Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, is a book that should be handed out with every smiley Walmart grocery bag. Its argument is nothing earth-shattering: the fast food industry is bad for your health, the environment, free-market competition, labor, and small-town economics. We all know this, in that ethical, big-picture bit of our brain that gets lost under the waves of immediate gratification advertising. What Schlosser does is dig an ever-widening tunnel through all that residue of selfishness that our culture encourages, fish-hooks our sensible side, and shoves it into the sunlight.

FFN is a series of journalistic vignettes highlighting the various parts of the vast web that makes up the fast food industry. Of particular interest to me were the analyses of the power relationship between the major fast food companies (notably McDonald's) and the agricultural industry. Really, it's a one-way power relationship: what McDonald's says, the agriculture giants do. The big agricultural companies--ConAgra, Archer Daniel Midlands, IBP, and the like--are extraordinarily powerful, but not as powerful as McDonald's. Schlosser gives a fascinating example of this, showing, in fact that not only is McDonald's more powerful than the agricultural giants, it's also more powerful than the FDA.

In the late 1990s, the FDA finally bowed to consumer pressure and tried to institute a ban on feeding animal protein to "food animals" to prevent mad cow disease. (Why, incidentally, does it take fear of a human disease to make people question the wisdom of forcing cannibalism on herbivores?) The meat industry kicked up such a fuss that the ban was reduced: "Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs, and cats could no longer be fed to cattle." But they could still eat "dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants." A year later, the FDA found that nobody was paying much attention to the laws, and that cattle were still being fed other dead cattle. Enter McDonald's. Worried that their sales might drop in the U.S. as they had in Europe, McDonald's announced that it would no longer buy meat from supplies who couldn't document that they'd been following FDA regulations and whose cattle had never been fed forbidden material. Bam. Done. The companies complied without a fuss. Why? Because McDonald's is the single biggest consumer of ground beef in the world. That's not a customer they can afford to lose. Market power at work.

The story of McDonald's enforcing FDA regulations is perhaps the most important story that Schlosser tells because it leaves the reader with some optimism. Schlosser doesn't argue that we shouldn't eat fast food. He does argue that we should pay attention to the vast structures that lie beneath the shiny facade of the actual restaurant and think about all the other things we're supporting by buying paper-wrapped burgers and re-fried potatoes. And not just think, but speak. As he says somewhere, if consumers demand organic, free-range beef in their fast food burgers, eventually that's what they'll get. If they never let the companies know that they disapprove of their labor practices, environmental attitudes, hygiene, etc., it won't change. And it's the companies, perhaps sadly, that consumers need to talk to, not the government, especially the FDA, which is practically useless.

I'm babbling.

Read the book.