Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 15. Februar 2008
Alternative Radio
ERIC SCHLOSSER
Die Fast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser ist Korrespondent des
„The Atlantic Monthly“ Der Träger zahlreicher
journalistischer Auszeichnungen, darunter auch des National Magazine
Awards, landete mit „Fast Food Nation“ einen Bestseller,
dem mit „Reefer Madness“ ein weiterer Verkaufsschlager
folgte.
Mein Buch „Fast Food Nation“
dokumentiert, wie die Art und Weise, wie wir uns ernähren, nicht
nur Konsequenzen für jeden Einzelnen von uns hat, sondern für
unsere gesamte Gesellschaft. Ich habe beinahe mein Leben lang Fast Food
gegessen, ohne je einen Gedanken darauf zu verschwenden, woher es kommt
oder wie und woraus es gemacht wird. Für die tiefgreifenden
Veränderungen, die unser Land in den letzten 25 bis 30 Jahren
erlebt hat, war Fast Food zwar nicht immer verantwortlich, aber immer
ein Symbol. Ein Symbol für den Größenwahn unserer Fast
Food Mentalität. Die Wirtschaft befindet sich mehr und mehr in
immer weniger aber immer größeren Händen. So
wächst der Abstand zwischen Arm und Reich und die
Nahrungsmittelindustrie betrachtet Tiere als bloße Ware und macht
Menschen zu Produktionsfaktoren, die man zwar nicht schlachtet, aber
beliebig mißhandelt. Man nennt das „Freie
Marktwirtschaft“ – aber die staatliche Subventionierung
dieser Firmen und deren Verquickung mit der Regierung haben mit dem
„gerechten“ Freihandel eines Adam Smith nichts, aber auch
gar nichts zu tun.
Interessanterweise stand die Wiege des Fast Food in Los Angeles, der
Stadt ohne Wasser, deren Hauptverkehrsmittel, das Auto, samt und
sonders durch die Regierung subventioniert wurde, ebenso wie der
Straßenbau und der Bau von Staudämmen. Hier, im Dunstkreis
einer durchaus erfolgreichen, dynamischen, aber keineswegs freien,
sondern vom Staat gepäppelten Wirtschaft, erblickte die Fast Food
Industrie das Licht der Welt.
In den 50er Jahren begann mit Chicken McNugget,
alles noch ganz unschuldig als Begleiterscheinung der damals
herrschenden Faszination für Schnelligkeit und Technologie und der
Träume vom Atomauto, von -Plastikhäusern und einer perfekten
Walt Disney Welt. Die Brüder McDonald besaßen ein typisch
kalifornisches Drive-In Restaurant, in dem junge kurzberockte
Kellnerinnen schnell zubereitete Speisen zu den Autos brachten. Doch
mit der Zeit waren es die McDonalds leid, diesen Mädchen und den
Schnellköchen, die nie lange blieben, ordentliche Löhne zu
bezahlen. Sie entließen die Kellnerinnen und die
Schnellköche und lernten schlecht bezahlte Kräfte an, die
außer Pommes Frites, Milch Shakes oder Hamburger nichts anderes
zubereiten konnten. Wie am Fließband mussten sich nun die Kunden
ihr Essen an der Theke abholen. Das war nicht nur negativ. Da
McDonald‘s billig war, konnten es sich auch Arbeiter leisten,
essen zu gehen. Weil alle McDonald’s liebten, wurden es immer
mehr. Alles ging gut, bis der Handelsvertreter Ray Kroc erkannte, welch
eine Goldgrube dieses Geschäft war. Er stieg bei den McDonald
Brüdern ein und bootete sie bald aus. Nach seiner Vorstellung
sollte an jeder Straßenkreuzung ein McDonald’s stehen, in
ganz Amerika und auf der ganzen Welt. Die Botschaft Ray Krocs, dem
Vordenker nicht nur der Fast Food Industrie, lautete: “Unsere
Organisation darf nicht auf das Individuum setzen. Das Individuum muss
der Organisation vertrauen.“ Einheitslook und alles unter
Kontrolle, hieß die neue McDonald’s. Philosophie. Bis in
die frühen 1970er Jahre hatte dies keine größere
Bedeutung. Erst als die Zahl der Niederlassungen immer weiter stieg und
bis heute weltweit 30 000 erreicht hat und Mc-Donald’s zum
größten Spielwarenhändler und zum mächtigsten
Käufer von Rindfleisch, Kartoffeln und Hähnchen wurde, zeigte
dies Wirkung.
In Brasilien ist McDonald’s der größte private
Arbeitgeber und die goldenen Bögen genießen inzwischen einen
höheren Erkennungswert als das christliche Kreuz.
- 2 -
Auch in der Landschaft nehmen Gleichförmigkeit und
Eintönigkeit überhand. Die Fast Food Industrie beherrscht das
Bild. Mit Flugzeugen, Hubschraubern und Satelliten kundschaftet man die
günstigsten Standorte aus. Und wo ein neuer McDonald’s
eröffnet wird, folgen Kentucky Fried Chicken und Burger King auf
dem Fuß. Doch nicht nur das Schnellgaststättengewerbe
kopierte das erfolgreiche McDonald’s Konzept, man findet
inzwischen auch überall die gleichen Auspuffshops, Optikerketten,
GAPs und wie sie sonst noch alle heißen.
