Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser
Houghton Mifflin. 356 pp. $25.00
The airwaves, editorial pages, and Internet chat groups—not to mention the “Dining In, Dining Out” section of the New York Times—are awash in indignation over the revelations contained in Fast Food Nation. In a series of meticulous and riveting exposés—ranging from “Why the Fries Taste Good” (artificial flavoring) to “The Most Dangerous Job” (meatpacking)—Eric Schlosser, a correspondent for the Atlantic, builds a compelling case against the fast-food industry based on the premise that “the real price never appears on the menu.” Then he tells us exactly what he thinks that price is.
The fast-food business, Schlosser’s story goes, started innocently enough in the aftermath of World War II as the innovation of a few iconoclasts like Ray Kroc of McDonald’s and Carl Karcher of the Carl’s Jr. chain, both of whom sought to feed southern California’s expanding population in a manner suited to the new automobile culture, and to make a buck in the process. At this stage, Schlosser’s admiration for his subjects is evident. But as the fast-food phenomenon spread across the land, driven in large part by the construction of the interstate highway system, things went terribly wrong. Rugged individualism gave way to conformity, and entrepreneurship gave way to corporate hegemony.
Today, argues Schlosser, the fast-food industry is responsible for, or at least symptomatic of, a host of societal ills. Driven by greed, McDonald’s and its ilk have created a labor economy dependent on cheap, unskilled, part-time employees, mostly teenagers who cannot easily protect their interests by unionizing. They have also fundamentally transformed the whole spectrum of the American agricultural system, from potato farming to meatpacking, making it into a reflection of their own corporate operations and encouraging the exploitation of family farmers, ranchers, immigrant laborers, and the soil.
Worse, wielding the dual weapons of advertising and political lobbying, the fast-food industry seeks to control our economy, our government, and our very psyches, particularly those of our children. By targeting the young and impressionable—including through insidious advertising in the public schools—these multinational corporations create captive consumers who can be relied upon to pester their parents for unhealthy food and the toy trinkets used to promote it. All the while, companies reveal themselves as the worst kind of hypocrites, trumpeting the free market while covertly lobbying for subsidies and preferential regulatory treatment.
Nor does the litany of evils end there. The industry is, it seems, largely responsible for obesity, for dangerous levels of contaminants in our meat supply, for failing to maintain workplace safety, and for high rates of suicide among cattle ranchers. Through the carefully plotted use of additives, the industry’s flavor engineers—flavorists, as they are called—dupe us into enjoying what is essentially flavorless frozen and-reheated food. And as fast food spreads beyond these shores and throughout the industrialized world, other nations are rapidly falling prey to the same ills.
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It should come as no surprise to learn that Schlosser profoundly distrusts the capitalist system: this, if anything, is the underlying theme of Fast Food Nation. Although he concedes that “the market is a tool, and a useful one,” no good, it seems, has ever been achieved by the market except insofar as its impulses have been strictly circumscribed by hard-hitting regulatory schemes.
In this respect, the fast-food companies represent, for Schlosser, the capitalist system run amok, rendering moot the conventional wisdom of supply and demand and making brainwashed addicts of us all. Indeed, Schlosser writes, just as the 20th century was “dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power,” so the present century will be marked by “a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.” He appears to intend the analogy quite exactly: in a chapter on the relationship between Ray Kroc and Walt Disney, there are hints of shared Nazi tendencies.
Unfortunately, to credit this portrait of the fast-food industry as a new evil empire, agribusiness as the reincarnation of Soviet collectivized farming, and capitalism as the new Communism, one must not only discount Schlosser’s wild hyperbole but overlook the inconvenient fact that capitalism has been responsible for almost every instance of material good since the industrial revolution. Even Schlosser is compelled to admit that the industry provides gainful employment to many of society’s most disadvantaged members, and helps them learn good basic work habits, complaining all the while that its motives in doing so are “hardly altruistic.” About that much, at least, he is right: it is on account of profit, not warm feelings, that America’s 3.5 million fast-food workers get paid.
It is a pity Schlosser’s mind is so relentlessly preoccupied by politics, and a callow politics at that. For as someone who wants to reduce the nation’s consumption of fast food, he fully understands that his many top-down proposals in this direction—a ban on advertising directed at children, a new federal food-safety agency, lots more government regulations, and so forth—will only take him so far. If consumers are to alter their behavior, they will have to be offered something better—and they will have to want it.
Schlosser is dimly aware of this conundrum. “Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food,” he writes in a rare moment of illumination, adding, “The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it.” But there is the crux of the matter. If customers wanted better-tasting or more nutritious fast food, surely the money-mad corporations would be providing it. But every attempt to create such items (like the McLean Deluxe, made partly from seaweed derivatives) has been an abject failure. Nobody wants to eat them.
In short, fast food does not explain our culture; our culture explains fast food. In his pursuit of corporate perfidy, Schlosser never pauses to consider that the industry itself is just one of the reasons for the fastfooding of America, which owes its existence to factors ranging from the decline of the family (the enjoyment of good food must be taught by example, beginning in the home), to the entrenchment of career-oriented feminism (it seems almost slanderous today to speak of recipes being handed down from mother to daughter), to the wholesale rejection of the idea of a distinctive American culture, including the (admittedly slender) culinary one.
Of all the arguments against fast food, the strongest and most obvious is the one Schlosser does not and seemingly cannot make: that its popularity represents a failure not of market capitalism but of taste. In fact, he summarily dismisses any such thesis as the carping of elitists. “The aesthetics of fast food,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “are of much less concern to me than its impact upon the lives of ordinary Americans, both as workers and consumers.” And besides, he adds, his populist instincts momentarily getting the better of his anti-capitalist ones, fast food tastes “pretty good.”
Well, taken in moderation, fast food is undoubtedly harmless, and only marginally less healthful than the food served at the family-run diners of old. It can also satisfy particular cravings for fat, sugar, and salt. But as compared with what does it taste “pretty good”? This is a question Schlosser is unequipped to answer, and perhaps even to ask, though it would lead to a much more nuanced and interesting discussion of the pros and cons of a fast-food nation. And in the meantime, in the person of the big, evil, multinational corporation, a more convenient target lies at hand.
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