PDF Summary:Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

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• The physical health of the population
• The conditions under which we work and the wages we are paid for our labor
• The legal and political system under which we live
• The appearance of our towns and cities

In many ways, the story of fast food is the story of the American West—and specifically, the story of Southern California in the postwar boom years of the 1950s. It was here that the low-density suburban housing sprawl, automobile-driven economy, and youth-centric consumer culture that would come to define so much of the rest of the country (and prove so conducive to the fast food industry’s success) got its start. Underpinned by a political ideology that emphasized low taxes, weak regulation of business, and small government, the Los Angeles suburbs of the 1950s proved to be fertile soil in which the fast food industry could sprout and grow to take over the country. It is there that we begin our story.

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Local entrepreneurs quickly saw that they needed to adapt their business models to account for the car-driven growth of the region. Zipping by in their cars, the new consumers placed a premium on speed, convenience, and easy access from the freeways. Thus, Southern California became home to the world’s first motel and drive-in bank. The lesson was not lost on the region’s restaurateurs—beginning in the 1940s, Southern California saw an explosion of drive-in restaurants offering curbside service to motorists waiting in their cars. The speed of the automobile made flashy marketing a necessity: drivers needed to be able to see the restaurant signs as they whizzed by. With a corresponding rise in the population of teenagers in Los Angeles County, the new drive-ins fit in perfectly with the rising youth culture, offering a unique blend of girls, cars, and late-night food.

Carl Karcher

One entrepreneur who seized the opportunity was Carl Karcher. Born to a hardworking German Catholic family and raised on a farm in the Midwest, Carl moved to the then-small city of Anaheim in the 1930s. While working as a bakery truck driver, Carl took note of the local hot dog vendors...

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Kids: The Best Salespeople

Kroc instituted a philosophy, the core values that would guide McDonald’s—Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value. He was a dogged believer in McDonald’s, selling franchises with an almost holy zeal. What he understood keenly was the power that young people had over American consumer spending—especially children. Like his contemporary and friend Walt Disney (with whom he has often been compared), Kroc was a master at marketing to kids. Once again, the strategy was right for the times. America was experiencing the baby boom of the postwar years, during which birth rates skyrocketed—between 1944 and 1961, over 65 million children were born in the United States. There was now a youth market that, in terms of sheer scale and disposable income, was unlike anything that had ever existed before.

To bring in families with young children, Kroc knew he needed to create a wholesome, clean, All-American image for McDonald’s. Even in these early days, there was an emphasis on bright, colorful mascots and an entertaining atmosphere for children. In 1965, McDonald’s unveiled a new mascot who would come to eclipse even Disney’s Mickey Mouse in...

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Quantity is the key to how McDonald’s and Burger King operate, not quality. Getting maximum production out of the workforce, maximum speed and volume of product output, is how they make money. With the right technology and system of management, even a small number of unskilled workers can churn out a high level of goods on the cheap.

The fast food chains have taken almost all skill and talent out of food preparation. At McDonald’s, nearly all of the buns, patties, and fries arrive at the restaurant frozen. All the employees need to do is thaw it, assemble it, and serve it. Every step of this process is painstakingly laid out in a four-pound manual known as “the bible” that employees are told to follow to the letter, no exceptions. The point is to achieve total uniformity of the product. This level of control and standardization—from where the supplies come from to how the food is prepared to how it is presented—is why a Big Mac tastes and looks the same everywhere, from Boston to Beijing.

Naturally, the employees in such a system are highly interchangeable, mere cogs in a machine. In addition to teenagers, fast food chains are also major hirers of recent immigrants...

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The Frozen Food Revolution

While this was going on, frozen food was becoming more and more available to ordinary Americans. Although it had been around since the 1920s, most Americans didn’t own freezers at that time, and certainly not when the Great Depression hit just a few years later. But this would all change in the postwar economic boom of the 1950s: now, suddenly, freezers were mass-produced and cheap. Their sales soared, as did those of frozen foods.

Simplot saw a golden opportunity in the frozen french fry. They were easy to produce, easy to eat (they didn’t require a knife and fork), and there was a growing demand for them thanks to the exploding popularity of the new fast food restaurants. Indeed, these fast food restaurants (McDonald’s in particular), with their demand for a uniform and standardized product, were the ideal institutional customers for Simplot’s frozen french fries. This made sense from Ray Kroc’s perspective—they could cut labor costs and achieve enormous economies of scale by purchasing Simplot’s frozen fries in bulk.

