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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
How do working conditions in the U.S. compare with those in other countries?
If you look at the line speeds in Australia, Australia is just a huge exporter of beef. It's a huge beef country. The line speeds there are closer to about 100, 115 cattle per hour. In Western Europe, in the Netherlands, it's like 70 cattle per house. In the States, in the 1970s, they may have slaughtered 170 cattle per hour; now they're slaughtering 300 to 400 cattle an hour. And some of that may be due to better technology, but a lot of it is just due to the workers who have no ability to protest against the speed of the line.
Fast food is such a big part of American life. You report that one of every four Americans eats fast food daily. Do you think it's likely that Americans will demand these kinds of changes and reforms in food safety and labor practices?
I'm deludedly optimistic. I certainly would not have bothered writing the book if I didn't believe that there's enormous potential for change.
Take genetically engineered foods, which are such a big issue for many activists. The federal government has been so closely allied with Monsanto and with the big agribusiness firms that sponsor genetic engineering -- under the Clinton administration and the Bush administration both. So activists who wanted change saw none of it coming from the federal government and the USDA.
And yet the recent decision by McDonald's not to buy any more genetically engineered potatoes just about wiped out the market for Monsanto New Leaf potatoes. And it did this not because of consumer protests in the United States, but because of consumer protests in Europe and its fear that it might come to the United States.
So if you can't look to Congress right now and you can't look to government, oddly enough the size of the fast-food industry and the power of the fast-food industry mean that big changes can come quickly.
And I think that right now is a very good time for the pressure to be applied, because the market for fast food is so saturated in this country right now that the big fast-food chains financially are not in the best shape. So if they want people to continue eating their food, they should step up to the plate and just take some more responsibility for what they're doing.
For example, they should be selling food for kids that is healthy for kids to eat. And that doesn't have to be tofu bars with brown rice; it just means that when you look at the ingredients of a Happy Meal, this is just not good food for kids to eat a lot of. There is no healthy Happy Meal.
It's not a question of McDonald's vanishing from the face of the earth. It's a question of these companies assuming some more responsibility for what they're selling. And again, I come to it as someone who has not only eaten at McDonald's a lot in the past but took my kids there a lot, and now I don't.
