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Fast Food Nation "Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. (... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. " - Adam Nicolson, Daily Telegraph ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting.
His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. Fast food. It is fast, and fast is generally seen as good. Enough people are willing to accept it as food.
It is convenient, apparently (fast, generally close at hand, of uniform and predictable "quality" everywhere). It is, generally, cheap - at least nominally (although, as Eric Schlosser points out, there are many hidden costs). Everyone loves fast food. Eric Schlosser's book promises to tell the dark side of the all-American meal - and he delivers. It is, by and large, a sordid, ugly tale, leaving a nasty aftertaste. Schlosser is not the first to explore the subject, but he does provide an up-to-date, thorough, and well-documented account.
Given the popularity of fast food, and the amount of it ingested by Americans (and, increasingly, people all over the world) this is information that desperately needs to be spread among consumers everywhere (though not many people seem eager to hear it). Schlosser's book covers much of fast food culture. Among other things, he discusses: how and why it developed, current labor practices in fast food establishments, how the taste of food can now be manipulated, contemporary agribusiness, federal regulations (and lack thereof), television advertising, health issues, and the spread of fast food abroad. 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 1990 s, 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. So let's go back to the beginnings of this industry, where and when fast food really began. It really comes out of Southern California and the post-World War II era. Southern California and the Los Angeles area was the first part of the world that had a car culture, and really pioneered a whole life revolving around cars, and the fast food industry came out of that culture.
It started with small drive-ins where you roll up to the restaurant and a 'car hop' (a waitress) would come and bring you your food. And the great innovation of the McDonald brothers in 1948 was to bring enormous economies of scale to the drive-in restaurant. By firing all their car hops and by persuading people it made sense to walk up to the counter themselves and get the food, they came up with a whole new revolutionary way to organize a restaurant kitchen. Is that akin do you think to what happened in other industries earlier in the century? Absolutely. It's really a Forest system, an assembly line system, that they brought for the first time to a restaurant kitchen, and Southern California in this period is really an interesting culture.
It's not only involving our suburban car culture, but it embodies in many ways this whole Eisenhower era - faith in technology and science. Those Disney visions of some day everyone driving in a flying car and having a house made out of plastic and nuclear-powered boats, and the fast food industry really comes out of that place, time and mentality. I think that the whole idea and ideology are still very much present in the fast food industry when you go into one of their kitchens The McDonald brothers were the great innovators, they created a new system for mass-producing food, and Ray Kroc was a salesman. He was selling milkshake makers and he had these customers in the little town of San Bernadeno, California, who were ordering a lot of milkshake makers and he decided to see their restaurant. He saw the McDonald brothers' restaurant and had this vision of a McDonald's at every intersection across this great land.
He became the promoter, the salesman and really the person responsible for spreading McDonald's far and wide. In the end he bought them out for a relatively small sum, given how big the company had become. They were allowed to keep one restaurant and as soon as he bought them up he opened a brand new McDonald's across from their restaurant and put them out of business. And the other great pioneer who was around at that same time was the legendary, Colonel Sanders. In his 60 s he had a secret recipe for his fried chicken, and he went from restaurant to restaurant selling it.
He hooked up with some people who thought it would be a good idea to start Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and in the early 50 s they started franchising it. He was the perfect spokesman because even though he wasn't really a colonel he dressed up in this outfit of an old fashioned Kentucky colonel, from there the chain really grew, and it was one of the first big franchising successes and at one point was bigger than McDonald's. Both of these corporations became huge during the 1960 s. What was the cause of that? Well if you look in particular at the growth of McDonald's, it was started around 1948. The franchising begins in the mid 1950 s and by 1968, after 20 years of existence, there are only a thousand McDonald's nation-wide.
Today, there are about 30, 000 McDonald's. When you look at that huge leap in growth, one of the crucial determinants in the United States at the same time was the decline in the real value of the minimum wage. The minimum wage peaks in the United States around 1968 - 1970, and then with inflation it declines by about 40 % over the next two decades. It's no coincidence that McDonald's fastest period of growth in the United States is as wages are falling, because their business model relied on large numbers of unskilled and low-paid workers Was there a secret marketing tool? Absolutely and Ray Crock, very early on, had the notion that they should target children with their marketing. He said that when a child enters his restaurant he or she usually brings one or two adults with them, and that is a very simple way of increasing the average check size.
Ray Kroc knew Walt Disney, they were in the same Ambulance Corp during World War I and he was clearly very influenced by Disney and Disney's efforts to market towards children. If you look at the early days of Ronald McDonald and McDonald Land, they borrowed a fair amount from Disney, and people who had worked for Disney, and it's not coincidence that those two companies now have a marketing alliance because their sensibility is very, very similar Moving on a bit, going into the 1970 s, that was the period when McDonald's in particular turned itself into a global corporation. I think in the 1970 s it began very slowly and very modestly to expand overseas, in Germany, in the UK, in Canada. You " ll find that the expansion overseas really accelerates in the 1980 s and 90 s and the very simple explanation is that the market for fast food had become increasingly saturated in the United States. They had built McDonald's at most of the best intersections and locations and there is an enormous growth imperative in this industry of executives.
Leading executives are quoted as saying "grow or die", and for these big companies to grow they had to find new markets. That's why McDonald's can be found on just about every continent and that's where a great deal of their efforts are being expended now. Let's talk about that agricultural system the effect the huge growth of McDonald's in particular had on American agriculture. Central to the success of McDonald's, as envisioned by Kroc, was that everything would look and taste exactly the same at every location - he was a great believer in uniformity and conformity. Now that has one effect when you " re talking about what a restaurant's architecture looks like and what that means for the American landscape, but when it comes to food it has a profound effect on how food is produced. Because if they want their potatoes to taste everywhere exactly the same, or their ground beef to taste everywhere exactly the same, they need suppliers who can produce that on a large scale.
And so the effect of the fast food industry in the United States has been really to promote concentration in agriculture, to promote large-scale industrialized agriculture that can make sure that a potato tastes exactly the same in New York as it does in Oregon. The ripple...
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