Jenyfer Matthews

One of the perks of working at the library is being able to borrow books, some of which I stumble across as I’m re-shelving the returns. I just finished reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2001), a book I first found last spring while it was on reserve for a class. I thumbed through the foreword while working at the circulation desk and was hooked from the first paragraph so of course I grabbed it last week when I found it back in regular circulation.

As fascinating as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation book is not about calories and fat content and reporting how unhealthy fast food is. It’s a dense read, each paragraph – each sentence – is simply brimming with information, starting with the history of fast food restaurants in the post World War II period. A classic example of the American dream, the men behind these modern empires started out with next to nothing but an idea and managed to take the idea of cheap food and kitchen efficiency to startling new levels.

But that’s just the beginning. The book goes on to describe how once these new restaurants took hold and gained popularity, they had a tremendous impact on farming, ranching, and meat packing industries. So voracious was the fast food industry’s appetite for potatoes and beef that the only way for the agriculture industry to keep up was to themselves apply many of those same principals of efficiency to their own products in an effort to keep up with the demand.

You might assume that with such high demand would come higher prices, but it didn’t happen that way in farming. In an effort to keep up and make more money, each farmer worked independently to produce a greater yield. So successful were they that it drove prices down. Of course it’s not that simple either – over the years huge agro-companies have grown to mammoth proportions and diversified, crushing individual farmers and ranchers in the process.

What made this book so interesting to me was not only the lesson in national economics but the human casualties in the industrialization of such large sectors of American society, starting with the people who work in the restaurants. The fast food industry typically only pays minimum wage and has actively (and successfully) fought any increases in minimum wage for years in an effort to keep their profit margins higher. And who usually works at these jobs? Unskilled workers, often teenagers, but also recent (or illegal) immigrants, all of whom are vulnerable members of society. Restaurant managers often receive annual bonuses for keeping labor costs low and they have established methods to do so. At best they “stroke” an employee, giving them praise and inculcating a feeling of being an important member of the team to manipulate employees into agreeing to work longer than their scheduled shift, with no extra pay. At worst, managers have been caught deliberately scheduling shifts to start and stop at busy times, forcing workers to stay over time during the rush, again with no extra pay.

Parallel situations have developed at slaughterhouses and meat packing plants as well. In an effort to maximize profits, the line speeds in both slaughterhouses and meat packing plants have increased – a dangerous practice from both the perspectives of the workers who are often injured by the knives they wield and the machinery they work with but also for the end consumer who may well end up with tainted products as a result of poor safety practices. Meat packing used to be a fairly skilled and highly paid profession. With industrialization, the big businesses have turned it into just another assembly line job, paid the minimum they can get away with and staffed with unskilled workers who have few other choices. As you might expect, the injury rate at a slaughterhouse or meat packing plant is high – not only from lacerations or accidents with machinery but also from repetitive stress injuries. Plant managers often receive bonuses based on low injury rate so many injuries go unreported on any official records.

If the working conditions of the people don’t move and disgust you, let’s move on to the animals. Aside from the much less than humane treatment they receive in the industrial feedlots, what the cattle are fed is horrifying. Cattle are ruminants and as such are intended to eat a variety of grasses. In feedlots they are fed whatever will fatten them up the fastest. In the past that list has included livestock wastes such as the remains of dead sheep and dead cattle and millions of dead cats and dogs purchased from animal shelters until the FDA banned such practices in the wake of fears over the spread of mad cow disease. Current regulations however still allow cattle to be fed dead pigs and dead horses as well as dead poultry, cattle blood, and waste products from poultry plants including sawdust and old newspapers that have been used as litter and which contain chicken manure, a source of dangerous bacteria, and parasites such as salmonella and tapeworms in addition to antibiotic residues, arsenic and heavy metals. (pp. 202-203).

What infuriated and disgusted me the most in this book was the underlying greed that was at the root of all of the worst practices in these industries. Here is a short list of examples that jumped out at me:

• No source of potential revenue goes unnoticed. In 1973, amid a bitter union organizing drive in San Francisco, the labor commissioner discovered and ordered a McDonald’s to stop accepting tips at its restaurants, since customers were being misled: the tips being left for crew members were actually being kept for the company.(p.76)

• Taxpayers are subsidizing the fast food industry’s high turnover rate. Through federal programs, fast food chains have claimed tax credits up to $2400 per each new low-income worker they hire. A 1996 investigation by the US Dept of Labor concluded that 92% of these workers would have been hired anyway and that their jobs were part-time, provided little training, and came with no benefits. The extremely high turnover rate in the industry simply means that the fast food companies can claim this credit for each new low income worker they hire. (p. 72-73)

• Pressure for ever increasing profits often drives companies to criminal activities. In 1989, ConAgra was found guilty of having systematically cheated chicken growers in Alabama: by tampering with trucks and scales and over an eight-year period 45,256 truckloads of full-grown birds were deliberately misweighed to make the birds seem lighter at ConAgra processing plants in the state. (p. 159)

• Meat processing plants deliberately recruit and exploit vulnerable groups. In September of 1994, GFI America, Inc. – a leading supplier of frozen hamburger patties to Dairy Queen, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, and the federal school lunch program – needed workers for a plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It sent recruiters to Eagle Pass, Texas near the Mexican border, promising steady work and housing. The recruiters hired thirty-nine people, rented a bus, drove the new workers from Texas to Minnesota, then dropped them off across the street from People Serving People, a homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis. (p. 163)

• The school lunch program in the US might be the most dangerous place to eat. A 1983 investigation by NBC News reported that the Cattle King Packing Company – at the time, the USDA’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s – routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King’s facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. (p. 218)

• Just cleaning the meat isn’t the answer. Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat & Poultry, opposes the idea of irradiation to sanitize meat because he believes it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods and allow unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says. (p. 218)

• Eating at home isn’t necessarily safer since the meat is still processed at the same places. Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry and extremely dangerous microbe [e coli 157:H7], infectious at an extremely low dose. The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.” (p. 221)

In the end, I can’t help wondering why. Why is it so important to squeeze out every single penny in profit at such a high cost to the employees and to national health? These corporations make billions of dollars in profit every year, would it really hurt any one of them to ensure better working conditions for their employees and enforce stricter safety measures? To allow farmers and ranchers to make a decent living? To feed cattle grass instead of other dead animals and biohazardous trash? The politicians who are out there shouting their patriotic slogans and calling for tax breaks are the same ones who are in the pockets of these big companies and often benefiting tremendously from turning a blind eye or flat out ignoring what is really going on. With the franchising of these restaurants internationally, the US is not only exporting a business model and a type of food, but all of these associated injustices as well. I’m not suggesting that all fast food restaurants should all be driven out of business, just that as powerful as they are, they need to take more responsibility for the power they possess.

If all of that wasn’t enough to turn your stomach, think about this: the fast food industry deliberately markets its product to children. Not only so the children will push their parents into coming to the restaurants and spend money as frequently as possible (have to collect ALL those toys after all), but also so that they can inculcate brand loyalty at an early age and thus ensure the next generation of customers. Americans are already some of the fattest and unhealthiest people in the industrialized world. Somehow fast food doesn’t seem like such a bargain anymore.

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