Happy meals

Eric Schlosser scorches fast food

by Julia Hanna

FAST FOOD NATION. By Eric Schlosser. Houghton Mifflin, 350 pages, $25.

If you love a juicy Whopper now and then, you might want to think twice before reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a scorched-earth treatment of the industry that has made McDonald's golden arches more recognized worldwide than the Christian cross. "Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life," Schlosser writes, noting that Americans spent more than $110 billion on the stuff (in all its bacon-and-cheese, super-sized forms) last year. In April 1997, when McDonald's ran its Teenie Beanie Baby giveaway, it sold 100 million Happy Meals in 10 days (typical sales are 10 million per week). The number of overweight teenagers in China (where Ronald has joined the Marlboro man as one of our nation's healthful ambassadors) has roughly tripled over the last decade. Fast Food Nation is packed with such strange-but-true facts, and they make for a fascinating, horrifying, read. Its ultimate implications extend beyond issues of nutrition to those of work conditions and the role of government control in this and other industries.

Schlosser knows that good old-fashioned storytelling is the best way to engage a reader's attention, and the history of fast food in America offers some choice material. He takes us back to where it all began, to the booming, post-war car culture of Southern California. In 1948, two drive-in-restaurant-owning brothers by the name of Richard and "Mac" McDonald fired their carhops and spent three months retooling their approach to preparing and serving food. They eliminated all menu items that required utensils and transformed their kitchen into a factory assembly line. The "Speedee Service System" was born, and America's eating habits were changed forever.

There are many other fascinating tidbits embedded in the history of "the all-American meal" and the tales of its unconventional founding fathers. Harlan Sanders, for example, left school at the age of 12 and worked in a variety of odd jobs, from mule tender to insurance salesman to obstetrician (he had no medical degree). He was 62 before he opened the first Kentucky Fried Chicken. The fast-food franchises that demand complete uniformity and consistency of their product were in fact conceived by rule-breaking iconoclasts.

Once he's provided this relatively quaint historical perspective for the modern-day madness of talking Chihuahuas and 64-ounce cups of soda, Schlosser zestfully takes apart the industry piece by piece. His firestorm of facts and criticism is overwhelming, to the point that it can seem unbalanced. He refers to court documents and press releases, but his argument would have benefitted from a direct confrontation with an industry leader (it's likely no one would talk to him, but he doesn't say).

Fast Food Nation is most convincing when Schlosser steps away from the podium and reports what he's seen, heard, and smelled in the field. There's an absorbing account of his experiences at a fragrance and flavor factory in a chapter titled "Why the Fries Taste So Good." If you've ever wondered what "natural flavor" is, reading this won't solve the mystery -- but it does offer a sobering insight into the chemical wizardry involved in creating it. As Schlosser puts it, "The basic science behind the scent of your shaving cream is the same as that governing the flavor of your TV dinner."

The chapters that examine the meatpacking industry are, no surprise, the most gut-wrenching, but they go well beyond expected depictions of gruesome carnage to show the toll taken on slaughterhouse workers, many of whom are recent or illegal immigrants. Schlosser describes the task of a worker (known as a "sticker") whose job it is to slit the carotid artery of a steer every ten seconds or so for eight and a half hours. Around that he fills in the other sights and sounds of a slaughterhouse, things you hoped you'd never know, then circles outward to show the economic and political factors that have made meatpacking the most dangerous job in the United States. With government agencies like OSHA and the USDA smaller than they've been at any time in recent history, major corporations are largely left to police themselves.

This poses a problem when it comes to keeping meat free of pathogens like E. coli. The 1993 outbreak of food poisoning caused by hamburgers served at a Jack In the Box in Seattle that killed four people and sent hundreds to the hospital resulted in the chain's initiation of a food-safety program that raises the cost of its ground beef by about one penny per pound. That seems a small price to pay, but proposed legislation to regulate the food industry meets stiff resistance in a political climate that has been anti-government for more than 20 years. "The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power," Schlosser concludes. "The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power." Fast Food Nation makes you think twice about the costs -- human, animal, social, and economic -- hidden in those two all-beef patties.