Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to
the World
Review by Sidney Mintz
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to
the World (New York: Allen Lane), 365pp.
Fast Food Nation is about food, its production and consumption. It
is also about an America Triumphant over all competing political philosophies:
rich, powerful and confident – yet often mean-spirited and scared. Eric Schlosser
provides a view of the country and its people that is both rich and disturbing.
He has a strong sense of place. We see his subjects where they live and work;
a rancher in Colorado shows how urban run-off has destroyed a creek running
through his land; a young woman rushes to work at a fast-food restaurant; a
third person stands knife in had, on the killing floor of a corporate abattoir
in a Midwestern town, spattered with animal blood and entrails. Those who have
not visited the United States may get a new sense here of what it is like.
One grasps the rapidity with which the physical landscape is transformed, then
almost as quickly abandoned or rebuilt; the easy movement of foreign newcomers
into all parts of the country; what people must do to stay alive and to get
ahead; the pervasiveness of automobiles; the inescapable need for money. For
the astonishing openness of American society is matched by a good-humoured but
cruel unconcern about what happens to people, to their limbs, their brains,
their children, if they are powerless and if they falter.
Fast food here is seen as a distinctively American property. Schlosser implied
that if we understand it, we may understand America. Yet fast food was not
invented by Americans. People have been eating it for centuries, and probably
millennia. Anyone who watches cooks at work in the canoes on Lake Xochimilco,
or on the kerbsides of busy New Delhi streets, or in the market squares and
subway stations of Hong Kong’s New Territories, know that. But something special
happened in the American case. Americans linked fast food to an entirely mobile
clientele. Its outlets are not integral parts of neighbourhoods so much as
highly efficient vending places, sited at crossroads in parking lots. Food
is standardized in every way possible, so that two of each item – hamburgers,
chips, whatever – are identical. And the simplicity of food preparation has been
so perfected that the labour force which delivers the food has become as interchangeable
as the food itself.
For corporate owners of brands, franchising – essentially riskless – became the
chief way to get the best sales results; fast labour turnover actually made
labour cheaper. Such economic efficiency underlined the pointlessness of teaching
any but the barest of skills to employees. The labour force, other than for
its immediacy and abundance, has no value at all; the more abundant it is, the
less it is valued. It is estimated today that between 6 and 9 million illegal
immigrants provide brawn for the American economy, hidden among more millions
of legal immigrant workers: fruit-pickers, busboys, dishwashers, ditch-diggers,
parking and gas station attendants, sweepers, gardening assistants, fast-food
service providers, meat-cutters. There is an erroneous public assumption in
the United States that these illegal immigrants are doing something illegal
beyond simply being there. Several states, however, have now approved the issuing
of driving licences to them; and there is even a movement to legalize them all.
Though the possibility that the illegals might be sent home one day is a capitalist’s
nightmare, there is not the slightest incentive to educate them. Because America
is prosperous, democratic and hospitable in ways that make it more attractive
than the older European societies, people continue to come. No matter how poor
one is, one’s children can grow up there to become physicians, professors, Congressmen,
Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even Secretaries of State. The dream
is fulfilled just often enough to keep it vibrantly alive in the mind of the
wage-slave who serves at the local fast-food outlet. Sociological research
has shown that managerial experience in fast-food restaurants is valuable for
a fraction of those who pass through them as employees. It does not work the
same way for the vast majority, who are young, usually poorly educated, often
members of minorities, and commonly, non English-speaking. The same seems true
for the meat-cutting and poultry industries that supply so much of the raw animal
protein for fast-food enterprises.
These circumstances bear an unappetizing resemblance to what happened on the
sugar-and-slave plantations in the New World. For abolitionists, putting an
end to the trade – not slavery itself, but simply the slave trade – was more than
a step towards total abolition. Cutting off the supply of labour, they reasoned
rightly, would materially benefit the enslaved. Before the trade ended, a planter
could calmly calculate the gain or loss involved in the purchase of a new slave,
while working to death one he already owned. One of Schlosser’s stories concerns
Iowa-born Kenny, whose industry, bravery and loyalty to his meat-packing company
have left him crippled and penniless after several accidents a work. As with
the sugar planters’ enthusiasm for Irish debt servants and Indian or Chinese
contract labourers, the meat entrepreneurs are equal-opportunity employers,
prepared to expend native-born Americans with the same sense of fair play that
they show to immigrants.
Schlosser also describes the unhealthy relations between government, labour
and the consumer. The sphere of regulation encompasses food safety as well
as the safeguarding of the labour force. Today, The Occupational Health and
Safety Administration is not only undermanned, but also quietly discouraged
from imposing safety rules which might slow production. The Food and Drug Administration
and the United States Department of Agriculture are unable properly to oversee
food production and handling. Declining surveillance of foods and food workers
is repeatedly advocated on now-familiar grounds: getting Big Government out
of the way. There is evidence that the abuses to be found in the fast-food
industries are made possible by collusive supervision, understaffed and underpaid
inspectors, extensive lobbying, “contributions” to politicians, and government
subsidies to industry.
Fast-food industries are children of the post-war automotive age. In the United
States, historically low prices for land (and later for fossil fuels) were matched
over time by enormous agricultural and water subsidies in the West and, after
the Second World War, federally financed road construction throughout the country.
A vast transformation of the entire US infrastructure helped to make the car
inescapable. In this light, the view of the fast-food system as a natural outcome
of the automotive miracle, the wondrous application of technology to human food
habits, and the triumph of rugged individualism seems naïve. “For better or
for worse,” Schlosser writes, “legislation passed by Congress has played a far
more important role in shaping the economic history of the postwar era than
any free market forces.”
Schlosser finally suggests what he thinks can be done in reaction to the fast-food
complex. He tells us about a Colorado cattleman who raises his animals as free-range,
grass-fed beef; about a Colorado restaurant owner who makes his own delicious – and
commercially successful – hamburgers and fries. Schlosser puts his faith in an
aroused citizenry, as well as in healther, tastier and more distinctive products.
Recent reactions by American agro-industrial complexes to European and Asian
resistance to GM foods suggest that consumers may be able to influence corporate
behaviour (though for how long, and in what degree, remains in great doubt).
By voting with careful attention to the issues, they may be able to influence
regulatory policies, too. Schlosser also addressed his government. He want
no more advertising campaigns aimed at children, but more safety regulation
of food production, more protection for workers, more attention to the safety
of the food itself.
Reprinted from the T L S, 14 September 2001
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