pulling a fast one

In his recent book Eric Schlosser exposes the unsavoury taste of the global fast food industry. Here, Iain Elliott summarises some of the meat of his arguments.

As the fast food industry has grown more competitive in the US, the major chains have looked to overseas markets for their future growth. The McDonald's Corporation recently used a new phrase to describe its hopes for foreign conquest: `global realisation'. A decade ago, McDonald's had about 3,000 restaurants outside the US; today it has about 15,000 restaurants in more than 117 countries. It currently opens about five new restaurants every day, and at least four of them are overseas. Within the next decade, Jack Greenberg, the company's chief executive, hopes to double the number of McDonald's. The chain earns the majority of its profits outside the US, as does KFC. McDonald's now ranks as the most widely recognised brand in the world, more familiar than Coca-Cola. The values, tastes, and industrial practices of the American fast food industry are being exported to every corner of the globe, helping to create a homogenised international culture that sociologist Benjamin R Barber has labelled `McWorld'.

The fast food chains have become totems of Western economic development. They are often the first multinationals to arrive when a country has opened its markets, serving as the avant-garde of American franchising. Fifteen years ago, when McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Turkey, no other foreign franchiser did business there. Turkey now has hundreds of franchise outlets, including 7-Eleven, Nutra Slim, Re/Max Real Estate, Mail Boxes Etc, and Ziebart Tidy Car. Support for the growth of franchising has even become part of American foreign policy. The US State Department now publishes detailed studies of overseas franchise opportunities and runs a Gold Key Programme at many of its embassies to help American franchisers find overseas partners.

The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald's represents `Americana and the promise of modernisation'. Thousands of people waited patiently for hours to eat at the city's first McDonald's in 1992. Two years later, when a McDonald's opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive-through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Brazil, McDonald's has become the nation's largest private employer. The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide. Classes at McDonald's Hamburger University in Oak Park, Illinois, are taught in 20 languages. Few places on earth seem too distant or too remote for the golden arches. In 1986, the Tahiti Tourism Promotion Board ran an ad campaign featuring pristine beaches and the slogan `Sorry, no McDonald's'. A decade later, one opened in Papeete, the Tahitian capital, bringing hamburgers and fries to a spot thousands of miles, across the Pacific, from the nearest cattle ranches or potato fields.

As the food chains have moved overseas, they have been accompanied by their major suppliers. In order to diminish fears of American imperialism, the chains try to purchase as much food as possible in the countries where they operate. Instead of importing food, they import entire systems of agricultural production. Seven years before McDonald's opened its first restaurant in India, the company began to establish a supply network there, teaching Indian farmers how to grow iceberg lettuce with seeds specially developed for the nation's climate. `A McDonald's restaurant is just the window of a much larger system comprising an extensive food-chain, running right up to the farms,' one of the company's Indian partners told a foreign journalist.

In 1987, the American ConAgra Beef Company, the biggest meatpacker in the world, took over the Elders Company in Australia, the largest beef company in the country that exports more beef than any other in the world. Over the past decade American multinationals Cargill, and IBP, have gained control of the beef industry in Canada. Cargill has established large-scale poultry operations in China and Thailand. Tyson Foods, one of the biggest chicken processors in America, is planning to build chicken-processing plants in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. ConAgra's Lamb Weston division now manufactures frozen french fries in Holland, India, and Turkey. McCain, the world's biggest french fry producer, operates 50 processing plants scattered across four continents. In order to supply McDonald's, JR Simplot, America's great potato baron, began to grow Russet Burbank potatoes in China, opening that nation's first french fry factory in 1993. A few years ago Simplot bought 11 processing plants in Australia, aiming to increase sales in the East Asian market. He also purchased a 3-million-acre ranch in Australia, where he hopes to run cattle, raise vegetables, and grow potatoes. `It's a great little country,' Simplot says, `and there's nobody in it'.

Targeting children

As in the US, the fast food companies have targeted their foreign advertising and promotion at a group of consumers with the fewest attachments to tradition: young children. `Kids are the same regarding the issues that affect the all-important stages of their development,' a top executive told the audience at a recent Kid Power conference, `and they apply to any kid in Berlin, Beijing, or Brooklyn'. The Kid Power conference, attended by marketing executives from multinational corporations such as Burger King, was held at the Disneyland outside of Paris. In Australia, where the number of fast food restaurants roughly tripled during the 1990s, a survey found that half of the nation's nine- and ten-year-olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat. At a primary school in Beijing, Yunxiang Yan found that all of the children recognised an image of Ronald McDonald. The children told Yan they liked `Uncle McDonald' because he was `funny, gentle, kind, and ... he understood children's hearts'. Coca-Cola is now the favourite drink among Chinese children, and McDonald's serves their favourite food. Simply eating at a McDonald's in Beijing seems to elevate a person's social status. The idea that you are what you eat has been enthusiastically promoted for years by Den Fujita, the eccentric billionaire who brought McDonald's to Japan three decades ago. `If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years,' Fujita once promised his countrymen, `we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will be blonde'.

