PDF Summary:Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
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1-Page PDF Summary of Fast Food Nation
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal shows how the fast food industry has reshaped the American economic system and imprinted itself on the nation’s culture since the 1950s. The industry has profoundly reshaped how American food is produced, marketed, and consumed. The book explores fast food’s exploitative marketing and labor practices, destruction of the nation’s independent farmers, responsibility for the spread of deadly foodborne pathogens like E. coli, and creation of a national obesity epidemic. Fast Food Nation shows us how fast food has exerted a decidedly negative influence on American life.
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They also tend to hire the most vulnerable members of society who have the least ability to fight back—teenagers, the elderly, the disabled, and undocumented immigrants. The industry is known for being one of the most uncompromisingly anti-union sectors of the economy, with a long history of extreme hostility toward organized labor and an established record of turning a blind eye to worker safety. The low wages, disregard for worker safety, and union-busting labor practices extend beyond the fast food chains themselves: these practices have also become hallmarks of the agribusiness and meatpacking industries that supply the fast food sector.
Destroying Independent Agriculture
The overwhelming economic power and demands of the fast food industry have been disastrous for formerly independent farmers, ranchers, and poultry growers. In the potato industry, the fast food chains force farmers to accept absurdly low prices for the crops they grow: out of $1.50 spent on an order of fries, perhaps two cents accrue to the farmer who actually grew the potatoes. The chains’ purchasing power has created a similar situation in both the beef and chicken markets, with once-independent agriculturalists now working as little more than hired hands for the major agribusiness firms. This has led to the destruction of family farms and the increased centralization of the nation’s food supply.
Deadly Food Poisoning
Deadly outbreaks of E. coli, a virulent pathogen primarily found in beef, have become far more common since the rise of fast food. This is largely due to fast food’s centralized system of food production, which exponentially expands the reach and scope of outbreaks. Today’s slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants are marked by appalling sanitary conditions, where cattle are packed into close quarters, given little exercise, and splash around in pools of manure. After the animals are slaughtered, poorly trained workers often handle the carcasses improperly, pulling out the stomach and intestines of the cattle by hand and spilling the contents of the digestive system all over the slaughterhouse floor and into the meat that’s sold to consumers.
Ground beef is particularly prone to contamination, because the package that’s sold in the supermarket does not come from a single animal. Because of how it is processed and shipped, the meat of just one infected cow can find its way into 32,000 pounds of ground beef.
Obesity Epidemic
Fast food has contributed to a national and global epidemic of obesity. In 1991, only four states had obesity rates reaching 15 percent; just a decade later, 37 did. The human costs are immense: severely overweight people are four times as likely to die young as people of normal weight. These health conditions are now increasingly seen in other parts of the world: between 1984 and 1993, fast food locations in the United Kingdom doubled, bringing American-style obesity in its wake. The British consume more fast food than any other Western European country; they also claim the continent’s highest rate of obesity. China also saw its proportion of overweight teenagers triple during the 1990s; meanwhile, at the dawn of the 21st century, one-third of all Japanese men in their 30s were overweight.
Recommendations
It seems like fast food is an unstoppable force as it reshapes communities and cultures, forces workers into exploitative relationships, contributes to global health problems, and despoils the environment. However, there are concrete steps that workers, activists, and elected officials can take to bring the industry to heel.
- Congress should ban companies that sell high-fat and high-sugar products from using the public airwaves to advertise to children.
- States and the federal government should pass legislation that makes it easier for fast food workers to organize labor unions. This would provide a real counterweight to the power of the chains, forcing them to address workers’ grievances.
- The USDA should be given increased funding and new authority to enforce the strictest possible food safety standards, especially for ground beef that it purchases through the federal school lunch program.
- Meatpacking companies must be held accountable for the gross violations of workers’ rights taking place in their plants, including punitive sanctions for every injured worker and even criminal prosecutions of executives who knowingly turn a blind eye to employee safety.
- 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.
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.
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PDF Summary Prologue: We Are What We Eat
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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.
PDF Summary Chapter 1: SoCal Origins
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Marketing to Kids
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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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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: McJobs
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: The Rise of Big Agribusiness
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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....
PDF Summary Chapter 5: In the Slaughterhouse
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: The Jungle, Redux
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Contamination Nation
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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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PDF Summary Chapter 8: Fast Food World
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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...
PDF Summary Epilogue: How to Fight Back
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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.