Book of the Month May 2005

Book of the Month

Frying Ronald, Jack, Wendy and the Colonel
by Andrew Begg
May 2005

Fast Food Nation
What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World
by Eric Schlosser
Penguin, 386 pages, 2002, ISBN 0-141-00687-0,
£7.99, available at www.amazon.co.uk

“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 Eric Schlosser, in the closing pages of Fast Food Nation. “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.” Schlosser has spent the last 300-odd pages (the book also has 64 pages of notes, an exhaustive bibliography and index) skewering the fast food producers and the takeaway mentality they have instilled in us, and holding them accountable for the fact that this generation will be the first of the last several to die at an earlier age than the previous generation.
Fast Food Nation could well have been a companion reader to the recent feature film Super Size Me, but in fact it is much more than that. Schlosser’s study first appeared as a two-part article in Rolling Stone, which generated more letters than any other piece in the magazine in the 1990s. Schlosser expanded the two articles into a comprehensively researched work that has become one of the canons of modern counterculture and a nightmare for PR departments.

Whereas 25 years ago just a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children, it was during the 1980s that working parents decided to spend more money on their offspring. After largely ignoring children, Madison Avenue began to refocus towards them and an increasing number of large advertising agencies established children’s divisions within their organisations. They came to believe what Ray Kroc and Walt Disney had believed many years previously – that a child’s brand loyalty began as early as the age of two, and an emerging kiddy population of pre-teens was ripe for exploitation. (This was also the case with some cigarette companies – the “Joe Camel” ads for the Camel brand showed how easily children can be influenced by the right corporate mascot. A 1991 survey showed that nearly all 6-year-olds could identify Joe Camel and Camel represented one-third of cigarettes illegally sold to minors, until the ad campaign was discontinued.)

Schlosser presents a litany of accusations against the fast food companies and their practices: marketing to children, establishing the servitude mentality of franchising, manipulating a minimum wage workforce comprising people that can’t get work elsewhere, such as students and immigrants by withholding medical benefits, and encouraging turnover to deter unionisation while taking full advantage of government subsidies for nonexistent “training.”

But domination of Western eating habits was not enough and fast food companies are nothing if not opportunistic. Several months after the fall of the Berlin Wall McDonalds announced its first restaurant in the former Iron Curtain, which would be put up in Plauen, a nondescript town on the wrong side of the wall. As statues of Lenin were being taken down across Eastern Germany and then Eastern Europe, statues of Ronald McDonald were going up. One of the books most memorable images is of Mikhail Gorbachev addressing delegates at a fast food convention in Las Vegas.

Schlosser also visits scientists called “flavourists” – the people who give food their flavour – in vast, Willy Wonka-type factories, and who, bent over Bunsen burners and mixing chemicals, can recreate the taste of anything from banana to vanilla malt to roast potatoes, always keeping in mind the critical sensation known in the industry as “mouthfeel.”

Schlosser’s style is in no way preachy. He is a journalist, but writes in a novelistic manner that is backed up by a mountain of facts and statistics and quotes from many industry sources, documents that were never intended to be read by the public. Among them is the fact that the ‘smell’ of strawberries in McDonald’s milkshakes results from an interaction of 350 different chemicals, that perfectly formed fries are got by shooting potatoes through a grid of blades at a speed of 117 feet per second, and that none of the workers in McDonald’s approximately 15,000 restaurants in North America are represented by a union.

Ultimately though our decision to buy junk food is one of choice, and Schlosser points out that the people running these companies are not bad men – rather, they are businessmen and are only giving consumers what they want. If demand for, say, free range beef and organically grown chickens were strong enough, then they will instruct their suppliers accordingly. The book finishes on a note of hope: “People can be fed without being fattened or deceived. This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense … a view of food as more than just fuel. Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.”