Fast Food Nation
Fast
Food Nation:
Not so long ago, Bill Gates traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, and was met at his hotel by his chum Warren Buffett. Together they went off to McDonald's, where Gates ate a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Both men love burgers, Buffett explained to The Wall Street Journal, and the fondness for McDonald's is apparently part of an unspoken understanding between them. And why not? A couple of unpretentious billionaires could hardly pick a more familiarly, innocuously, authentically American place to have lunch.
In the opening pages of “Fast Food Nation,” Eric Schlosser makes a series of observations about McDonald's. The company operates about 28,000 restaurants around the world. It's the nation's biggest buyer of beef, pork and potatoes, and the world's biggest owner of retail property. The company is one of the country's top toy distributors and its largest private operator of playgrounds. Ninety-six percent of American schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald. Roughly one of every eight workers in the United States has done time at the chain. The McDonald's brand is the most famous, and the most heavily promoted, on the planet. “The Golden Arches,” Schlosser says, “are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Of course, McDonald's isn't alone. “The whole experience of buying fast food,” he writes, “has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.”
But Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is here to tell us that this is not as it should be. The aim of his book, developed from articles written for Rolling Stone, is to force his readers to stop and consider the consequences of McDonald's and its ilk having become inescapable features of the American (and, increasingly, global) landscape — to contemplate “the dark side of the all-American meal.”
This sounds kind of frivolous. After all, practically everyone in the country has at least dabbled in fast food at one time or another. So what's the big deal? Readers who have grown weary of attempts to locate the DNA of the contemporary American soul within the history of video games or tennis shoes or whatever might also feel a wave of fatigue when Schlosser announces his interest in fast food “as a metaphor.”
But the good news is that this isn't a frivolous book at all. Schlosser is a serious and diligent reporter, and “Fast Food Nation” isn't an airy deconstruction but an avalanche of facts and observations as he examines the fast-food process from meat to marketing. Or maybe that's the bad news. One of the central themes here is the degree to which the modern fast-food business is defined by the industrialization of most of its parts, a development whose consequences Schlosser sees as almost universally negative.
Fast-food restaurants evolved from the drive-in eateries spawned by the post-World War II car culture of Southern California. The men who built the new industry were rugged individualists, but their insights all revolved around relentless homogeneity — in the food they offered and in the way they acquired, produced and served it. In 1948, Richard and Maurice McDonald shrank their menu to only those items that could be eaten without silverware, converted their kitchen to a food-assembly line that required almost no skill from employees and dropped teenager-attracting female carhops in favor of a setup that required patrons to help themselves. This Speedee Service System allowed McDonald's to lower its prices — drawing a clientele made up largely of families. The founders of Burger King, Taco Bell and Carl's Jr. were all directly influenced by what they saw at McDonald's. Dunkin' Donuts, Wendy's, Domino's and Kentucky Fried Chicken each took off during the 1950's as well.
Since then, the processes the McDonalds set in motion have gained momentum. As late as 1965, workers at McDonald's (by then Ray Kroc was C.E.O. of the chain) were still actually peeling and slicing potatoes. To see how this is handled today, Schlosser visits a “fry factory” in Idaho, watching as potatoes are washed and have their skins blown off by machines and are then fired through a Water Gun Knife — a hose that shoots potatoes, at 117 feet per second, through steel grillwork that cuts them into perfectly uniform fries. These, of course, eventually arrive frozen at your local fast-food outlet, where you'd be hard pressed to find a potato peeler. Schlosser also calls on “the flavor industry” — labs where the taste of foods that are frozen and otherwise processed is devised. In what seems like an outtake from Sleeper, scientists called “flavorists,” wearing lab coats, cobble together chemicals to recreate the flavor of fresh cherries or grilled hamburgers, always keeping “mouthfeel” in mind.
And then there's the hamburger itself, which has traveled a long road from being “a food for the poor” at the start of the 20th century to the down-home meal of choice for capitalist royalty at the start of the 21st. It was drive-ins and fast-food places that made hamburgers a national favorite, especially when the easy-to-eat burger was positioned as a great choice for kids. More recently, cattle raising and meatpacking have been industrialized just like the potato business, flavor science and fast-food outlets themselves. In the 1960's, slaughterhouses were reorganized into assembly lines, de-skilled in the same style as a McDonald's kitchen. These jobs remain dangerous, though, and to help fill them at least one big meatpacker operates a labor office in the capital of Mexico and a bus line from that country to the American Midwest. The factory-like process that turns livestock into hamburgers — which Schlosser describes in sometimes harrowing detail — means that “a single fast-food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle.” So chew on that, Messrs. Gates and Buffet.
Schlosser argues that because of all this there is a greater risk than is generally understood of being made sick or even killed by a strain of E. coli in a fast-food burger. That may be true, but it seems to me that this is an area where he ranges into hyperbole. At one point, he asserts that “hundreds have died” in the past eight years as a result of sickness brought on by this E. coli strain. The implication is that he's citing a hard number of people known to have been killed by tainted fast food. Actually, though, as Schlosser explains in his end notes, he extrapolated his figures from an annual total in a report on food-related illness, which itself relied on a good deal of extrapolation. Moreover, that report doesn't address fast food specifically (and in fact Schlosser builds his numbers from figures including E. coli cases that are not even food-borne), which is relevant because fast-food outlets are hardly the only places where processed meat is sold. One of Schlosser's own marquee anecdotes concerns a man who contracted E. coli from frozen hamburger patties bought at the grocery store.
Even so, his larger beef with the meatpacking business, whose clients also include school lunch programs, is pretty compelling. And on the whole so is “Fast Food Nation.” While the things Schlosser is concerned about (small farmers, mom-and-pop store owners, low-skilled immigrant workers, child-focused marketing, the political clout of big business) and the solutions he suggests (mostly better government regulation) will seem like predictable liberal carping to some, the book manages to avoid shrillness. This is a fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist.
At the very least, Schlosser makes it hard to go on eating fast food in blissful ignorance. But in a larger sense, what “Fast Food Nation” criticizes is the very free-market enthusiasm that has made heroes of the burger fans Gates and Buffett, the latter of whom has famously been a major McDonald's shareholder. Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity. At one point, Schlosser quotes a scientist who specializes in food safety. This man is discussing the meat industry's reluctance to perform certain tests on its products, but he could be talking about almost any of the questions Schlosser raises about the fast-food business — or, come to think of it, about the culture that takes that business for granted. “If you don't know about a problem,” the man observes, “then you don't have to deal with it.”
This review appeared in the January 21, 2001, issue of The New York Times Book Review.
