By Eric Schlosser
Perennial Books, 383 pages
Available at A Different Bookstore and Ink & Stone
You start reading Eric Schlosser’s exposé of the American fast-food industry, Fast Food Nation, and immediately notice something: You’re getting hungry. You could go for a burger. All those references to french fries and tacos are starting to make your mouth water.
This is part of Schlosser’s point: We – the citizens of the world – have been conditioned from childhood to crave fat-saturated foods. Fast-food corporations spend millions per year to ensure that we keep coming back. We are like Pavlov’s dog responding to a Happy Meal.
Schlosser admits as much in his introduction. "During the two years spent researching this book, I ate an enormous amount of fast food," he writes. "And most of it tasted pretty good." He knows the reason people eat so much fast food is because it’s cheap and tasty. But he also knows exactly why it’s tasty. During a visit to a chemical plant in New Jersey, Schlosser reveals that the tastes of most fast foods are engineered in laboratories – then sprinkled on the tasteless processed food. Wearing a blindfold, Schlosser is given a whiff from a test tube: "I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous."
Fact: A small group of chemical plants off the New Jersey Turnpike provides the taste of about 70 percent of fast food sold in the US.
Such details are kind of funny and cute, not particularly scary. But Schlosser has other things to reveal. That craving for a burger gradually disappears as we learn about slaughterhouses, E. coli and Mad Cow Disease. We learn that the rate of obesity among Americans is twice as high as it was in the 1960s – and the trend is spreading worldwide – partly due to the friendly insistence that we "go large" and "super-size" our orders.
Not only the health effects of fast food, but its economic by-products are held up to the light in Fast Food Nation. For this, Schlosser paints a picture of post-war USA centered on the growth of California and the expansion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. As young war veterans settled down outside Los Angeles – a city that relies on a vast network of roads and motor vehicles – they immediately saw gold: Small drive-in restaurants could cater to all those hungry people driving around. Carl’s Jr. was the first chain; McDonald’s – eventually purchased from the McDonald brothers by Ray Kroc and made into a global enterprise – soon followed.
As they grew, the fast-food outlets relied more and more on American livestock producers – the rugged cowboys of the Old West. But such cattlemen couldn’t possibly produce enough beef to supply an exploding industry that was feeding America in a hurry. According to Schlosser, what happened next is classic monopolistic expansion, with no concern for workers or suppliers. The beef-packers – those cheery businessmen who slice up the cows, freeze ‘em and ship ‘em to restaurant chains – managed to band together so that fewer than 10 large beef packers now control the market in America. They dictate the price of cattle, a condition that has forced livestock producers to raise more and more cattle just to make ends meet.
So now we have a situation where American cattle no longer graze on open lands, like in John Wayne movies of the past; they are packed into large pens, fed enriched grain (often containing dead animal parts) until they gain 400 or so pounds. Then they are ritually slaughtered.
The problem with grain feeding in such close quarters is that there’s a greater risk of fecal contamination, which leads to the deadly E. coli O157:H7 and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (or "Mad Cow") disease.
Schlosser talks about outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 in the US, and how difficult it is to get the government to recall even contaminated beef. He describes one six-year-old boy, Alex Donley, who received the toxin after eating a tainted hamburger (it’s not stated where the burger came from). His illness started with abdominal cramps, then progressed to bloody diarrhea. He suffered hallucinations and dementia, as his brain slowly liquefied from the Shiga toxins released by E. coli. Within a week, Alex was dead.
Not all victims die. Tens of thousands in the US are sickened yearly by tainted meat. And though there’s never been a case of Mad Cow disease within the US, its outbreak in England and Belgium eventually led to massive destruction of livestock.
If that’s not enough to make you lose your appetite, Schlosser has more horrors: he takes readers to Greeley, Colorado, inside one of the nation’s biggest slaughterhouses.
You can smell Greeley before you can see it. The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during summer months, blanketing Greeley day and night like an invisible fog.
At the ConAgra Beef plant in Greeley, cattle are led up a winding pathway, oblivious to the steel bolt gun that awaits them at the doorway to the plant. The gun stuns the steer, then a couple plant workers wrap chains around its legs; the cattle are lifted onto an assembly line, where another worker slits their throats. But sometimes the cattle are still alive, even as the workers start slicing and dicing. It’s one of the most revolting descriptions of food processing you’ll ever encounter. And it beats the hell out of Hannibal for shock value.
Schlosser has been criticized for depicting US Republicans in Fast Food Nation as heartless and greedy, only interested in profit, and determined to stop food regulatory agencies every step of the way. Unfortunately, that’s pretty accurate. Anyone who wants a biased but essentially factual depiction of the way Republicans vote on such issues as health care, tax breaks for rich corporations and more stringent inspections of food processing plants should read this book. (Bill Clinton’s lengthy bio, My Life, also paints Republicans as evil incarnate.)
Take the matter of food advertising directed at kids. Most would admit colorful ads with cartoon characters promoting fast food are manipulative of children. While a congressional bill was introduced in the early ’80s to ban fast food advertising during "kiddie" hours (generally Saturday mornings), the administration of incoming president Ronald Reagan made sure the bill was defeated. In fact, most efforts to govern or control the excesses of the fast-food industry have been blocked by lobbyists who swing Republican votes in Congress. Schlosser depicts the big fast-food chains as "revolving door" employers that hire kids at minimum wage, give them less than 40 hours of work per week so they never gain health benefits, then fire or release them within three to four months. Obviously, this keeps costs down and profits up.
Perhaps the most revealing quote comes from an executive of Archer Daniels Midland, a huge US agribusiness calling itself the "supermarket to the world" that was charged with collusion to overbill farmers to the tune of $180 million. Caught on tape in a 1999 federal sting operation, the president of the company is heard telling a roomful of Japanese executives: "We have a saying in this company. Our competitors are our friends, and our customers are our enemies."
And that’s pretty much all you need to know about the people who feed the world. Now. Ready for that super-size burger?