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In the Fast Food Jungle

By: Art Jannicelli
www.WhatTheHellAmIDoingHere.com

Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation takes us on a comprehensive Safari of the Fast Food Jungle. Fast Food Nation will provide you with a very large helping of informed consent to allow you to draw your own conclusions about the Fast Food Nation. This is definitely a book I would recommend to every American consumer of Fast Food.
To make an in-depth analysis of any social phenomena it is essential to review its history. With the historical context in place we can then examine the Ideology driving the Fast Food Nation. This will not be a comprehensive understanding of the Fast Food Nation until we take into account the impact on those most exploited by the Fast Food Nation. With all of this in mind it will then be possible to see its most serious problems, some possible solutions, and how to go about making those changes to the Fast Food Nation.

The Fast Food Nation was founded in sunny southern California during the Post War Boom of the 1940's. It took a unique set of set of circumstances to get the Fast Food Nation off to a running start; namely government subsidy. During World War Two the U.S. government poured billions of dollars into southern California to create a powerful industrial center for war production. The population of southern California grew rapidly with the infusion of government money and jobs.

Another critical subsidy was the Interstate Highway act. This was the first time the government had agreed to bear the burden—all rail services including the Trolley, had to pay for their own track—of creating a public transportation system. Had the price of building and maintaining roads been included in the price of a car, there would have been far fewer roads and cars. As a result there would have been much lower demand for Fast Food restaurants; without the abundance of roads and cars you need to get to them. American's now had government money to pay for great cars, cheap food, thousands of miles of free roads, and a Fast Food Nation was just over the horizon.

Fast-forward to the present, the Fast Food Nation has grown tremendously and is now omni-present throughout the United States and is coming to a country near you, in the very near future. On average one in four Americans eats at a Fast Food Restaurant everyday. As a result American's bought far more Fast Food then they spent on higher education in 1999.

America's Fast Food Empire is politically Conservative. It should then come as no surprise it vigilantly supports the Market Fundamentalism that is driving globalization. Market fundamentalism is the idea that markets are always more efficient then governments. Therefore, taxes should be slashed and all government regulation of the market ended.

The Fast Food Nation is just one more obvious example of the hypocrisy of market fundamentalism. The Fast Food nation was utterly dependent on government subsidy of southern California to infuse the necessary disposable capital into the economy to get started. To this day, the Fast Food Nation still takes government subsidy to train employees and to protect their international interests.

On the other hand, the Fast Food Nation has worked to end government protection for our workers and meat. The Fast Food lobby has been ruthless in working to undercut the funds of the FDA and USDA. The weakening of these organizations has resulted in Europeans enjoying safer meat then US consumers. The Fast Food lobby has been just as brutal to OSHA, resulting in deplorable working conditions at meat packing plants and a blatant disregard for worker safety and child labor laws in Fast Food restaurants. The results of the Market Fundamentalism embraced by the Fast Food industry have been the same in America, as they have been in other countries: The exploitation and oppression of consumers, producers, and workers of the Fast Food industry, for the profit of the owners.

Fast Food companies also ruthlessly pursue children in their advertisements. Their goal is to become a child's trusted friend. According to Schlosser, “America's fast food culture has become indistinguishable from the popular culture of its children”. Schlosser also reports that 90% of children between 3 and 9 visit McDonalds once a month and 1 in 5 toddlers drink soda! Soda companies now market baby bottles with the names of soda on them. The Journal of Dentistry for Children reports infants were being fed soda in these bottles!

According to the head of the FTC, children must be protected from advertisement directed at a child's present-mindedness, because they are unable to protect themselves. Especially, since children have a hard time differentiating advertisements from the programming. Children spend an average of 21 hours watching TV a week, more then any other single activity except sleeping, and approximately one in four children between the ages of two and five have a TV in their room.

However, no matter how potentially dangerous these statistics are, this is not a difficult problem to correct. TV easily influences children; however, parents can be an even greater influence. It is the responsibility of the parent to police what their children eat and drink. Therefore, in the interest of the children, parents need to be educated on the potential long-term health risks of fast food and soda, to their children, such as obesity. With this information parents could make good educated decisions about their child's diet.

Restaurants are no longer small potatoes; they are America's largest employer and yet pay the lowest wages, consistently lower then migrant farm workers. The workforce of the restaurant industry is made up of the most vulnerable members of society. Two out of three of the faces behind a restaurant worker uniform are under the age of 20; the rest are made up of the disenfranchised migrants, illiterates, disabled, and non-English speakers. Sociologist Ester Reiter found, “the trait most valued in fast food workers is “obedience”. Minimum wage has declined forty percent in the last 25 years when adjusted for inflation. Schlosser notes that a one-dollar increase in minimum wage would only add two cents to the cost of a burger. Minimum wage is exactly what the majority of restaurant workers live on. At the same time the vast majority are prevented from working full time hours, so employers will not have to pay benefits.