The impact of fast food is readily apparent in Germany, which has become one of McDonald's most profitable overseas markets. Germany is not only the largest country in Europe, but also the most Americanised. Although the four Allied powers occupied it after World War II, the Americans exerted the greatest lasting influence, perhaps because their nationalism was so inclusive, and their nation so distant. Children in West German schools were required to study English, facilitating the spread of American pop culture. Young people who sought to distance themselves from the wartime behaviour of their parents found escape in American movies, music, and novels. `For a child growing up in the turmoil of [post-war] Berlin ... the Americans were angels,' Christa Maerker, a Berlin filmmaker, wrote in an essay on post-war Germany's infatuation with the US. `Anything from them was bigger and more wonderful than anything that preceded it.'

Open door

The US and Germany fought against each other twice in the 20th century, but the enmity between them has often seemed less visceral than other national rivalries. The recent take-over of prominent American corporations -- such as Chrysler, Random House and RCA Records -- by German companies provoked none of the public anger that was unleashed when Japanese firms bought much less significant American assets in the 1980s. Despite America's long standing `special relationship' with Great Britain, the underlying cultural ties between the US and Germany, though less obvious, are equally strong. Americans with German ancestors far outnumber those with English ancestors. Moreover, during the past century both American culture and German culture have shown an unusually strong passion for science, technology, engineering, empiricism, social order and efficiency. An electronic paper-towel dispenser in a Munich men's room is the spiritual kin of the gas-powered ketchup dispensers at the McDonald's in Colorado Springs.

The traditional German restaurant, serving schnitzel, bratwurst, knackwurst, sauerbraten, and large quantities of beer, is rapidly disappearing in Germany. Such establishments now account for less than one-third of the German food service market. Their high labour costs have for the most part been responsible for their demise, along with the declining popularity of schnitzel. McDonald's Deutschland, Inc., is by far the biggest restaurant company in Germany today, more than twice as large as the nearest competitor. It opened the first German McDonald's in 1971; at the beginning of the 1990s it had 400 restaurants, and now it has more than 1,000. The company's main dish happens to be named after Hamburg, a German city where ground-beef steaks were popular in the early 19th century. The hamburger was born when Americans added the bun. McDonald's Deutschland uses German potatoes for its fries and Bavarian dairy cows for its burgers. It sends Ronald McDonald into hospitals and schools. It puts new McDonald's restaurants in gas stations, railway stations, and airports. It battles labour unions and -- according to Siegfried Pater, author of Zum Beispiel McDonald's -- has repeatedly fired union sympathisers. The success of McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and TGI Fridays in Germany has helped spark a franchising boom. Since 1992, the number of franchised outlets there has doubled, and about 5,000 more are being added every year. In August 1999, McDonald's Deutschland announced that it would be putting restaurants in Germany's new Wal-Mart stores. `The partnership scheme will undoubtedly be a success,' a German financial analyst told London's Evening Standard. The kiddie factor alone -- children urging their parents to shop at Wal-Mart because they have a McDonald's inside the store -- could generate an upsurge in customers'.

The golden arches have become so commonplace in Germany that they seem almost invisible. You don't notice them unless you're looking for them, or feeling hungry. One German McDonald's, however, stands out from the rest. It sits on a nondescript street in a new shopping complex not far from Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis. The stores were built on fields where Dachau's inmates once underwent forced labour. Although the architecture of the shopping complex looks German and futuristic, the haphazard placement of the buildings on the land seems distinctively American. Across the street from the McDonald's there's a discount supermarket. An auto parts store stands a few hundred yards from the other buildings, separated by fields that have not yet vanished beneath concrete. In 1997, protests were staged against the opening of a McDonald's so close to a concentration camp where gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned, where scientists performed medical experiments on inmates and roughly 30,000 people died. The McDonald's Corporation denied that it was trying to profit from the Holocaust and said the restaurant was at least a mile from the camp. After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald's was distributing thousands of leaflets among tourists in the camp's car park, the company halted the practice. `Welcome to Dachau,' said the leaflets, `and welcome to McDonald's.'

The McDonald's at Dachau is one-third of a mile from the entrance to the concentration camp. The restaurant recently staged a `Western Big Mac' promotion. It was decorated in a Wild West theme, with paper place mats featuring a wanted poster of `Butch Essidie'. The restaurant was full of mothers and small children. Teenagers dressed in Nikes, Levis, and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts sat in groups and smoked cigarettes. Turkish immigrants worked in the kitchen, 70s disco music played, and the red paper cups on everyone's tray said `Always Coca-Cola'. This McDonald's was in Dachau but it could have been anywhere -- anywhere in the US, anywhere in the world. Millions of other people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu, food that tasted everywhere the same.

Iain Elliott is a freelance journalist.

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