Fast Food Fracas

After a brief history of the people who began the major fast food corporations, Schlosser illustrates that Ronald McDonald is not our kids’ friend. He begins by criticizing how the fast foods corporations, as well as other big companies, target the innocent minds of children. He points out how the “fantasy world of McDonald Land borrowed a good deal form Walt Disney’s magic Kingdom.” Indeed, many of the creators of McDonald Land were formally contributors to Disney movies, songs and attractions.  Schlosser’s point is that whereas Disneyland makes profits by targeting kids for entertainment, fast food corporations profit from kids eating fat, sugar and possibly salmonella bacteria. 

 Schlosser also is striking when he points out that the fast food market is making its biggest profit on what children use as 9 percent of their daily caloric intake: soda. Schlosser does a good job of giving many facts in this section of the book yet the reader may feel as if these facts just keep dragging on.

Schlosser does not subscribe to the idea that fast food is a healthful way for teen-agers to learn about work. Schlosser states that the “fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion to its workers then any other American industry.” Meanwhile, between 1968 and 1990 when the growth of fast food industry was at its peak, the value of the minimum wage relative to inflation declined economically by 40 percent—as well as psychologically. Furthermore, around 60 large food service companies wanted to eliminate the federal minimum wage altogether. In the meantime, says Schlosser, “The earnings of restaurant companies executives have risen considerably.” Schlosser goes into great detail about how fast food companies discourage unionization, as well as how having low-paid workers reduces safety on the job and even encourages “inside” crimes. Schlosser does a phenomenal job illustrating that teen-agers should not be the fast food industries donkeys.

Schlosser really cuts to the chase when he begins to discuss corporate consolidation and price fixing. He discusses how independent ranchers, especially in the West, have always prided themselves on being independent. He goes on to say that today ranchers face unprecedented problems, among which is companies such as McDonalds, the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, buying from fewer and fewer meat suppliers: going from 175 local suppliers in 1978 to only five a few years later. A hundred years ago, says Schlosser, “American ranchers found themselves in a similar predicament.”  In 1917, the Beef Trust, comprising the five largest meat packing companies, controlled 55 percent of the market. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 had had little affect so far. But in 1917, the FTC concluded that the five major meat packing firms were guilty of price fixing, collusion and sharing secret information. For the next 50 years, says Schlosser, the market place became relatively competitive. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan—the president who could not figure out why unemployment was so high because he saw so many jobs offered in the classified section of the newspaper every morning—allowed the top four meat packing firms “to merge and combine without fear of antitrust enforcement.” As a result, today these top four firms slaughter about 84 percent of the nation’s cattle.  Thus, things are even worse than they were in the days of Upton Sinclair. By 1999, three Archer Daniels Midlands (“the supermarket to the world”) officials had been sent to federal prison “for conspiring with foreign rivals to control the international market. . . .” 

One of the most sensational by-products of all this corporate manipulation, Schlosser asserts, is the contamination of our food, not to mention the corporations' inhumane treatment of both meat packers and animals. Most people remember the outbreak in 1993 of the bacterium E. coli for which Jack in the Box got blamed. Schlosser goes into painful detail about the horrific symptoms this bacterium causes, particularly in children. He goes on to explain how unsanitary conditions in both cattle yard and restaurant, as well as infusion of antibiotics into feed grain, have led to various public health problems from E. coli to Salmonella. However, this is only half the shock: The meat packing industry’s treatment of its workers, increasingly made up of immigrants, and animals is just as unjustifiable. 

Specifically, in Chapter 8, Schlosser describes a “field trip” he took to a slaughterhouse “somewhere in the High Plains.” He relates the so-called “common injuries suffered by meat packers,” such as lacerations, tendonitis, and cumulative trauma disorders, which Schlosser states occur 33 times more often than the national average. He tells of in-house doctors and nurses who represent their companies better than they represent their patients, and how workers who refuse to cooperate with companies’ medical policies are punished. Finally, Schlosser graphically describes the abject poverty these workers’ low wages force them to live in. Due to this improvised lifestyle, crimes naturally go up in the towns where these workers live.

Most vividly of all, Schlosser details the inhumane treatment of pigs and cattle, which are often improperly slaughtered by overtired workers and therefore are literally dissected alive. This reviewer will never pass a feed lot off of the highway with the same emotions again.

Some of Schlosser’s solutions may seem to border on socialism. He clearly favors massive government intervention and regulation of the meat packing and fast food industries in a manner reminiscent of Sinclair, although in his epilogue he does mention how smaller, employee-friendly companies such as In-N-Out Burger manage to serve clean, high quality food at a profit, while treating their employees humanely. In addition, Schlosser encourages readers to take matters into their own hands and boycott their local McDonalds. 

But perhaps what is most surprising about Schlosser thesis is about how “socialistic” the behavior of some of our cooperation’s is. Schlosser states “having centralized American agriculture, the large agribusinesses firms are now attempting, like Soviet commissars, to stifle criticism of their policies.”  He writes of  “veggie libel laws,” which make it illegal to criticize agricultural commodities, and cites the famous lawsuits against Oprah Winfrey by the meat packing industry, which Winfrey won.

The book’s shortcomings, its abundance of statistics, are nonetheless impressive and necessary for Schlosser to prove his point. But overall, this book is very informative while remaining entertaining, not to mention chilling.