Hold the Mayo

“Fast Food Nation” is a passionately argued, incendiary polemic about a subject close to our hearts (and stomachs), and Eric Schlosser may be the Upton Sinclair for this age of mad-cow disease. With his book fresh in my head--tales of big cattle producers feeding cows (who are naturally noncarnivorous) the wastes of other livestock, of workers losing limbs in nonunion meatpacking plants, of artificial flavors pumped into French fries like nicotine added to cigarettes--I went in search of a fast-food restaurant. As is often the case, the first fast food joint I encountered was a McDonald’s, X-ray bright and filled with a multiethnic, multi-aged lunchtime crowd. A frenetic beeping from behind the counter gave the place the feel of an operating room. A giant tableau advertised “Buzz Lightyear” toys, while a sign announced a “shakable” salad in a cup. Slogans with trademarks hanging off them burst out from seemingly every surface. I ordered a Big Mac, fries and Coke--a perfect low-fiber, low-nutrient, high-grease, high-sugar lunch. The price was $5.41. To borrow architect Robert Venturi’s classic phrase about the suburban strip, “It was almost all right.” As long as I didn’t think about it too much.

But that is precisely Schlosser’s intent: to make us think about the “all-American food,” to provide some discomforting thoughts about what has become, for some, a de facto comfort food. Of all the industries to have fallen under the purview of public and pundit scrutiny--the tobacco industry with its costly trials and advertising bans; the film business with its inflammatory lyrics and parental warning labels--little attention has been paid to the fast-food industry, which dwarfs them all, economically and, Schlosser suggests, morally.

At $110 billion annually, fast food is a behemoth with yearly sales outpacing the combined publishing, film, music and software industries--one would have to add tobacco to (barely) eclipse fast food’s numbers. It is also the most personal form of consumerism (the product is literally consumed) and, despite our blithe acknowledgment of its status as “junk food,” any criticism or thoughts about how the sesame-seed bun became our Daily Bread go generally unpursued.

Schlosser, a respected journalist known for in-depth profiles of the migrant labor agricultural sector and the marijuana-growing industry, wants to make a meal out of fast food, and it is no Happy Meal at that: Fast food, in Schlosser’s excoriating account, pays its workers less than any industry save the aforementioned migrant farm business. Although its product is over-designed (as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Burger King’s much-heralded French fry overhaul of a year ago featured 19 pages of preparation specifications, its fries rigorously engineered to provide seven seconds of “audible crunch”) and undernourishing, fast food’s ever-increasing volume (McDonald’s, he notes, introduced “large” fries in the 1970s, and two decades later unveiled the “supersize”--three times the original portion) has been a major contributing factor to American obesity. “The profits of the fast-food chains,” writes Schlosser, “have been made possible by losses imposed on the rest of society.”

With a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts, Schlosser’s tale of starch and fury ranges from the strategic-defense enclave of NORAD (where the Domino’s deliveryman gets instant clearance) to the grim interiors of meatpacking plants in towns like Lexington, Neb. (known as “Mexington” for its influx of Mexican migrant workers), and an industry trade show in Las Vegas where Mikhail Gorbachev made an appearance. Schlosser muses, with typically mordant wit, that the fast-food industry is so powerful that it can bring the architect of glasnost to Vegas for the mere purposes of display, Roman-circus style: “Gorbachev’s appearance at the Mirage seemed an Americanized version of that custom, a public opportunity for the victors to gloat--though it would have been even more fitting if the fast food convention had been down the road at Caesar’s Palace.”

Fast food, like capitalism, may have conquered the world, but in so doing there seems as much cause for concern as for celebration. One might applaud the entrepreneurial spirit of the McDonald brothers of San Bernardino, whose “Speedee Service System,” debuted in Downey in 1948, brought modern industrial organization to the kitchen and forever changed the American way of eating. One might wonder why, as Schlosser does, the Small Business Administration has for decades subsidized the opening of fast-food franchises--which, with their economic interrelation to a massive corporate entity, are hardly anyone’s cherished image of a “small business”--”thereby turning a federal agency that was created to help independent small businesses into one that eliminates them.”

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One might also marvel at the technology found in places like the potato-processing plants of McDonald’s supplier J.R. Simplot, where optical sorting machines detect blemishes on would-be French fries, remove them briefly from the line and, using a set of tiny automated knives, surgically excise the offending mark. One might be dismayed by the arsenal of chemists employed to add flavor (“natural flavor,” observes Schlosser, does not necessarily mean without synthetics) to a food that should presumably possess its own flavor. McDonald’s employs satellite imagery to track areas of future population growth and plot its next franchises; perhaps that same computer lacked the moral reasoning to object to putting a McDonald’s cheek-by-jowl with the former concentration camp at Dachau. “Welcome to Dachau,” the leaflets read, “and welcome to McDonald’s.”

Fast food is everywhere, from Red Square to Rio de Janeiro, and its “McWorld” ubiquity is a staple in the myth-making of Western triumphalism. Viewing from these Olympian heights, one loses sight of the heart of this abstract economic empire: The moment when a person actually buys a burger and fries. “Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food,” Schlosser correctly points out. Then what explains the “billions and billions served”? Has an industry duped an entire nation into eating food that isn’t especially good for it or for the environment? Or are we to blame? Who in this day and age doesn’t know the effects of eating a Big Mac and fries or, for that matter, their chicken as well: Schlosser notes that the wildly successful Chicken McNugget, introduced at a time when the popularity of red meat was in decline for health reasons, actually has twice as much fat as a hamburger. Although Schlosser is superb at articulating all the dreary reasons why we should not eat fast food, he provides comparatively little insight into why we do.

Popularity is the X-factor in polemics such as Schlosser’s, and the pernicious issue of supply and demand is never as simple as it seems. Schlosser is right to decry the entry of fast-food franchises into the nation’s schools. More than 30% of schools, he reports, play host to a fast-food franchise, but even his critique eventually leads away from the franchises (which would cater to those same kids after school anyway) toward the institutions that invited them there in the first place. But his call that “Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children” is excessive: Should no advertising be allowed anywhere on any products aimed at children--toys, animated films, breakfast cereals? This approach overemphasizes supply, as well as the power of advertising to spur demand. If the figure of Ronald McDonald has become a kind of absent parent figure, the symbolic provider of food, this perception has less to do with the particular savvy of a marketing icon than with societal changes in work and family, from which fast food has certainly benefited but can hardly said to have caused.

Still, after reading Schlosser’s account of the Las Vegas trade show--with one executive proudly crowing, “As if things weren’t good enough, consumers also dropped all pretense of wanting healthy food”--the smiling veneer of my fast-food experience above is quickly lifted. As “Fast Food Nation” tells us, of course the food tastes good, it’s chemically designed to; of course it’s cheap, it relies on cheap labor and efficiencies of scale; of course the environment is festive and well-lighted, so are casinos. There are other choices we can make, Schlosser reminds us, even in the world of fast food: companies that use better-quality ingredients, that pay workers more than the average and provide benefits. “Fast Food Nation” points the way but, to resurrect an old fast-food slogan, the choice is yours.