Fast Food Nation
Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 @ 06:48
What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World
by Eric Schlosser (2001)
A well-researched and very readable example of popular journalism on a topic that has attracted increasing concerns and antagonism. By now an average person would at least have a vague rancour for its nutritionally-empty, junk calories if not for its “McAmericanism”. But what really lurks behind those buns, the high school kids behind the counters, the slaughterhouse, the laboratories that manufacture the globally uniform smell of those “barbecued meat patty”? This book tells the history of fast-food industry and its impacts on social and cultural landscape.
Tracing their humble origins from a handful of hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California, Schlosser wrote about the speedee service revolution, the similarities and relations to Disney, their “kid kustomers” and the insidious, synergised marketing campaigns, to the homogenous, global fast-food empires relying on interchangeable (with high turnover rate), rigorously-controlled “de-skilled”, de-unionised workers.
On-site reports and analysis of the flavour industry and its process answer your questioning scepticism when faced with “No artificial flavours” label on the food package:
The distinction between artificial and natural flavor can be somewhat arbitrary and absurd, based more on how the flavor has been made than on what it actually contains… A natural flavor is not necessarily healthier or purer than artifical one. When almond flavor (benzaldehyde) is derived from natural sources, such as peach and apricot pits, it contains traces of hydrogen cyanide, a deadly poison. Benzaldehyde derived through a different process — by mixing oil of clove and the banana flavor, amyl acetate — does not contain any cyanide. Nevertheless, it is legally considered an artificial flavor and sells at a much lower price. Natural and artificial flavors are now manufactured at the same chemical plants, places that few people would associate with Mother Nature.
Apart from its health concerns, the industrialisation of the cattle-raising and meatpacking industry has changed how beef is produced (from whole sides of beef into smaller cuts, vacuum-sealed and plastic-wrapped “boxed beef”, and “turned one of the nation’s best-paying manufacturing jobs into one of the lowest-paying, created a migrant industrial workforce of poor immigrants, tolerated high injury rates, and spawned rural ghettos in the American heartland.”
Workers… are under enormous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of creating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations, and amputated limbs are difficult to conceal from authorities. But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped disks, pinched nerves.
This centralised, industrialised system of food processing has also “proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease.”
The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially substances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes — the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle — until August of 1997. The were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also known as “mad cow disease”. Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be feed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle… The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle… about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994.
Fast Food Nation was written in 2001; torrents of criticism, backlash, debates, headlines and campaigns against and for fast-food industry have since (and before) then infiltrated the popular media (e.g. the well-known Super Size Me, Chew on This, the recent movie adaptation of this book), resulting in more drastic marketing counter-strategies, e.g. menus and advertisement promoting “healthier” options. As such, many of Schlosser’s reports no longer apply, or seem outdated if not widely-known. But the book still offers interesting insights into one of the today’s world’s biggest commodities, and far from just being a knee-jerk anti-McDonald’s diatribe, it gives optimistic examples of fast-food corporations with responsible practice (In-N-Out, Jack in the Box), and that “there is nothing inevitable about the fast-food nation that surrounds us”. There is also what and how to do section, some of which are now apparent as noticeable changes in the production of fast-food, increasing wariness and demand for stricter practice towards the industry.
April 27th, 2007 09:52
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