Welcome to Burger World
by Steve Weinberg Posted Mon, Jan 1 2001
When reporter Eric Schlosser began investigating the impact of the fast food industry on society, he had no idea how many borders he would have to cross.
The big chains like McDonald’s are looking overseas for much of their future growth; the market for fast food in the United States is more or less satiated. A decade ago, McDonald’s operated about 3,000 restaurants outside the United States. Today it operates about 15,000 restaurants in about 120 countries.
This sort of saturation marketing is changing the cultures of nations like Germany, wiping out traditional cuisine and promoting obesity and other health problems.
Schlosser’s dogged reporting and fine writing would be treasured by fellow journalists in any nation. Some of his discoveries seem surreal. At a New Jersey company called International Flavors and Fragrance, Schlosser met with a scientist named Brian Grainger. He is called a flavorist, a chemist whose job is to take brand-name fast-food items and artificially give them their distinctive aromas. Grainger carried a dozen small glass bottles from his lab. He told Schlosser to dip a fragrance testing filter into each one.
“I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles,” Schlosser reports. “I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sautéed onions and shrimp. Grainger’s most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. It smelled like someone in the room was flipping burgers on a hot grill.”
If Schlosser is correct—and there is no reason to think otherwise—the fast food industry, led by McDonald’s, has:
- Served meals leading to hospitalization of thousands, the majority of them children, with hundreds of them dying because of food they consumed. – Been complicitous in the consolidation of the beef, poultry and potato industries, causing huge numbers of family farms to suffer, which has apparently contributed to farmer suicides. – Played a role in the hiring of illegal immigrants to work in unsafe meat-packing facilities, resulting in crippling or fatal workplace injuries by the thousands. – Seduced teenagers all over the United States into working lousy hours for lousy wages, which takes them away from schoolwork and leads some to drop out before high school graduation. – Promoted eating habits almost certain to cause obesity, leading to an illness explosion in every state and, increasingly, in other nations.
Sensational stuff, for sure, but Schlosser is rarely shrill without evidence to back up the charges.
Furthermore, the strident passages result less from the superheated language of so many other exposés than from outrage that comes from his head as well as his heart. Schlosser is an investigative reporter who is cerebral as well as angry.
As he says, “This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture.”
Schlosser heaps plenty of blame on the fast food restaurant chains, the multinational companies that supply the food and the cowardly governmental officials who look the other way as national health declines. But he never forgets the millions of consumers who flock every day to McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, etc. share the blame.
Schlosser introduces complications into his morality play of a book. As he should. Take these three sentences, from page 241: “A number of attempts to introduce healthy dishes (such as the McLean Deluxe, a hamburger partly composed of seaweed) have proven unsuccessful. A taste for fat developed in childhood is difficult to lose as an adult. At the moment, the fast food industry is heavily promoting menu items that contain bacon.”
Explicated one by one, here is the complicated message those three sentences convey: The fast food industry is not all bad because it tries to promote healthier eating from time to time. But many consumers are not interested in eating healthier food. That is partly their fault, but partly the fault of the fast food executives who worked hard to addict consumers to fat at young ages. In the end, it is about money because fatty bacon is easy to sell at a huge mark up.
Fast Food Nation is Schlosser’s first book. It started as several articles for Rolling Stone magazine. In book form, it reads like a bunch of not-so-well-connected magazine articles. Each of the 12 chapters, including the introduction and the epilogue, can pretty much stand on its own.
Probably the best way to read this book is a chapter a day. It’s not that the going is heavy. The reason for reading in moderation is the upsetting nature of each chapter. More than one a day, just like more than one Whopper a day, could be enough to make a consumer sick.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.