From Fast Food Nation

[telebob x]

In the potato fields and processing plants of Idaho, in the ranchlands east 
of Colorado Springs, in the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the High Plains, 
you can see the effects of fast food on the nation's rural life, its 
environment, its workers, and its health. The fast food chains now stand 
atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control of American 
agriculture. During the 1980s, large multinationals—such as Cargill, 
ConAgra, and IBP—were allowed to dominate one commodity market after 
another. Farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, 
essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced 
off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate 
farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class 
and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and 
large numbers of the working poor. Small towns that seemingly belong in a 
Norman Rockwell painting are being turned into rural ghettos. The hardy, 
independent farmers whom Thomas Jefferson considered the bedrock of American 
democracy are a truly vanishing breed. The United States now has more prison 
inmates than full-time farmers.

The fast food chains' vast purchasing power and their demand for a uniform 
product have encouraged fundamental changes in how cattle are raised, 
slaughtered, and processed into ground beef. These changes have made 
meatpacking—once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation—into the most 
dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient 
immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated. And the 
same meat industry practices that endanger these workers have facilitated 
the introduction of deadly pathogens, such as E. coli 0157:H7, into 
America's hamburger meat, a food aggressively marketed to children. Again 
and again, efforts to prevent the sale of tainted ground beef have been 
thwarted by meat industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress. 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.

I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every 
social problem now haunting the United States. In some cases (such as the 
malling and sprawling of the West) the fast food industry has been a 
catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other cases (such as 
the rise of franchising and the spread of obesity) fast food has played a 
more central role. By tracing the diverse influences of fast food I hope to 
shed light not only on the workings of an important industry, but also on a 
distinctively American way of viewing the world.

Elitists have always looked down at fast food, criticizing how it tastes and 
regarding it as another tacky manifestation of American popular culture. The 
aesthetics of fast food are of much less concern to me than its impact upon 
the lives of ordinary Americans, both as workers and consumers. Most of all, 
I am concerned about its impact on the nation's children. Fast food is 
heavily marketed to children and prepared by people who are barely older 
than children. This is an industry that both feeds and feeds off the young. 
During the two years spent researching this book, I ate an enormous amount 
of fast food. Most of it tasted pretty good. That is one of the main reasons 
people buy fast food; it has been carefully designed to taste good. It's 
also inexpensive and convenient. But the value meals, two-for-one deals, and 
free refills of soda give a distorted sense of how much fast food actually 
costs. The real price never appears on the menu.

The sociologist George Ritzer has attacked the fast food industry for 
celebrating a narrow measure of efficiency over every other human value, 
calling the triumph of McDonald's "the irrationality of rationality." Others 
consider the fast food industry proof of the nation's great economic 
vitality, a beloved American institution that appeals overseas to millions 
who admire our way of life. Indeed, the values, the culture, and the 
industrial arrangements of our fast food nation are now being exported to 
the rest of the world. Fast food has joined Hollywood movies, blue jeans, 
and pop music as one of America's most prominent cultural exports. Unlike 
other commodities, however, fast food isn't viewed, read, played, or worn. 
It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry 
offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of 
mass consumption.

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. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, 
what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off 
the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in. The 
whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten. I've written this book 
out of a belief that people should know what lies behind the shiny, happy 
surface of every fast food transaction. They should know what really lurks 
between those sesame-seed buns. As the old saying goes: You are what you 
eat.

Excerpted from Fast Food Nation. Copyright © 2001 by Eric Schlosser.




_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com