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Fast Food Nation
The Dark Side of the All American Meal
by Eric Schlosser
Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and
poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad.
That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix
of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.
Praise for Fast Food Nation
"This year, Americans will spend more money on fast food than on higher education .
. . . Schlosser shows how the fast food industry conquered both appetite and landscape."--The New
Yorker
"A passionately argued, incendiary polemic. . . . Schlosser has a flair for dazzling
scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts." -- Los Angeles Times
"Everyone frets about the nutritional implications of excessive dining at America's fast-food
emporia, but few grasp the significance of how fast-food restaurants have fundamentally changed
the way Americans eat. Schlosser documents the effects of fast food on America's economy,
its youth culture, and allied industries, such as meatpacking, that serve this vast food
production empire."--Mark Knoblauch, Booklist
Schlosser aims to do what the best social criticism has always done: draw connnections between
the familiar and hte unfamiliar, alerting us that much of what we take for granted in our
comfortable lives is anything but natural, inevitable, and innocuous. This is a book for
all of us." -- In These Times
What the author does . . . is look at the biggest picture imaginable. He tabulates the actual
cost to life and culture (food-borne disease, near-global obesity, animal abuse, political
corruption, worksite danger) of an all-American industry founded on the premise and promise
of cheap. If we shoudl decide as a national to use Schlosser's math, even the richest people
on Earth can't afford that $1.99 combo meal."-- Houston Chronicle
Quotes from Fast Food Nation
OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American
society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in
southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods
wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at restaurants and drive-throughs,
at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise
ships, trains, and airplanes, at K- Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even at hospital
cafeterias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more
than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education,
personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on
movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music -- combined.
. . .
This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Fast
food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both
as a commodity and as a metaphor. What people eat (or don't eat) has always been determined
by a complex interplay of social, economic, and technological forces. The early Roman Republic
was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves. A nation's diet can be more
revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter
of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of
time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also
our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have
become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have
never taken a single bite.
. . .
The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes
in American society. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked
in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years. During that period, women
entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than
by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children
worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed. As the sociologists
Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the
workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally
perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money
used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half
of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants -- mainly at fast food restaurants.
The McDonald's Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America's service economy, which
is now responsible for 90 percent of the country's new jobs. In 1968, McDonald's operated
about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about twenty-eight thousand restaurants worldwide
and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. An estimated one out of every eight workers
in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald's. The company annually
hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private.
McDonald's is the nation's largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes -- and the second
largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald's Corporation is the largest owner of retail property
in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food
but from collecting rent. McDonald's spends more money on advertising and marketing than
any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world's most famous brand.
McDonald's operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States.
It is one of the nation's largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren
found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a
higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald's on the way we live
today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian
cross.
In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of the McDonaldization of America.
He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step
toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on
American life. In Eat Your Heart Out (1975), he argued that bigger is not better. Much of
what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large
restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations
an unprecedented degree of power over the nation's food supply. Moreover, the tremendous
success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business
methods. The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today's retail
economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical
stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.
. . .
Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though
it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life. And yet the dominance of the fast food
giants was no more preordained than the march of colonial split-levels, golf courses, and
man-made lakes across the deserts of the American West. The political philosophy that now
prevails in so much of the West -- with its demand for lower taxes, smaller government, an
unbridled free market -- stands in total contradiction to the region's true economic underpinnings.
No other region of the United States has been so dependent on government subsidies for so
long, from the nineteenth-century construction of its railroads to the twentieth-century
financing of its military bases and dams. One historian has described the federal government's
1950s highway-building binge as a case study in interstate socialism -- a phrase that aptly
describes how the West was really won. The fast food industry took root alongside that interstate
highway system, as a new form of restaurant sprang up beside the new off-ramps. Moreover,
the extraordinary growth of this industry over the past quarter- century did not occur in
a political vacuum. It took place during a period when the inflation-adjusted value of the
minimum wage declined by about 40 percent, when sophisticated mass marketing techniques were
for the first time directed at small children, and when federal agencies created to protect
workers and consumers too often behaved like branch offices of the companies that were supposed
to be regulated. Ever since the administration of President Richard Nixon, the fast food
industry has worked closely with its allies in Congress and the White House to oppose new
worker safety, food safety, and minimum wage laws. While publicly espousing support for the
free market, the fast food chains have quietly pursued and greatly benefited from a wide
variety of government subsidies. Far from being inevitable, America's fast food industry
in its present form is the logical outcome of certain political and economic choices.
. . .
In the potato fields and processing plants of Idaho, in the ranchlands east of Colorado
Springs, in the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the High Plains, you can see the effects
of fast food on the nation's rural life, its environment, its workers, and its health. The
fast food chains now stand atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control of
American agriculture. During the 1980s, large multinationals -- such as Cargill, ConAgra,
and IBP -- were allowed to dominate one commodity market after another. Farmers and cattle
ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness
giants or being forced off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate
farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class and becoming
socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working
poor. Small towns that seemingly belong in a Norman Rockwell painting are being turned into
rural ghettos. The hardy, independent farmers whom Thomas Jefferson considered the bedrock
of American democracy are a truly vanishing breed. The United States now has more prison
inmates than full-time farmers.
. . .
The fast food chains' vast purchasing power and their demand for a uniform product have
encouraged fundamental changes in how cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed into
ground beef. These changes have made meatpacking -- once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation
-- into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient
immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated. And the same meat industry
practices that endanger these workers have facilitated the introduction of deadly pathogens,
such as E. coli 0157:H7, into America's hamburger meat, a food aggressively marketed to children.
Again and again, efforts to prevent the sale of tainted ground beef have been thwarted by
meat industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress. The federal government has the legal
authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal -- but still lacks the power
to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.
. . .
I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem
now haunting the United States. In some cases (such as the malling and sprawling of the West)
the fast food industry has been a catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other
cases (such as the rise of franchising and the spread of obesity) fast food has played a
more central role. By tracing the diverse influences of fast food I hope to shed light not
only on the workings of an important industry, but also on a distinctively American way of
viewing the world.
. . .
Fast food has joined Hollywood movies, blue jeans, and pop music as one of America's most
prominent cultural exports. Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn't viewed, read,
played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers,
both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.
. . .
Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the
twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern
California, that embodied its limitless fiath in technology, that quuickly spread across
the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its
thinking became obsolete. . . . Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional,
diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustabinable, profitable--and humble.
© 2000 Eric Schlosser. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents of Fast Food Nation
Introduction
I. The American Way
1. The Founding Fathers
2. Your Trusted Friends
3. Behind the Counter
4. Success
II. Meat and Potatoes
5. Why the Fries Taste Good
6. On the Range
7. Cogs in the Great Machine
8. The Most Dangerous Job
9. What's in the Meat
10. Global Realization
Epilogue: Have It Your Way
Afterword: The Meaning of Mad Cow
About Eric Schlosser
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. This is his first
book.
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