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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Author Eric Schlosser says you don't want to know what the burger giants are serving.
Feb 8, 2001 | Eric Schlosser wants you to know he's no vegan vigilante on a one-man jihad against the fast-food business. Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation," is a red-meat eater who has consumed his fair share of burgers and fries. But he won't be grabbing dinner at McDonald's or Burger King anytime soon.
His gross-out exposé charges the fast-food industry with a litany of sins, from spreading sprawl to pushing unhealthy food on kids to exploiting teenage workers to relying on taxpayer dollars to underwrite the whole multibillion-dollar business. And that's before he even lays into the meatpacking business, which, he reports, literally grinds up its workers.
But Schlosser is more old-fashioned muckraking reporter than polemicist. For "Fast Food Nation" he waded through ankle-deep blood on the floor of a slaughterhouse to get the story. His next book will take on another big business: the prison-industrial complex.
Schlosser bubbled over with appalling facts in our recent conversation about fast food, what's really in our meat and what he thinks is the worst job in America.
In the book, you visit a fast-food convention where the head of Jack in the Box gripes about critics of the industry, saying they're promoting an agenda that's "anti-meat, anti-alcohol, anti-caffeine, anti-fat, anti-chemical additives, anti-horseradish, anti-nondairy creamer." Has the fast-food industry reacted to your book?
Not yet, and not to me. That speech that you mentioned, it was wild. The implication was that criticizing this industry is like being un-American. It had a very strong McCarthyite taint to it. And I think that's really their attitude.
I should reveal openly right now, for the record, that I have no investments in any health-food companies. I'm not a radical vegetarian, although I have a lot of respect for vegetarians and I think a lot of their arguments are very compelling. I came to this project as a person who has eaten an enormous amount of fast food and as a person who has probably eaten more hamburgers than any other type of food.
You paint a pretty bleak picture of both the fast-food industry and the food it serves. Why do you think this industry is so successful and iconic of America?
It's successful because it's convenient, it's inexpensive and it tastes good. And people need to eat, but don't have time to prepare their own food. So there's no question that this industry serves an important role in the society that we now have. This is how people are being fed.
When Ray Kroc [one of the founders of McDonald's] wanted all his food to taste the same in the late '50s and early '60s, doing that with a few hundred McDonald's meant one thing, and the impact on the land and the impact on the economy were one thing. But when there are 28,000 of them and when McDonald's is the biggest purchaser of beef in the United States, that idea of "Hey, let's have all the food taste exactly the same" has a hugely different effect.
The fast-food industry is so American and it is consciously so American -- Kroc wanted every McDonald's to fly the American flag. But the things that it worships -- conformity, uniformity, efficiency, technology -- that's only part of America. There are all these countervailing things that are really American too and that just aren't in the mix: individuality, diversity, caring about your workers.
You write that McDonald's has literally changed the American landscape. How does the company decide where to put its next franchise?
McDonald's has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed. Basically the goal was to be always just slightly ahead of it because that was where the real estate would be inexpensive. You could get the inexpensive real estate, put up your McDonald's, and by the time the growth got there you'd have a great location.
It became in some instances a self-fulfilling prophecy because the company's reputation for site selection is so well known that you'll notice wherever there's a McDonald's there are likely to be other fast-food chains nearby. So it kind of feeds the sprawl at the same time it predicts it. Ray Kroc was a genius at site selection. He would fly in a Cessna and in a very unscientific way he would look for schools to put McDonald's near -- where kids were. They went from Cessnas to helicopters and then from helicopters to commercial satellite photography and very ingeniously came up with computer software that would incorporate not only satellite photography but census figures and very in-depth, block-by-block demographic studies of income, of ethnic background. It's just incredible.