Effects on US Farmers

Fast food’s popularization of the french fry has radically reshaped US agriculture....

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The by-now-familiar wave of consolidations followed, driven by the market’s new demands for standardized, uniform products. In such an environment, small meatpackers had to face the prospect of either selling themselves to the major players or risk going out of business. They simply could not compete with the scale of production that the giants had. This led to the creation of mega-firms like ConAgra, the largest meatpacking company in the world and the largest food-service supplier in all of North America. This concentration of the industry was actively supported by the Reagan justice department through its non-enforcement of antitrust law.

Death of the Unions

IBP also declared war on the meatpacking unions. They made a point of locating their plants in rural states, outside the urban centers where labor organization was strongest—before this, major cities like Chicago were the nerve centers of the meatpacking industry. The company developed a reputation of having a zero-tolerance policy toward unions, which eventually spread throughout the whole industry. In the early 1970s, they even enlisted the help of organized crime figures to break up a strike that was...

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(Shortform note: The scenes at these facilities are so gruesome and heartrending that the meatpacking industry has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent the public from seeing what goes on inside them. “Ag-gag” laws make it illegal to film or photograph activities at factory farms or meatpacking plants without the explicit consent of the owner—with the goal of silencing or intimidating activists who are trying to shine a light on animal abuses. These laws are on the books in Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, and Utah. Check out this New York Times article to learn more.)

Death and Injury on the Job

Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous occupations in America, with about one in three workers in the industry suffering an on-the-job injury. And these are only the official numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Independent studies estimate that the real rate of injury is far higher, with many incidents going unreported.

Workers are routinely lacerated, struck by swinging cattle carcasses, or subjected to carpal tunnel syndrome due to the repetitive physical...

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Children under the age of five are especially vulnerable to E. coli, and the pathogen is now the leading cause of kidney failure among American children. And its effects on children are truly horrific. In 1993, one six-year-old boy developed abdominal cramps after eating a tainted hamburger. This progressed to bloody diarrhea, the destruction of internal organs, and the liquifying of his brain before his ultimate death.

Distressingly, much of this tainted meat is served to children in their school cafeterias through the USDA’s school lunch program. Some of the meatpackers who provide ground beef for the program have been found to be processing cattle that are already dead when they reach the plant, mixing rotten meat into packages of ground beef, and maintaining facilities infested with rats and cockroaches. Conservative judges have given legal cover to ground beef processors by ruling that they cannot be held responsible for bacteria in their meat, when the bacteria might have come from the slaughterhouses they purchased it from. This novel argument ensures that **meatpackers and fast food chains face little legal incentive to demand better standards from their...

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The opening of the first McDonald’s in China, although still nominally a communist state, was met with great enthusiasm by the public in 1992. Thousands of people waited in line to take their first bite of a Big Mac, as the chain’s mere presence seemed to symbolize the long-awaited arrival of modernity. McDonald’s has shown few qualms about opening for business in culturally or religiously significant places—the golden arches are now in the Muslim holy city of Mecca and in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Perhaps most shockingly, the company even opened up a restaurant on what was once the grounds of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau—and aggressively marketed itself to visitors with flyers announcing, “Welcome to Dachau and welcome to McDonald’s.”

Global Strategy

As fast food has planted its flag in nearly every corner of the world, it has developed a truly global supply chain. The major chains source as many of their supplies as possible from the countries where they do business.

Seven years before opening their first location in India, McDonald’s began cultivating relationships with agricultural vendors in that country, even teaching farmers how to grow the exact...

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• The Justice Department must step up its antitrust enforcement actions to break up the power of the major agribusiness firms that have reduced America’s once-proud independent farmers to little more than sharecroppers.
• Fast food chains must be made liable for the behavior of their suppliers. Instead of using their economic clout to pad their bottom lines, they should wield this power on behalf of customers and the general public.

The fast food industry is not all-powerful and its continued dominance is hardly assured. In the past, Americans overcame powerful business interests to ban child labor, establish a minimum wage, and create publicly funded bridges, roads, schools, and national parks—and they can do it again.