Read Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World Online
Authors: Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (35 page)
CONGRESS SHOULD BAN ADVERTISING
that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power. Congress should do all those things, but it isn’t likely to do any of them soon. The political influence of the fast food industry and its agribusiness suppliers makes a discussion of what Congress should do largely academic. The fast food industry spends millions of dollars every year on lobbying and billions on mass marketing. The wealth and power of the major chains make them seem impossible to defeat. And yet those companies must obey the demands of one group — consumers — whom they eagerly flatter and pursue. As the market for fast food in the United States becomes increasingly saturated, the chains have to compete fiercely with one another for customers. According to William P. Foley II, the chairman of the company that owns Carl’s Jr., the basic imperative of today’s fast food industry is “Grow or die.” The slightest drop in a chain’s market share can cause a large decline in the value of its stock. Even the McDonald’s Corporation is now vulnerable to the changing whims of consumers. It is opening fewer McDonald’s in the United States and expanding mainly through pizza, chicken, and Mexican food chains that do not bear the company name.
The right pressure applied to the fast food industry in the right way could produce change faster than any act of Congress. The United Students Against Sweatshops and other activist groups have brought widespread attention to the child labor, low wages, and hazardous working conditions in Asian factories that make sneakers for Nike. At first, the company disavowed responsibility for these plants, which it claimed were owned by independent suppliers. Nike later changed
course, forcing its Asian suppliers to improve working conditions and pay higher wages. The same tactics employed by the antisweatshop groups can be used to help workers much closer to home — workers in the slaughterhouses and processing plants of the High Plains.
As the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, the McDonald’s Corporation must be held accountable for the behavior of its suppliers. When McDonald’s demanded ground beef free of lethal pathogens, the five companies that manufacture its hamburger patties increased their investment in new equipment and microbial testing. If McDonald’s were to demand higher wages and safer working conditions for meatpacking workers, its suppliers would provide them. As the nation’s largest purchaser of potatoes, McDonald’s could also use its clout on behalf of Idaho farmers. And as the second-largest purchaser of chicken, McDonald’s could demand changes in the way poultry growers are compensated by their processors. Small increases in the cost of beef, chicken, and potatoes would raise fast food menu prices by a few pennies, if at all. The fast food chains insist that suppliers follow strict specifications regarding the sugar content, fat content, size, shape, taste, and texture of their products. The chains could just as easily enforce a strict code of conduct governing the treatment of workers, ranchers, and farmers.
McDonald’s has already shown a willingness to act quickly when confronted with consumer protests. In the late 1960s, African-American groups attacked the McDonald’s Corporation for opening restaurants in minority neighborhoods without giving minority businessmen the opportunity to become franchisees. The company responded by actively recruiting African-American franchisees, a move that defused tensions and helped McDonald’s penetrate urban markets. A decade ago, environmentalists criticized the chain for the amount of polystyrene waste it generated. At the time, McDonald’s served hamburgers in little plastic boxes that were briefly used and then discarded, making it one of the nation’s largest purchasers of polystyrene. In order to counter the criticism, McDonald’s formed an unusual alliance with the Environmental Defense Fund in August of 1990 and later announced that the chain’s hamburgers would no longer be served in polystyrene boxes. The decision was portrayed in the media as the “greening” of McDonald’s and a great victory for the environmental movement. The switch from plastic boxes to paper ones did not, however, represent a sudden and profound change in corporate philosophy. It was a response to bad publicity. McDonald’s no longer
uses polystyrene boxes in the United States — but it continues to use them overseas, where the environmental harms are no different.
Even the anticipation of consumer anger has prompted McDonald’s to demand changes from its suppliers. In the spring of 2000, Mc-Donald’s informed Lamb Weston and the J. R. Simplot Company that it would no longer purchase frozen french fries made from genetically engineered potatoes. As a result, the two large processors told their growers to stop planting genetically engineered potatoes — and sales of Monsanto’s New Leaf, the nation’s only biotech potato, instantly plummeted. McDonald’s had stopped serving genetically engineered potatoes a year earlier in Western Europe, where the issue of “Frankenfoods” had generated enormous publicity. In the United States, there was relatively little consumer backlash against genetic engineering. Nevertheless, McDonald’s decided to act. Just the fear of controversy swiftly led to a purchasing change with important ramifications for American agriculture.
The challenge of overcoming the fast food giants may seem daunting. But it’s insignificant compared to what the ordinary citizens, factory workers, and heavy-metal fans of Plauen once faced. They confronted a system propped up by guns, tanks, barbed wire, the media, the secret police, and legions of informers, a system that controlled every aspect of state power — except popular consent. Without leaders or a manifesto, the residents of a small East German backwater decided to seek the freedom of their forefathers. And within months a wall that had seemed impenetrable fell.
Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food. The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it. The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit. The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald’s should feel daunted; they’re outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you. A good boycott, a refusal to buy, can speak much louder than words. Sometimes the most irresistible force is the most mundane.
Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it. Then place your order. Or turn and walk out the door. It’s not too late. Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way.
