The Dark Side of Drive-Through
Reviewed by Elaine Herscher
CONSUMER HEALTH INTERACTIVE Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
By Eric Schlosser
Houghton Mifflin
356 pp $25 
What if most Americans actually knew -- not imagined, but knew for certain -- the real price they paid for the cheeseburger grabbed in haste at the drive-in window? What if they had hard evidence of workers maimed in service to the $3.99 combo meal, or the human toll the fast food industry has taken on everyone from family farmers to low-wage urban teens? Would that burger be a little bit harder to swallow? There's a good reason why Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is subtitled "The Dark Side of the All-American Meal." Although the book is filled with fascinating history and lore -- including the best information we're ever likely to get on why french fries taste so good -- it's relentless in its pursuit of connections. Schlosser won't rest until you're fully informed about how your 12-year-old's Big Mac came to lie before her on its plastic tray. The story, as we can all imagine, isn't pretty. Along with the best flavor enhancers science can muster, there's a pernicious ingredient ground into those all-beef patties -- greed. Enough greed, Schlosser contends, to have an astonishing influence on every corner of our culture, from creating a "cheap and powerless work force" of meatpackers and food servers to endangering the health of its target market and best customers -- children. The most dangerous job
"A nation's diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast-food restaurant," Schlosser writes. "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." Fast Food Nation is at times, frankly, sickening. Schlosser writes about feedlots that one government official compares to a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when raw sewage coursed through the streets. We learn more than most of us ever care to know about cattle slaughter and processing. Workers in meatpacking plants routinely suffer from repetitive strain injuries, and many have lost fingers and worse as the pace of killing and cutting up animals has increased to create higher profits. The faster the line moves, the less attention is paid to food safety. Parasites and bacteria are another price we pay for the meatpacking industry's profit margin. Schlosser's description of a 6-year-old boy's death from eating one tainted hamburger is unbearable to read. If you have any leanings toward vegetarianism, this book may push you over the edge. But that isn't Schlosser's goal. He's issuing a wake-up call. Not only are you what you eat, the whole country is what you eat. Fast food, Schlosser contends, has implications that reverberate through our whole economy. McDonald's is the nation's largest buyer of meat, pork, and potatoes, with an endless need for cheap, uniform product that can only be satisfied by huge agricultural corporations that undercut the lowest prices family farmers and ranchers can offer. Thus fast food is exerting a disquieting amount of pressure on farmers already struggling for survival. In writing this book, Schlosser, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, isn't looking down on Middle America from some gourmet penthouse. He says that most of the fast food he ate during his two years of research tasted pretty good. (At the french fry factory, he asked for seconds.) He's primarily concerned about the health effects on the children who eat the food and the well-being of the teen-agers, many still children themselves, who serve the food. Few skills needed
The fast food industry has mechanized and computerized its food preparation to such a degree that the typical adolescent worker learns no skills. He or she does get minimum wage -- kept low by the industry's lobbyists -- and is always scheduled to work less than the number of hours that would require the employer to provide benefits. And the workplace is hazardous to health in more ways than one: Fast food joints are notorious targets for robberies and employee shootings. Schlosser has also focused on the marketing battle for children's hearts and minds: 96 percent of American school children can identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with better recognition is Santa Claus. And kids trust what the clown is pushing. In 1978, Schlosser writes, the typical teen-age boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda a day. Today, he drinks nearly three times that much, getting 9 percent of his daily calories from soda, on which fast food restaurants make a gigantic profit. Young girls are close behind. In numerous studies, soda consumption has been linked to obesity, which in turn can lead to Type 2 diabetes -- once almost unheard-of in teen-agers and now alarmingly widespread. It can also contribute to calcium deficiency, as children drink less milk in favor of soft drinks. Schlosser points out that the rising abundance of high-fat, inexpensive fast food meals has coincided with an enormous jump in the number of obese children and adults. More than half of all American adults and one-third of children are obese or overweight. For adults, the obesity figures are twice as high as they were in the 1960s, when fast food was just getting its start. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is targeting obesity as a national epidemic, estimates that 112,000 Americans die each year as a direct result of being obese. Overweight children are at risk of developing high cholesterol levels and heart disease over the long term. Fast food isn't the only culprit; sedentary lifestyles are to blame, too. But it's hard not to point the finger at fast food as the major player in obesity. Here's one example: A Carl's Jr. Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger paired with an order of CrissCut fries contains 76 grams of fat -- more fat than an adult should be consuming over an entire day. Schlosser also notes that other nations eager for all things American are gobbling up our fast food and are on their way to becoming as fat as we are. Humble beginnings
Of course, obesity was probably the last thing on the minds of the men who made fast food what it is today. These children of the Depression were frankly astonished by their own success, and their stories make for good reading. The road to the golden arches was paved by plucky entrepreneurs like J.R. Simplot, who built an empire from humble potatoes, and Carl Karcher, the kingpin of Carl's Jr., who started out pushing a hotdog cart. Could these men have predicted how ubiquitous -- and high-tech -- their fast food would become? In one of the most fascinating chapters in the book, Schlosser takes readers inside one of many "flavor factories" that operate from a string of unremarkable buildings off the New Jersey Turnpike. There, "in an industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants," pioneering chemists create Calvin Klein's "Eternity" perfume as well as simulations of bananas, cherries, sautéed onions, and shrimp. In a room containing nothing but small bottles and strips of white filter paper to dip into them, Schlosser sampled one aroma and could have sworn someone was flipping burgers on a grill. Schlosser's reporting is meticulous, and the writing is spare but cuts to the bone. During the course of his extensive research travel, he writes about his visit to one of the more than 1,000 McDonald's restaurants in Germany, this particular one distinguished by being a third of a mile from a notorious concentration camp. "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," Schlosser writes. "After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald's was distributing thousands of leaflets among tourists in the camp's parking lot, the company halted the practice. 'Welcome to Dachau' said the leaflets, 'and welcome to McDonald's.' " That Fast Food Nation is a New York Times best-seller is a credit to the reading public, because it's no easy read, and ultimately the book is deeply disturbing. But it all serves to chip away at our denial. Once you know this stuff, it's pretty hard to feel too cheery about your kid's next Happy Meal. -- Elaine Herscher is a senior editor at Consumer Health Interactive. A former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she has written widely on health issues.
Reviewed by Michael Potter, MD, an attending physician and associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He is board-certified in family practice.
Our reviewers are members of Consumer Health Interactive's medical advisory board.
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First published September 12, 2001
Last updated June 15, 2007
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive
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