet Riley of the American Meat Institute in Washington, which represents the meatpacking industry, prefaced her statement on Friday that Mr. Schlosser had "vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair" by saying that she had not read the whole book "but did look up the pertinent parts."
Asked about McDonald's response to Mr. Schlosser's book, Walt Riker, a McDonald's spokesman, faxed a statement yesterday saying: "His opinion is outvoted 45 million to 1 every single day, because that's how many customers around the world choose to come to McDonald's for our menu of variety, value and quality."
At an appearance at the Barnes & Noble on Astor Place last Thursday, Mr. Schlosser answered the inevitable question about how the fast food industry was responding to his book by saying: "These companies would rather be silent or sue. They have such huge, huge advertising budgets that they really want to control how their message gets out. And so far, there have been no subpoenas."
Last week, McDonald's got out the message that it was ordering its beef suppliers to guarantee that they were not feeding cattle animal products that would leave them susceptible to mad cow disease.
But is Mr. Schlosser satisfied? "It's further proof that when McDonald's says jump, the industry says how high," he said. "What's appalling is that those guidelines were issued by the federal government four years ago. McDonald's is making its suppliers obey four-year-old regulations that were watered down to begin with."
Even before the book went to the printer, Mr. Schlosser had to cut a chapter on genetically altered food after McDonald's announced that it would no longer buy potatoes produced through bioengineering.
"The enormous power McDonald's has can have good consequences," he said. "McDonald's is able to do in a moment what Congress can't or won't do."
Mr. Schlosser is particularly incensed at the marketing of fast food to children. "They are creating a nostalgia, because eating habits are formed in childhood," he said. His book explores "the whole psychology of pestering" that allows children greater leverage over their harried parents today, leading them into fast food outlets for promotional toys.
"Even well-educated, well-informed parents give in," he said. "To me, it's better to give them the toy and throw away the food. The toy is not a bad thing. The playground in a poor neighborhood is not a bad thing. The clown is not a bad thing. The bad thing is the food that is being sold to children. There's no reason they can't have a healthy Happy Meal. Given the flavor industry and the science available, there's no reason they can't have a chicken dish that's healthy to eat." Don't get him started on McNuggets.
So how does this mild-mannered zealot deal with his own children, who are 8 and 10? "They were unhappy at first about no more Happy Meals, no more ground beef," he said. "But to quote Nancy Reagan: `Just say no.' " Aren't they grade-school pariahs, with no Ronald McDonald in their lives?
"Hopefully, they're charismatic enough to make up for that," he said.
If he takes his girls out, it's to a neighborhood place like E. J.'s Luncheonette. Reminded that it, too, is a chain, he paused, then responded: "Smaller. Smaller."
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