Chewing the Fat - Fast food nation: the dark side of the all-American meal - Review

The misguided beef against fast food

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 356 pages. $25

There is a tightly held, though empirically misguided, belief that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. This claim can be applied equally to mass-market restaurateurs and high-end authors. The latter routinely hector readers about what we should eat, as if we were the most irresponsible, spoiled tots, and they the most sagacious parents. For a clear window into the mind of such a scold, skip Eric Schlosser's title for his subtitle. Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic, has dubbed his bestselling account of the fast food industry, "The Dark Side of the All-American Meal." No delicacy here.

Schlosser is not pleased with inexpensive, franchised chain restaurants. In his introduction he asserts, in what must be one of the most charming acts of literary balance, "I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem now haunting the United States." Well, it's good to get that out of the way! As with many entrepreneurs seeking their fortunes by identifying and solving oh-so-pressing social problems, Schlosser's professed concern is with "the nation's children" and the impact of this industry that "feeds off the young.

Like pornography, fast food gets no respect. Here is a successful, lively business with many critics and few public champions. To be sure, corporations puff up themselves in their advertisements, but they spout in a vacant echo chamber. Yet we must ask: If everyone hates fast food, how and why does the industry thrive?

Schlosser claims that fast food does so well because of government policies that support and subsidize the industry. At the same time, he argues, there's an absence of controls over fast food's supposed excesses, the result being much damage to our health, environment, work force, and economy. He alleges that changes in our economic structure have led to a concentration of unfettered power in the fast food world, despite the contempt of elite commentators. Schlosser doesn't attack fast food on its aesthetic dimension, on its tackiness and taste. Indeed, he avers that most of it tastes "pretty good," although he inserts the rather odd dig that "it has been carefully designed to taste good." Perhaps not so different from the menus at Lutece or Chez Panisse.

For Schlosser, though, "the real price never appears on the menu." We need to "know what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." We are warned that fast food has contributed to obesity, the malling of America, the destruction of small farms and rain forests, occupational hazards, the threat of tainted meat, and the destruction of workers' rights. Schlosser concludes that, "The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by losses imposed on the rest of society." Happy Meals, it would seem, have a lot to answer for.

While I doubt much of Schlosser's political and economic assessment, he is a lively writer, and can make a story come alive with his ability to present heroes and villains. He knows how to write non-fiction, and effectively (if romantically) presents the lives of people affected by the fast food industry.

There is the Horatio Alger-like sharecropper's son, Carl Karcher, the creator of Carl's Jr. restaurants, eventually fired and locked out by his corporate board. There is Dave Feamster, a struggling and solicitous owner of a Little Caesars pizza franchise. There is Hank, the frustrated cattle rancher, whose suicide, we are assured, was at least partially the result of economic changes wrought by the fast food industry. There is Elisa Zamot, the working-class Colorado teen, who rises before dawn only to be underpaid and mistreated by McDonald's. There is Kenny Dobbins, a loyal meat packer severely injured and abused by the packing industry. Schlosser sees the landscapes of culinary America (and now the world) littered by the battered and bruised bodies of workers exploited by those more powerful.

Fast Food Nation is rife with villains as well. Many are large, impersonal corporations, all too often hiding behind vaguely sinister acronyms (IBP, CKE, IFF). Others are the directors of these large, "faceless" organizations, always presented without the sympathetic understanding that Schlosser so effectively grants to their underlings.

Academics sometimes refer to this style of writing as "sociology with adjectives," referring to the power of the pungent, descriptive phrase to set the terms of debate without having to adduce evidence. Consider, for instance, the difference between a "sizzling burger" and a "leaden burger." Such descriptions, sprinkled like salt throughout Fast Food Nation, affect the taste of the repast. Schlosser is an adjectival writer, a scribe who deftly deploys literary condiments.

But to dismiss Schlosser's rhetorical flourishes is not to dismiss his arguments. Every industry has its own peculiarities, many of them unpleasant. Recall the famous analogy between sausage-making and lawmaking that suggests watching either process is unappealing. The backstage of most production techniques have this underground quality, and meatpacking and food preparation certainly hold to this unappetizing tradition (as everyone has known from the 1906 muckraking of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle onward). Schlosser's descriptions are searing, no doubt. No picnics here; blood and guts are the decorative touches on the work floors. The mass processing of food is inevitably a case of what the sociologist Everett Hughes termed "dirty work"-- necessary for a society's survival, but not nice. Hospital operating rooms, battlefields, and sanitation trucks also fall under this category. We turn our faces away, until others force our faces back.

Such dirty workplaces contribute jobs that keep people alive, both by giving them things they need or by providing them with work by which to feed themselves. To be sure, these are jobs that neither Schlosser nor most of his readers would dream of except in their worst nightmares. Yet low-skill natives and far-flung immigrants take these unappealing jobs because they conclude that their lives will be markedly improved by such work. Their choice is not to write for The Atlantic or for REASON. Schlosser accurately points to the dangers of mass meat processing, but danger is endemic to the human condition.

