A fast food chain reaction

By MARGIE THOMSON

Even setting aside the urban myths about fast food - the rats in the takeaway chicken, the cats and dogs in the meat patties - there are enough genuine issues out there to make a book like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation a must-read in these grease and sugar-laden times.

He boots "happy" right out of the Happy Meal and reveals a changing world where countless farmers have gone to the wall as huge corporate concerns have grown up to service the expanding fast food companies; process workers are shamelessly exploited, working in dangerous conditions for pitiful wages; teenagers are employed at youth rates; consumers, and children in particular, are beguiled into buying food that makes them fat and unhealthy; physical landscapes are restructured as regional differences are obliterated and fast food outlets "play like a tape loop" along the highways.

Schlosser, an American journalist, is mostly writing about the United States, which is increasingly dominated by chains for every facet of life (and death: Service Corporation International, the world's largest provider of death-care services, owned 3826 funeral homes at last count).

His book will not, therefore, have quite the impact here it has had there and in Europe, which is also feeling the effects of encroaching multinationals, the harbingers of the global economy.

But we are so inculcated with American culture that his stories of the birth of the fast food chains (all started by ordinary "little guys" with a determination to succeed) and their inter-relationships with other icons such as the Disney Corporation, cowboy culture, sunny California and so on, feel as if they have something to teach us about the world we occupy, albeit on the fringes or vicariously.

We are by no means exempt, as the mushrooming of fast food outlets in New Zealand illustrates (147 McDonald's, 60 Burger Kings, 87 KFC, 86 Pizza Hut, 29 Starbucks - and more of everything in development), and so Schlosser's book could be considered a warning or simply a new angle on the way our world works.

Apart from the dismal implications for independent restaurants and takeaway operators, the main risk posed here by fast food chains is to the nation's health and, in particular, the health of our children.

While no detailed statistics are available on obesity among children, the Ministry of Health has warned that children are becoming less active and that Type 2 diabetes, a disease linked to obesity, sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy eating, is occurring earlier and is predicted to almost double from 81,000 in 1996 to 145,000 in 2011.

The Green Party's press release from the end of May, revealing that McDonald's and Burger King cook their French fries in beef lard is, in the context of Schlosser's book, disturbing.

In most countries, including the United States, this practice was discontinued because of consumer concerns about the high fat, high cholesterol content of beef lard.

As Schlosser notes, fries cooked in beef fat have more saturated fat an ounce than a McDonald's hamburger. In other countries, McDonald's at least cooks its fries in vegetable oil, adding synthetic beef flavouring.

Just last week a national nutrition survey revealed New Zealanders eat twice as many chips as the Aussies, and that chips from fast food outlets are about three times more expensive than chips from independent shops and much higher in fat.

Schlosser's book, which was published in hardcover last year but appears now in paperback and with a new afterword, has been criticised for seeming too much like a series of magazine articles artificially strung together.

In part, though, it's the flavoursome, bite-sized chunks that make it so readable and the structure seems logical.

He begins with the stories of the founding fathers setting up their hotdog carts in the Californian sunshine of the 1930s and 1940s; moves through an analysis of how they came to fit in with other developments (de-skilling of the workplace, consolidation of capital, the discovery of children as a market niche, the all-out targeting of children using everything from charities to sponsorships of sport, schools, hospitals and children-focused amenities such as zoos).

His study includes profiles of the different industries associated with the fast food chains such as agriculture (potato farming), meat processing (particularly horrifying) and food technology; the use of young, uneducated, immigrant labour at low pay rates; the exploitation of government subsidy schemes; and an analysis of the food itself.

Fast food-related food poisoning episodes have occurred in the United States, with E. coli being a particularly dangerous ingredient of some hamburgers (it's what happens when the meat is produced in such a way that any one patty can contain meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle which, Schlosser reveals, have often spent long periods of time standing in their own manure. Not to put too fine a point on it, he says: "There is shit in the meat.")

The lack of inspection and control in the United States meat-processing industry is revealed as a most dangerous state of affairs.

He exposes the chemicals needed to create, for instance, a strawberry-flavoured milkshake. The list of 49 ingredients, including solvent, will seriously challenge your desire ever to have another.

And that, in the end, is a central question about this book: will it change consumer behaviour?

Schlosser says he wants us to make up our own minds. What he's up against, of course, is that we're not a species known for sensible choices. If we think something tastes good, we'll probably go ahead and eat it, or drink it, or smoke it against our better judgment.

Yet he remains as optimistic as those early entrepreneurs who began with a burger bar and a fresh idea, and took over the world.

"Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the 20th century - a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar Southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete."

While there are clearly many areas where direct parallels do not exist between the US situation and our own, nevertheless there is a wider framework that keeps this book fascinating and relevant.

We live in a fast-changing world and need to find new ways to understand it. With that in mind, Kalle Lasn's Culture Jam is an interesting companion-read for Fast Food Nation.

While Schlosser has chosen to focus on one sector of the economy, Lasn is searching for a way to understand (and undermine) consumer culture per se.

A Canadian media activist who founded Adbusters magazine, he investigates the encroachment of television, advertising and other forms of virtual reality in our lives. "We learn to be careful about what we dump into nature or absorb into our bodies; now we must learn to be careful about what we take into our minds," he writes.

* Fast Food Nation, Penguin, $26.95
* Culture Jam, Quill, $42.95