Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser.

4/5 rating. 288 pages.

Book #52 of 2021. Read July 25, 2021.

The tagline of this book is “The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” and this certainly sums up this book perfectly.

Eric takes a fascinating look through the history, and problems caused by fast food. While it is easy to look at obesity and other health-related issues that come from the immediate consumption of the salt, fat, and high calories of fast food, he goes all the way up and down the supply chain. Eric visits ranches, slaughterhouses, potato farms and processors, he talks about the franchises, he looks at the working conditions in the actual store, the advertising and much more.

Almost at every turn, the number one goal for the companies is spurred on by pure greed. They will step on anyone and everyone to earn one cent more of profit. Customers are unimportant as anything but how much they are worth to the companies. Workers are basically just used – often, in places such as slaughterhouses, until they can barely move or perform any job – then let go when they are of no more use.

This book sums up what happens when unfettered capitalism runs rampant. It’s not just the McDonald’s of the world, either. Large corporations throughout the supply chain are sending tainted meat to school cafeterias; ensuring that even an arm amputation at work will only compensate you a max of $36,000; and protecting the rights of the corporations over the rights of individuals every step of the way.

This book is appalling, informative, and disturbing, but I think it is important to see how our collective actions and apathy affect those around us. I definitely would recommend this book, but be prepared to be in utter shock at the inhumanity of a lot of it.

Quotes:

“In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars.”

“A nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature.”

“Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years.”

“The restaurant industry is now America’s largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages.”

“The roughly 3.5 million fast food workers are by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States. The only Americans who consistently earn a lower hourly wage are migrant farm workers.”

“The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week.”

“The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.”

“The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal – but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.”

“Lobbyists from the oil, tire, and automobile industries, among others, had persuaded state and federal agencies to assume that fundamental expense. Had the big auto companies been required to pay for the roads – in the same way that trolley companies had to lay and maintain track – the landscape of the American West would look quite different today.”

“In the late 1920s, General Motors secretly began to purchase trolley systems throughout the United States, using a number of front corporations. Trolley systems in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Montgomery, Alabama, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Los Angeles – more than one hundred trolley systems in all – were purchased by GM and then completely dismantled, their tracks ripped up, their overhead wires torn down.”

“Many studies had found that young children often could not tell the difference between television programming and television advertising. They also could not comprehend the real purpose of commercials and trusted that advertising claims were true.”

“The industry groups lobbied Congress to prevent any restrictions on children’s ads…”

“The typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television – roughly one and a half months of TV every year.”

“Outside of school, the typical American child spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping.”

“As American cities and towns spend less money on children’s recreation, fast food restaurants have become gathering spaces for families with young children.”

“In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks.”

“Instead of relying upon a small, stable, well-paid, and well-trained workforce, the fast food industry seeks out part-time, unskilled workers who are willing to accept low pay.”

“English is now the second language of at least one-sixth of the nation’s restaurant workers, and about one-third of that group speaks no English at all.”

“While quietly spending enormous sums on research and technology to eliminate employee training, the fast food chains have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for ‘training’ their workers.”

“Fast food restaurants had to employ a worker for only four hundred hours to receive the federal money – and then could get more money as soon as that worker quit and was replaced. American tax-payers have in effect subsidized the industry’s high turnover rate, providing company tax breaks for workers who are employed for just a few months and receive no training.”

“In the late 1990s, the real value of the U.S. minimum wage still remained about 27 percent lower than it was in the late 1960s.”

“Increasing the federal minimum wage by a dollar would add about two cents to the cost of a fast food hamburger.”

“Teenagers are far more likely to be untrained, and every year, about 200,000 are injured on the job.”

“In 1998, more restaurant workers were murdered on the job in the United States than police officers.”

“About 90 percent of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy processed food.”

