Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser available @ Amazon.com
The whole time I was reading this book I kept picturing Ray Kroc (the founding father of McDonalds) as played by Gene Wilder screaming, “It’s alive, it’s alive.”
Unlike Young Frankenstein there is nothing humorous or entertaining about the monster that has been unleashed on the American consumer and that is rapidly spreading to the rest of the world. This monster is fast food.
Fast Food was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. It has been translated into at least 20 languages. There is a good reason for this. It is a very well written book that documents a pernicious problem in our society, fast food and all it has spawned.
I say pernicious because of its influence on American culture. It many ways Generica can be directly linked back to McDonalds and their insistence on uniformity. There have been a multitude of imitators in the fast food industry. Many other retailers have sought to migrate the McDonald model to their product. Drop me off in a suburban shopping district or residential area and I would have a hard time picking out where I was. I would have a hard time identifying how it was different from the last place I had been. To me this is very sad that we have lost this diversity.
In their quest for a uniform product it has accelerated the consolidation of food processing and the elimination of the family farm. It has help promote the nightmare that is factory farming.
In their quest for cheap sourcing it was spawned horrible working conditions in the meatpacking industrial. Along with that it has sought to keep wages low, fighting any increase in minimum wages. It has so compartmentalize their store operations that the workers learn no real skills, and fast food restaurants do not care about turnover.
One only has to walk out the door and look at our youth to see another result of the fast food mentality. It is the epidemic of obesity that has swept this country, especially the younger generation. These companies, especially McDonalds, aim their advertising at children. One of the points the book makes is that Americans spend more on fast food than they do higher education. How upside down is that?
To me, this is a tale of what happens when corporations and the people behind them care only for profit. If there is every a consideration of how they are affecting society, labor forces, and individuals it is hard to tell. There is something inherently wrong in any organization that exists simply for profit. This is not what life, business, and society should be about.
One of the scariest points made in the book is that McDonalds actually has more influence/control over the meatpacking industry than does our government. The USDA, FDA, and other agencies that we think are protecting us and our food supply are painted as being powerless. It was only when these chains begin to worry about E. coli in their hamburgers affecting their profit did the meatpackers change. Up until that point they had been fighting the government tooth and nail. Unfortunately, this improved “sanitation” only applies to hamburgers sold to these big companies. McDonalds and the other large chains with their gargantuan shopping carts are the real power to effect change in this system. That depresses the hell out of me.
If the fast food giants come across as immoral, the meatpacking industry comes through antisocial villains. We are not that far removed from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book, The Jungle. From ethical and health reasons, one has to really consider hard if you should eat any meat produced from the current system. We could be doing better, there are European countries that do, but the industry and the Republican Party fight hard against changing the current dysfunctional, dangerous system. It is profits no matter what.
My mother used to irritate the snot out of us boys with a song she used to sing. What would trip the song was our “wanters” getting out of whack. Maybe I need to send my mother into a few corporate board rooms. Somehow we have to get past the mentality that it is just business, and remember our humanity. Sigh.
Do yourself a favor before you visit another fast food restaurant, or purchase more factory farmed meat, read this book. It will change your outlook.