Fast Food Nation
was published on April 26, 2001, as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spread across Great Britain, providing ghastly televised images of sheep and cattle burning in funeral pyres. At the same time, European governments were beginning to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cattle potentially infected with mad cow disease (BSE). These two calamities no doubt generated interest in the book and its critique of industrialized agriculture. Long after mad cow and foot-and-mouth receded from the news, however,
Fast Food Nation
continued to attract readers. Its success should not be attributed to my literary style, my storytelling ability, or the novelty of my arguments. Had the same book been published a decade ago, with the same words in the same order, it probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention. Not just in the United States, but throughout western Europe and Japan, people are beginning to question the massive, homogenizing systems that produce, distribute, and market their food. The unexpected popularity of
Fast Food Nation
, I believe, has a simple, yet profound, explanation. The times are changing.
Aside from a brief mention on page 202,
Fast Food Nation
did not address mad cow disease or its implications. When I started working on the book a few years ago, the threat of BSE in the United States seemed largely hypothetical.
E. coli
0157:H7, on the other hand, was sickening tens of thousands of Americans every year. Those illnesses were often linked to the consumption of tainted ground beef, and the meatpacking industry’s refusal to deal effectively with the problem of fecal contamination seemed a good example of the weaknesses in America’s food safety system. The harms caused by
E. coli
0157:H7 have not diminished since the publication of
Fast Food Nation
. But mad cow disease now poses an even greater potential threat to anyone
who loves hamburgers — and to the companies that sell them. Among other things, this afterword provides a brief account of the risks that BSE may pose, the government efforts to reduce those risks, and the remarkable power that the major fast food chains wield over the meatpacking industry. Mad cow disease is important today, not just as a deadly foodborne illness, but also as a powerful symbol of all that is wrong about the industrialization of farm animals.
On March 29, 1996, the Food and Drug Administration announced that in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE in the United States, the agency would “expedite” new rules prohibiting the use of certain animal proteins in cattle feed. American consumer groups had been demanding tough feed restrictions for years and were planning to sue the FDA if it refused to take action. Nine days earlier, Stephen Dorrell, the British health minister, had surprised Parliament by acknowledging for the first time that mad cow disease might cross the species barrier and infect human beings — a possibility that his government had vehemently denied for years. Great Britain was soon engulfed in a mad cow panic. Ten young people had developed a previously unknown ailment, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), that literally destroyed their brains. The disease was tentatively linked to the consumption of tainted beef. Cattle that had eaten feed containing the remains of infected animals now seemed responsible for transmitting the pathogen to human beings. Some of the young people with vCJD,
Science
magazine noted, had been “keen consumers of beef burgers.” The McDonald’s Corporation promptly announced that it was suspending the purchase of British beef.
The FDA’s vow to act quickly soon encountered resistance from the American cattle, meatpacking, meat-processing, feed-manufacturing, and rendering industries. Animal protein was an inexpensive feed additive that promoted growth, and slaughterhouses produced huge volumes of waste that needed to go somewhere. At the time, American cattle were eating about 2 billion pounds of animal protein every year — mainly the remains of other cattle. About three-quarters of all American cattle were being fed animal protein, and dairy cattle were the most likely to eat it in significant amounts. They were also the most likely to wind up as fast food hamburgers one day.
The National Renderers Association, the American Feed Industry Association, the Fats & Protein Research Foundation, and the Animal Protein Producers Industry opposed an FDA ban. Spokesmen for the rendering industry asserted that the link between mad cow disease
and human illness was “totally unsupported by any scientific evidence.” They said that a ban on feeding dead cattle to cattle would be “unfeasible, impractical, and unenforceable.” They thought any feed change should remain voluntary; strict new FDA regulations would bring little real benefit and cause great economic harm. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association opposed a total ban on animal proteins, suggesting instead that feed restrictions should be limited to certain organs known to transmit mad cow: brains, spinal cords, eyeballs. The American Meat Institute called for muscle meat to be exempted from any FDA ban, along with fats, blood, blood products, and intestinal material. The National Pork Producers Council said there was absolutely no harm in allowing cattle to continue eating dead pigs.
Consumer groups and public health officials wanted strict controls on what livestock could be fed. The Consumers Union demanded a total ban on the feeding of “all mammal remains to all food animals.” Such a ban was now being imposed in Great Britain; scientists there had demonstrated in 1990 that pigs could be infected, through injection, with a variant of mad cow disease. Moreover, a British ban on the feeding of ruminants (goats, sheep, cattle, elk, deer) to other ruminants had not been entirely successful at halting the spread of BSE. Prohibited material intended for poultry and hogs had, one way or another, still wound up being fed to cattle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that, at a bare minimum, the feeding of ruminants to ruminants had to be outlawed in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE.
On August 4, 1997, almost a year and a half after the FDA promised a speedy response to the threat of mad cow, new animal-feed restrictions took effect. “The United States has no BSE,” the agency declared, “and the final rule provides the necessary feed controls… should BSE occur here.” The FDA described its new ban as “mammalian-to-ruminant, with exceptions.’ Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs and cats could no longer be fed to cattle. Rendering plants and feed mills would have to prevent these banned ingredients from mingling with feedstuffs that cattle were still allowed to eat: dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants, regardless of what kind of meat those leftovers contained. Extensive records had to be kept on the disposition of various animal proteins, and feeds that were now prohibited for cattle had to be clearly labeled as such. There were no new restrictions, however, on what could be fed to poultry, hogs, zoo
animals, or pets. Indeed, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the National Food Processors Association, and the Pet Food Institute successfully lobbied against any new labeling requirement for pet foods. These industry groups rightly worried that the FDA’s proposed warning label — “Do not feed to ruminants” — might alarm consumers about what their pets were actually being fed.