“‘A free market requires many buyers as well as many sellers, all with equal access to accurate information, all entitled to trade on the same terms, and none with a big enough share of the market to influence price,’ said a report by Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs. ‘Nothing close to these conditions now exists in the cattle market.’”

“At a meeting with Japanese executives that was secretly recorded, the president of Archer Daniels Midland preached the virtues of collaboration. ‘We have a saying at this company,’ he said. ‘Our competitors are our friends, and our customers are our enemies.’”

“The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.”

“As in so many aspects of meatpacking, IBP was a trailblazer in recruiting migrant labor. The company was among the first to recognize that recent immigrants would work for lower wages than American citizens – and would be more reluctant to join unions.”

“The system now leaves countless unskilled and uneducated manual workers poorly compensated for injuries that will forever hamper their ability to earn a living. The few who win in court and receive full benefits are hardly set for life. Under Colorado’s new law, the payment for losing an arm is $36,000. An amputated finger gets you anywhere from $2,200 to $4,500, depending on which one is lost. And ‘serious permanent disfigurement about the head, face, or parts of the body normally exposed to public view’ entitles you to a maximum of $2,000.”

“The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.”

“The [beef] industry has repeatedly denied that problems exist, impugned the motives of its critics, fought vehemently against federal oversight, sought to avoid any responsibility for outbreaks of food poisoning, and worked hard to shift the costs of food safety efforts onto the general public.”

“‘There is no limit to the expense that might be put upon us,’ the Beef Trust’s Wilson said in 1906, arguing against a federal inspection plan that would have cost meatpackers less than a dime per head of cattle. ‘[Our] contention is that in all reasonableness and fairness we are paying all we care to pay.’”

“The American Meat Institute immediately filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the USDA from testing any ground beef for E. coli 0157:H7.”

“The meatpacking industry’s allies in Congress worked hard in the 1990s to thwart modernization of the nation’s meat inspection system. A great deal of effort was spent denying the federal government any authority to recall contaminated meat or impose civil fines on firms that knowingly ship contaminated products. Under current law, the USDA cannot demand a recall. It can only consult with a company that has shipped bad meat and suggest that it withdraw the meat from interstate commerce.”

“Once a company has decided voluntarily to pull contaminated meat from the market, it is under no legal obligation to inform the public – or even state health officials – that a recall is taking place.”

“Both the USDA and the meatpacking industry argue that details about where a company has distributed its meat must not be revealed in order to protect the  firm’s ‘trade secrets.’ In February of 1999, when IBP recalled 10,000 pounds of ground beef laced with small pieces of glass, the company would disclose only that the meat had been shipped to stores in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Neither IBP, nor the USDA, would provide the names of those stores.”

“The inability of the USDA to seek monetary damages from the meatpacking industry is highly unusual, given the federal government’s power to use fines as a means of regulatory enforcement in the airline, automobile, mining, steel, and toy industries. ‘We can fine circuses for mistreating elephants,’ Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman complained in 1997, ‘but we can’t fine companies that violate food-safety standards.”

“Instead, they could test for other bacteria as a broad measure of fecal contamination levels; the results of those tests would not have to be revealed to the government; and meat containing whatever organisms the tests found could still be sold to the public.”

“For years some of the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA – and then distributed to school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1989s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle…”

“Supreme Beef responded the next day by suing the USDA in federal court, claiming that Salmonella was a natural organism, not an adulterant.”

“Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry an extremely dangerous microbe, infectious at an extremely low dose.”

“The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use.”

“The line speeds at Dutch slaughterhouses average less than one hundred cattle an hour; the American average is more than three times as high.”

“But when at least one-third of meatpackers workers are injured every year, when the causes of those injuries are well known, when the means to prevent those injuries are readily available and yet not applied, there is nothing accidental about the lacerations, amputations, cumulative traumas, and deaths in the meatpacking industry. These injuries do not stem from individual mistakes. They are systematic, and they are caused by greed.”

#fastfoodnation #ericschlosser #corporations #unfetteredcapitalism

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