I heard about Fast Food Nation a while back, but it wasn’t until I heard Eric Schlosser giving an interview making the connection between the rise of the fast food industry, suburban sprawl, and government subsidies that I became interested in reading the book. The book is incredibly well written, telling the stories of individual people and detailing the fast food industry’s history, business models, and connections to culture.
The book has been rightly compared to Sinclair’s The Jungle. The most horrifying parts of the book describe the conditions of the workers in the beef industry and the chain of events preceding the fast food hamburger. In the beef packing industry, people are still needed in order to navigate the cow corpse through the process, and probably even worse, to clean the machinery and facility. Schlosser tells stories of people who have suffered from dehabilitating injuries and people who have been killed while working. The conditions seem unimaginably disgusting and unsafe, and the managers seem to view the consequences as prices of doing business rather than as taking away peoples’ bodies and lives.
On the other side of the machinery, the farming practices are touched upon. Chickens are fed cow parts, cows are fed chicken parts, chicken waste, and parts of other cows. Cows are fed cats and dogs from the pound (yes, you read that correctly – I think there is now supposed to be some standard in place so that this does not happen anymore). The size of chickens is able to be standardized to the point where the butchering process can be automated. A single fast food hamburger contains meat from hundreds of different cows.
While all of this goes on behind the scenes, fast food restaurants spend billions on advertising and marketing to fill an imagined niche in the lives of the customers. The happy meal toys, the playlands, the good tasting (apparently, most people think it tastes good), cheap and convenient food provide a service that people like. Parents show their children love by taking them to fast food restaurants. I remember in the 90s when McDonald’s switched from polystyrene packaging to paper packaging because of all the flack they got from environmentalists. But they only made that change in the U.S. and places that showed concern for the material. They did not make an ethical decision to make the change globally. They made a business decision to make the change in places where it might affect their profits.
And then comes the question, are these people evil or just good business people? The book certainly shows how they are good business people. The book points out a lot of things that might also lead you to believe that they are evil. Who would knowingly cause such harm on workers and consumers just to make a little money? Then again, people need to eat, and there are a lot of people to feed today. Maybe they are providing a beneficial service by feeding so many people efficiently?
My vegetarian ivory tower of Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, and organic farmer’s market vegetables is probably just as much, or almost as much, industrialized, and is certainly full of fluffy, feel good marketing. I might feel happy buying an organic orange at Whole Foods while hearing INXS play through the speakers, but when I eat it and there are no seeds, I wonder what is wrong. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, will be speaking at Berkeley on February 27th.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=371
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