Employees are more exploited then consumers or producers of fast food, and have the least opportunity to escape their circumstances. While consumers face unnecessary risks to their health from Fast Food, if a consumer becomes unhappy or ill they can just choose to stop consuming fast food. If a supplier and/or producer of fast food is unhappy with the deal they are getting they could always try and organize to force the Fast Food Nation to treat them better, since without them they have no product. However, the employees of Fast Food have only their labor to withhold, which could be replaced tomorrow with a scab worker. Therefore, trying to organize unions has been impossible for most Fast Food workers and as such they deserve the greatest deal of attention.

Fast food is considered the lowest of low prestige jobs; it has a turn over rate of 300 to 400 percent a year. According to Schlosser the U.S. government subsidizes this turnover rate by paying for worker training to the tune of $2,400 per employee hired and trained. At the same time the Fast Food companies are continually working to create a “zero training” environment. “Zero training” is a goal of making any worker interchangeable since there would be no training. As a result there would also be no need to treat your employees with the slightest degree of respect, care, or decency, since they would be as easily replaceable as your motor oil. The fact that more then one franchise has been successfully sued for stealing from their employees by not paying them for their time indicates there is not much consideration for employees in any case. Schlosser also found numerous cases of management ignoring child labor laws in regard to hours and use of dangerous equipment. Then perhaps, management is just taking their cues from the poor treatment of employees by the customers, who consider them beneath their contempt for wearing a uniform. If this weren't enough, more Fast Food workers are killed on the job every year, then cops. While I did survive my Safari in the Jungle, I did experience first hand many of the accusations made against the Fast Food Nation in regard to their treatment of employees.

“Q'ing is for quality.” Is the one thing that sticks in my mind from my McDonalds training at the age of sixteen. When I finished my sophomore year in high school I was sixteen. I wanted some extra money, so I went and applied to McDonalds. The McDonalds I ended up working for was more then three miles from my home. I was hired at minimum wage $4.25 an hour.

The assistant manager who trained me showed us a video on how to be a good cashier, gave us a brief tour of the restaurant, and then explained the fact we would be suspended for being more then $2 short on our registers, (I later worked at Toys R' Us, that had no problem with shorts under $25) on our second offense we would be terminated. Only after running us through the orientation did she take us to the schedule, only to find that she had just trained four food prep people to be cashiers. When she discovered this, she told us training was over and we could just figure it out when we worked our first shift.

So my first shift, I was taught how to shirk and solder with the best of my co-workers. I learned that you fill the meat and nugget bins completely and then just reset the timers when they go off, as opposed to the food. I also learned to just rotate the time markers in the wrapped food bins rather then the food. This appeared to work except in the morning when the Canadian bacon turned green from its preservative, the cure for this was Q'ing.

Q'ing is McDonald's lingo for Microwave heating food. Officially Q'ing was used to please customers by melting their cheese, in my experience it was used to hide old and cold food. The way to avoid getting old or cold food is, always order every piece of meat or chicken well done; special orders are always fresh and they will make you your very own piece of chicken or hamburger if it is ordered well done.

My experience with shirking food timers was due to my manager. He did not believe in positive management, every word out of his mouth was negative. Therefore, we all had a fear of ending up as the subject of one of his loud, public, and, humiliating tantrums. So when he told us that what we threw away was getting deducted from our pay we all did what he said, and did not rotate out old food, until he left the building. One day a 5' tall coworker was told to refill one of the deep fryers, she was having a hard time lifting the five gallon jug of vegetable oil, as she was pouring it, someone bumped into her, she lost control of the jug, and the cold vegetable oil sprayed all over her uniform. Our benevolent manager saw this and told her since it was busy she could not leave to change, but he would not charge her for the oil; he then told her to get another jug and fill the fryer and then mop her mess. The manager was also infamous for shouting matches with assistant mangers (especially his girlfriend assistant manager that he hired). Bottom line we all worked in fear of screwing up while he was present—crew members would shout warnings when they saw his truck entering the parking lot—and that kind of tension just causes more accidents.

The McDonalds I worked at also had a policy that if a restaurant was accident free for thirty days the employee's would be rewarded with $4.50 in free food on there lunch break. The problem with this kind of incentive is it encourages employees to hide injuries so they don't ruin things for their co-workers. While I worked there an employee put his hand down on a grill and tried to finish his shift.

Now you might be thinking how could someone not notice putting your hand down on a grill? Looking back on my experience, I would liken working for McDonald's to being a mechanical animal. When things got busy your movements become fluid and repetitive, you work as you are trained, and there is no thought. Part of the problem is also the meat cooking method; we were supposed to use our bare fingertips to get stubborn patties on the spatula. I burned the tip of my pinky this way and did not notice until I had finished my shift. So I could easily sympathize with someone who would not notice placing a hand on the grill while working hard and exhausted. In that state of mind, you don't notice the pain. Some days when I finished a shift my muscles would cramp up badly and I would be completely exhausted.
By far the hardest physical job anyone could do was “Truck”. At my Restaurant my manager would use the youngest males for the job. Truck starts by standing in the freezer, in your standard uniform without gloves, while a manager throws 20lb boxes down a gravity fed conveyor at a 45-degree angle at you. You were supposed to catch the boxes, pivot to the pile you were working, then lift the box on to the stack, and pivot back, before the next box came down. “Truck” took 45 minutes of standing in a freezer and took as much energy as an eight-hour shift.