Unnecessary danger can be curtailed, but federal regulators, juries, and journalists may not be able to distinguish necessary from unnecessary. Schlosser has a sensitive nose, but would these workers prefer to find their jobs gone because of the fine sensitivities of canny writers? No one should argue against corporate ethics and morality--they are heavenly virtues. The controversy is over who will--who is capable of--adequately cleaning up the mess when that morality is not in evidence. Schlosser presents no evidence that government inspectors have been effective in such situations; the marked improvement in working conditions since the days of Upton Sinclair is due at least as much to technological advancements that increase efficiency. After all, routinely injuring or killing workers is no way to keep a mobile work force happy.

It's also no way to keep customers satisfied. Despite Schlosser's animus toward fast food, the evidence indicates that the fast food industry contributes to the improvement of sanitary and work conditions. The providers of consumer services to a large public are particularly susceptible to consumer pressure, and especially wary of poisoning their customers. When in 1993 Jack in the Box hamburgers caused E. coli illnesses and four deaths, the corporation took steps to protect their meat supply. Whether from moral concern or a desire to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits, one big, faceless corporation succeeded in changing the way that meat was processed, at least for its customers. Evil meatpackers were at the mercy of their supposed corporate comrades-in-arms, the fast food industry.

In a similar way, public pressure on fast food corporations to eliminate plastic packaging, the destruction of the rain forest, or the reduction of fatty oils has proven to be effective. A food industry without large, influential corporations that consumers can rally against would be far less amenable to change. It is precisely the public presence of ubiquitous fast food chains that permits social movements to challenge the industry effectively. A small change in market share may be the difference between profit and bankruptcy for those corporations.

All of the so-called problems of the fast food industry could be solved by similar public pressure, if those issues were truly important to the public. Public pressure could increase pay scales for young workers like Elisa Zamot, if the same public would be willing to patronize those corporations that provided workers with a "living wage." Students at Harvard, in their successful sit-in on behalf of their cleaning crews, showed the way. Harvard's tuition is inelastic--what is a few thousand dollars among friends compared to $11 an hour? Perhaps the same might be true at Taco Bell; perhaps not.

Like so many activists, Schlosser's arguments operate on several tracks. The public should rise up in righteous indignation against fast food--both through public pressure on the restaurant chains and through pressuring the government to enact ever more regulations to make the pain vanish. But whether government regulation will be as effective in changing corporate practices as that of consumer pressure is an issue that Schlosser doesn't consider.

One virtue of Schlosser's analysis is to remind us of the extent of governmental intervention in the market, and not only on the side of the workers. The fast food chains receive hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for training workers through the Work Opportunity Tax Credit program. Schlosser points out that we are subsidizing the fast food industry for training workers, even if these workers quit or are fired after working for less than six months.

Even if we accept the questionable assertion that government should provide tax incentives for hiring untrained workers--most of whom would be hired in the natural course of doing business--are these the long-term jobs that taxpayers should support? Assuredly not. Similarly, state government use of subsidies to attract corporate headquarters may work in the short-term: The state of Nebraska used such techniques to lure Iowa Beef Packers to Dakota City, Nebraska, an effective strategy until South Dakota offered a still-better deal. These government baubles lead to a climate in which the next, more attractive subsidy will have a louder siren call.

When all the talk of the injustice and crimes has become half-forgotten echoes in most eaters' heads, there is still the food to deal with. What tobacco was to the 1990s, fat may become to the current decade. Increasingly we hear cries for a "fat tax." Fast food can be blamed, claims one waggish commentator, for the creation of "Gen-XL." Fast food, of course, includes a wide range of foods, including salads, but the mainstays--hamburgers, fried chicken, and tacos--have been criticized for high fat and sodium content. Schlosser claims that the "annual cost of obesity is now twice as large as the fast food industry's total revenues"--a factoid justified by one journalist quoting another. Supposedly 44 million Americans are obese, and another 6 million are super-obese.

Given the (ever-growing) government involvement in health care, the medical costs of fat have become a public policy issue of grave import. We are told that the government must curtail our freedom to choose our own food in order to cut its costs--costs that it assumed through the expansion of government into health care in the first place. Each government intervention legitimates further intervention, until the entire camel, not just its nose, is under the tent.

I do not claim that fast food is a culinary masterpiece, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. De gustibus non disputandum. As a former restaurant reviewer, I do not patronize fast food establishments often, but as Schlosser admits, the food is created to taste good--and taste good it often does. Fast food is, certainly, a choice, and one's food choices ought to be personal matters. There seems to be no market as open and as accessible with as many options as the restaurant industry, with thousands of choices in any mid-sized city.

The explosive growth of fast food restaurants over the course of the past several decades should tell us something: Fast food does not always satisfy one's highest aspirations--much less the refined sensibilities of journalists. But it certainly fills one's tummy passably well.

Gary Alan Fine is professor of sociology at Northwestern University and the author of Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (University of California Press).

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