Fast-food meals leave journalist far from happy
Apr 06, 2001 (Chicago Tribune - Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service via COMTEX)
-- Like many parents, Eric Schlosser regularly took his young sons to
McDonald's.
"We were big customers," said Schlosser, an investigative journalist and
correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. "We ordered a lot of Happy Meals."
Then Schlosser accepted an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to write about
the fast-food industry. What started out in his mind as a "kitschy, funny story"
soon moved to something deeper and more serious. The end result is a current
best-selling book, "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal"
(Houghton Mifflin, $25).
Schlosser's kids, now 8 and 10, no longer eat at any fast-food restaurants.
"The more I reported on the industry, the more angry I became," Schlosser said.
"When I was done with the reporting, I was done with fast food."
The book focuses on hamburgers and fries as a symbol of what's wrong with
American eating habits and the businesses that foster them. This book becoming a
best seller offers a flicker of hope that those habits and the fast-food
industry can be changed for the better.
Even so, Schlosser is quick to clarify that he doesn't see McDonald's, Burger
King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell - you name the franchise - as culprits
for all of society's ills. It's more like a super-size share.
"I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social
problem now haunting the United States," Schlosser writes. "In some cases (such
as the malling and sprawling of the West) the fast-food industry has been a
catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other cases (such as the
rise of franchising and the spread of obesity) fast food has played a more
central role."
Schlosser serves plenty of statistics: In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion
on fast food. In 2000 they spent $110 billion, or more than what we spend on
movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music combined. Twenty
years ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food was spent to prepare
meals at home. Now about half is spent at restaurants, mostly fast-food
franchises. The rate of obesity among American children has doubled since the
late 1970s. Dietary guidelines typically recommend that one-third or less of
calories of any child's meal come from fat, but about half of any Happy Meal
calories derive from fat (the chicken nuggets option is less healthful than the
hamburger meal).
Nonetheless, Schlosser's book stands out for its storytelling. You will learn
why french fries taste so good despite being mass-produced. He explains why,
aside from the salad greens and tomatoes, most fast food is delivered to a
restaurant already frozen, canned, dehydrated or freeze-dried. Readers go inside
beef slaughterhouses to discover the substandard conditions for workers. Plus,
check out the details about meat processing in this country (a fast-food
hamburger can contain meat from dozens or even hundreds of cattle) and why "many
workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they made it
themselves."
"My wife and I have decided we won't allow our kids to eat ground beef at all,"
Schlosser said. "The meat-recovery system in this country allows for too much
bone marrow and bone meal to potentially be in the meat."
While Schlosser's point is not directly about bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), or mad-cow disease, there is a connection. In Europe, where the disease
is taking a grip on humans and cattle alike, health agencies believe the highest
risks of tainted meat come from burgers, sausages and cuts of meat still
attached to bone. The theory is these meat sources and bones can contain more
nerve fibers that can harbor deadly "prion" proteins that infiltrate the brain.
From Schlosser's perspective, the most telling part of mad-cow concerns occurred
last month. McDonald's demanded that any beef it buys beginning Sunday has to
meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards for cattle feed (basically
by disallowing cow or sheep byproducts, which is logical enough because cows do
not normally eat other cows). Large beef-packing companies responded quickly by
saying they would meet the April 1 deadline and provide the documentation from
suppliers for all shipments.
The FDA recently reported that hundreds of feed makers failed to comply with its
rules, which are aimed at keeping BSE from spreading should it reach the U.S.
The problem is, the FDA rules on feed were established in 1997. What the
government couldn't do in four years, McDonald's managed in less than four
weeks.
"It shows how powerful McDonald's can be in getting what it wants," Schlosser
said.
(Bob Condor writes for the Chicago Tribune. Write to him at: the Chicago
Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.)
By Bob Condor
Chicago Tribune