I did “Truck” on a number of occasions and if there was any equipment I was not supposed to use at the age of sixteen I was not aware of it. I used the electric tomato slicer, filled and used the fryers, cooked meat. The most dangerous aspect of this was the fact you received very little training. Usually, the way you learned to do something new was, a manager would order you to do something and rather then say, “I do not know how” and get yelled at, you just tried to figure it out. I remember one day a trainee proudly announced he had learned how to cook sixteen hamburgers at once. The grills are only designed to do up to twelve patties at a time. So, a manager walked back to the grill and said, show me. The manager then promptly cut a patty in half to discover it bright red on the inside. If that trainee had not been boastful, he would have kept that up till someone had complained or worse.

Probably, like most kids my age, I took pride in being a good employee and collecting my tiny pay checks. So in the end it was not the working conditions that made me quit it was the management's unwillingness to meet my scheduling needs. At the beginning of August I turned in a note requesting a schedule change. I was going to be starting my junior year in high school and I could no longer work day shifts. I gave management 4 weeks notice. When the schedule for the first week of school was posted, sure enough, my hours conflicted with school and were double the amount allowed by my work permit. I approached the scheduling manager about this; she acknowledged that she had received my request. However, she told me it was to big a bother for her to reschedule for one person and I would need to trade my hours. I then asked if she would change my hours on the next schedule, she replied it would be easier for her if I would just trade the hours away myself weekly. I then asked the restaurant manager about the situation, he told me I had to take it up with her. Sure, I could have fought it, but for a $4.25 an hour job, that conflicted with going to high school? So I quit, after 3 months of employment. Although, I have to wonder if anyone my age in different circumstances, might have tried to make their schooling work around McDonalds.

I would consider myself a “social” fast food consumer. I'll eat at fast food if I am with a group to avoid causing a fuss, but I will not choose to go there. In my opinion fast food is unhealthy and uneconomical. Schlosser points out that for all the hype that it is our genes that is making us fat, obesity has only begun to rise dramatically in the last 40 years. This coincidently matches up nicely with the growth of the fast food industry. The saddest part is, gaining weight is the easy part, losing it can become a life long battle and young people do not recognize these consequences in their present minded state. Nor, do infants and toddlers have the ability to tell their parents they should not be given soda.

On top of the obesity correlation, Schlosser makes a very strong case that quite a bit of our nations meat and chicken is contaminated with fecal matter and as a result Salmonella and E. coli bacteria. Clearly, a person is better off in the long run and potentially in the short run to just avoid fast food.

In terms of the economics of eating fast food, the low-end value meals at Fast Food restaurants are usually over $4. In my experience as a college student $4 is enough to make eight good-sized hamburgers and purchase a twelve pack of soda. The bottom line is, by cooking my own food, I save money by getting more for each dollar, and I have the piece of mind of knowing I prepared it correctly and in sanitary conditions.

I agree with Schlosser that big changes need to be made in the way the government regulates the Fast Food industry. Advertising directed at children to buy unhealthy foods should be banned, for the protection of a child's present-mindedness. The Federal government subsidy for job training should end, since the Fast Food Nation is not actually following the intent of the subsidy, by working to give as little training as possible. OSHA should be empowered to enforce worker safety and child labor laws. The FDA and USDA need to be revamped to follow the Swedish and Dutch systems that have much lower rates of dangerous bacteria in their meat.

The problems are obvious; the hard part is fixing them. Just like the debate over globalization, the struggle here is between cheap attractive products versus their negative social impacts. The Fast Food Nation is a hierarchal system set up to maximize profits by marginalizing all aspects of fast food production and consumption. Consumers are marginalized in the process when their rights to eat clean and safe food are ignored to raise profits. The producers are marginalized when meatpacking workers are made to work at a brutal pace in dangerous ghastly grotesque conditions, and while ranchers are forced into a barely subsistent existence. The only ones getting a happy meal in our Fast Food Nation are the owners.

The battle to change the Fast Food Nation resembles the battle against globalization in another way; it is a very daunting task. Schlosser documents the fact that the Fast Food Nation is a strong monetary supporter of the Republican Party. In this era of cash and carry government it is going to be very hard for consumers and producers to raise the kind of money to necessary to defeat an industry that brings in more then $110 billion a year. Organized boycotts also tend to have the adverse effect of actually increasing sales by providing free advertisements for what they oppose.

I would argue that it comes down to a personal choice. We the people as consumers must decide for ourselves, that we are unwilling to put up with the poor treatment of our sons and daughters, and the unsanitary and unhealthy food, the Fast Food Nation is serving. We must decide that enough is enough, we are done being tread on, and terminate our consumption of fast food. The fastest way to heart of the Fast Food Nation is through the hole we will burn in their wallet.