March 01, 2002
Fast food inevitability?
Have you ever complained to others that hamburgers don't taste as good as they did when you were a kid? It isn't just your imagination.
Do you look at the defeated, exhausted faces behind the counter at your local McDonald's and wonder where the happy, fresh-faced employees in the commercials work? Most likely, they don't exist outside the ads.
Are you an ambivalent omnivore who has for years entertained the idea of becoming a vegetarian? Fast Food Nation might finally push you over the edge.
Part corporate history, part social commentary, part modern update of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, this indictment of multinational corporations is a fascinating, though often subjective, look at the rise and ubiquity of McDonald's and its corporate cousins. Fast Food Nation gets off to a shaky start with Eric Schlosser's inclusion of statistics that sometimes stretch credulity. Schlosser states that the McDonald's Corporation creates 90 percent of the country's new jobs, citing a study by two sociologists (one of whom, ironically, is named Macdonald) whose credentials are never made explicit. Schlosser then maintains that 96 percent of America's schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald; his endnote references a survey conducted by McDonald's in 1996. Schlosser's assertion that the Golden Arches are more recognizable by the world's population than the Christian cross is based on a survey conducted among a sample group of 7,000 by the dubiously named marketing firm Sponsorship Research International.
Schlosser's sleek, fast-moving but listing ship rights itself and sets a more even course in the following chapters. By far the most compelling reading in Fast Food Nation is in chapter eight, "The Most Dangerous Job." Here Schlosser's considerable skills as an investigative reporter are evident in his interviews with dozens of slaughterhouse workers. Schlosser introduces us to employees with job titles such as "knocker" (who during an eight and a half hour shift shoots hundreds of cattle with an air-driven bolt stunner), "shackler" (who wraps chains around the legs of sometimes still twitching cattle and sends them on the assembly line) and "sticker" (who slits a jugular vein every ten seconds). Schlosser portrays a nightmarish world where the floors run ankle-deep in blood, cattle carcasses whiz by at breakneck speed, the air is punctuated by the sounds of whirring machinery and the loud pop-pop-pop of the stunner gun, and employees are in constant peril of being stabbed and dismembered while working within inches of one another with razor-sharp knives.
Fast Food Nation is powerful and compassionate in its portrayal of the workers who are cogs in the great fast food machine. Slaughterhouse workers are primarily young, female and Latino, many illegal and illiterate immigrants, and have no bargaining power to resist the frequent sexual harassment from their male supervisors. Many employees at fast food restaurants are high school students and dropouts who receive minimal job training and are often coerced into working overtime without pay. Franchise owners are treated as modern-day sharecroppers, forced to follow strict company directives and order exclusively from corporate suppliers when local suppliers might be less expensive. Many do not own the lease on their own property and can find their franchise stripped away for infractions of corporate policy. According to Schlosser, restaurant managers earn about $23,000 per year and work 50-70 hours every week with no overtime pay.
Schlosser paints a bleak picture of the world behind the Happy Meal and Ronald McDonald, but ends Fast Food Nation on a note of hope and a call to action. He describes economically feasible alternatives to the hegemony of the fast food corporate giants, restaurants such as Conway's Red Top in Colorado and In-N-Out Burger in southern California that offer high quality food at low costs while practicing environmentally responsible policies and treating employees humanely. In his concluding chapter, "Have It Your Way," Schlosser encourages citizens to put pressure on fast food companies and lobby Congress to enact the following policies:
- Ban direct advertising to children.
- End tax breaks that reward fast food chains for high employee turnover.
- Make school cafeteria food safer than the food in fast food restaurants.
- Form one central agency to inspect food, and end the current standard of dozens of competing federal agencies with limited authority and conflicting interests.
- Regulate slaughterhouses, making the meat safer and the working conditions more humane.
Corporations such as McDonald's have changed their policies in the face of bad publicity and public pressure; they no longer use polystyrene boxes and genetically engineered potatoes (in the United States, at least) after well-orchestrated campaigns by consumers. The reform of America's fast food culture, Schlosser concludes, lies ultimately in the hands of consumers.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
By Eric Schlosser. HarperCollins, 384pp. $13.95.
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