Author: Eric Schlosser
Review: SF Chronicle
Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "The American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible, and that ultimately calls for the boycott of one of the most powerful and lucrative industries in the United States.
This is the stuff of PR department nightmares. Exhaustively researched, frighteningly convincing, this book seeks no less than to peel back the smiley- face image that the fast-food industry has worn for decades and reveal what lurks behind the Happy Meals, secret sauces and fries. Schlosser's subtitle pretty much says it all: "The Dark Side of the All-American Meal."
"Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases," writes the National Magazine Award-winning Schlosser. "They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. . . . The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten."
Beginning as a two-part article in Rolling Stone that generated the most mail of any piece published by the magazine during the 1990s, Schlosser's journalism successfully expands into a comprehensive, sobering book-length account of the historical and cultural rise of fast food, an industry that within a relatively brief period of time has "helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. "
As if channeling the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson, as well as drawing upon the work of such contemporary cultural critics as Mike Davis, Schlosser traces the "hamburger hegemony" from its current globalization back to its origins in postwar Southern California, where brothers Richard and "Mac" McDonald's San Bernardino restaurant eventually became one of the world's most famous brand names.
But it wasn't until Ray Kroc, "a Willy Loman who finally managed to hit it big in his early sixties," bought the right to franchise McDonald's that the Golden Arches and the companies that followed began to spring up all over the country, and then beyond. Interestingly, the men who created these empires were traveling salesmen, high school dropouts and iconoclasts -- which is ironic, considering the homogenization and regimentation their companies imposed with fanatical rigor.
With an unapologetically leftist perspective, Schlosser presents a litany of charges against the fast-food companies and their practices: marketing to children, establishing the indentured servitude of franchising, manipulating a minimum-wage workforce (primarily young, unskilled, recent immigrants) by withholding medical benefits, perpetuating turnover to deter unionization, yet taking full advantage of government subsidies for nonexistent "training." These are just a few of the greed-is-good tactics employed to keep profits high.
What's most revealing is how the fast food industry has single-handedly altered American agriculture. Companies such as McDonald's, the nation's largest purchaser of meat, have encouraged consolidation and centralized production. Today very few companies supply the vast majority of the nation's beef, poultry and potatoes, the staples of the fast food diet; small businesses, ranchers and farmers are disappearing. Most alarming, says Schlosser, is how changes in food production and cattle raising have increased the likelihood of widespread outbreaks of food-borne pathogens, such as E. coli.
Yet despite high-profile scares such as the 1993 Jack in the Box case, Schlosser contends that the real health dangers remain hidden from the general public, while the meat packing industry continues to vehemently oppose further regulation of their food safety practices. Moreover, the meat packing industry enjoys a rare immunity from federal intervention. Although the U.S. government can demand the nationwide recall of a stuffed animal or toy, according to Schlosser, "it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves. "
Schlosser's research is impressive -- statistics, reportage, first-person accounts and interviews, mixing the personal with the global. Repeatedly he returns to the bellwether town of Colorado Springs, Colo., where many of the fast food-related issues he discusses are being played out.
But of the book's many memorable images -- visits to a slaughterhouse and a Willie Wonka-like "flavor" factory, Mikhail Gorbachev addressing a fast food convention in Las Vegas, the suicide of a Colorado rancher -- none is more indelible than Schlosser's description of Eastern Germany, where "in town after town statues of Lenin have come down, and statues of Ronald McDonald have gone up."
Like other works of its ilk, "Fast Food Nation" runs long on analysis and short on solutions. Rather predictably (but certainly justifiably), Schlosser advocates greater government intervention and industry accountability. But he concludes by urging readers (that is, eaters) to send the chains a message: Stop buying what they sell.