Der Verlust an unberührter Natur ist bestürzend, aber noch
bestürzender ist der Einfluss, den McDonald’s auf die
Arbeitswelt der USA hat. Es ist kein Zufall, dass das Sinken der
Mindestlöhne mit dem wachsenden Bedarf an billigen
Arbeitskräften in der Fast Food Industrie zusammen fällt. Mit
den Brüdern McDonald fing alles an, aber das war nichts im
Vergleich zu den heute von Vorgesetzten und Maschinen kontrollierten
Arbeitsbedingungen. Arbeitskräfte sollen nicht teuer und
ausgebildet sein, sondern billig und austauschbar. Mc Donald’s
schließt lieber eine Filiale als mit der Gewerkschaft
zusammenzuarbeiten. Deshalb ist auch die Personalfluktuation so hoch.
Doch immer öfter breitet sich dieses Niedriglohnsystem auch in
anderen Industriezweigen aus. Die Fast Food Industrie ist der
größte Billiglohn-Arbeitgeber der USA. Kein Wunder, dass man
sich gegen jede Lohnerhöhung vehement zur Wehr setzt, oder
versucht, gesetzliche Mindestlöhne zu unterlaufen.
In der Fast Food Industrie zu arbeiten ist hart aber noch tausendmal
härter ist es in der Fleischindustrie. Anfangs kaufte
McDonald’s sein Fleisch landesweit bei 125 bis 150 Betrieben.
Doch dann, gemäß Ray Krocs Motto der Vereinheitlichung,
wollte man, nur noch mit wenigen, dafür riesigen Fleischfabriken
Geschäfte machen. Das führte zu einer unglaublichen
Konzentration auf dem Fleischmarkt. Ein typisches Beispiel dafür
ist Greeley in Colorado. Man riecht Greeley, lange bevor man es sehen
kann. Man kann diesen Geruch nach lebenden Tieren, Exkrementen und
Tierkadavern, die zu Hundefutter verarbeitet werden, nicht beschreiben.
In dieser modernen Industriestadt verarbeiten Menschen und Maschinen
große Jungbullen zu kleinen vakuumversiegelten Fleischpaketen. Es
sind Orte wie Greeley, aus denen die Milliarden Hamburger kommen, die
wir Jahr für Jahr essen. Dafür werden bis zu 100 000
Jungrinder auf engstem Raum zusammengepfercht und drei Monate lang aus
riesigen Maschinen mit jeweils 3 000 Pfund Getreidekraftfutter
gemästet. Die Masse ihrer Ausscheidungen über trifft die der
Bewohner von Denver, Boston, Atlanta und St.Louis zusammen. So also
sieht moderne Vieh- und Weidewirtschaft aus!
Je größer und mächtiger die Fleischfabriken wurden, um
so tiefer sanken die Löhne. Noch vor etwa 25 Jahren waren
Fleischereiarbeiter, ebenso wie Autobauer, die bestbezahlten der USA.
Heute verdienen sie am wenigsten. Dabei ist dieser Beruf einer der
gefährlichsten. Hier leidet man nicht am Carpaltunnelsyndrom des
Computermenschen, sondern an schweren Nacken-, Schulter-, Rücken-
und Handgelenksverletzungen. Auch hier ersetzte man qualifizierte
Arbeiter durch Ungelernte. 80% sprechen nicht Englisch, ein Viertel von
ihnen sind illegale Einwanderer. Sie alle leben in bitterer Armut. Das
hat nicht nur Folgen für die Steuerzahler von Weld County, die
für die hohen Gesundheitskosten und sozialen Aufwendungen zur
Kasse gebeten werden, sondern für uns alle.
- 3 -
Selbst wenn uns die armen Fleischfabrikarbeiter gleichgültig sind
oder wir als Veganer nie in die Nähe von Fleisch kommen, bleiben
wir nicht von den durch Fleisch verursachten Krankheiten verschont, da
mindestens 10% der gefährlichen E Coli Bakterien durch
Körperkontakt übertragen werden.76 000 Menschen erkranken
jährlich an einem ernährungsbedingten Leiden. 5 000 Menschen
sterben an einer Lebensmittelvergiftung. Das sind mehr als die Opfer
des 11.Septembers. Ich behaupte nicht, dass sie alle Hamburger gegessen
haben, aber die Massen-Lebensmittelproduktion ist eine ideale
Voraussetzung für die Verbreitung von Krankheiten. Weil die
Arbeiter schnell sein müssen, machen sie Fehler und verletzen sich
oder übersehen ungenießbar Teile. Viele Menschen erkranken,
weil sie mit Fäkalien verunreinigtes Fleisch gegessen haben. Doch
dank unserer industriefreundlichen Lebensmittelkontrollbehörden
ist es der Fleischindustrie gelungen, Tests auf die gefährlichen
E-Coli-Bakterien zu verhindern.
Als 1993 700 Menschen - darunter viele Kinder - durch Kolibakterien
erkrankten, und die Clintonregierung entsprechende Tests anordnen
wollte, zog die Fleischindustrie vor Gericht
Bis heute kann die Bundesregierung verunreinigtes Fleisch nicht aus dem
Handel ziehen. Wenn ein Kind an einem Spielzeug ersticken könnte,
kann die Regierung das Produkt vom Markt nehmen. Wenn dasselbe Kind
durch den Genuss eines Hamburgers sterben könnte, darf die
Regierung nicht einschreiten. Rückrufaktionen erfolgen nur auf
freiwilliger Basis.
In Europa handhabt man diese Dinge ganz anders. Dänemark ist der
größte Fleischexporteur der Welt. Wird dort in einem der
riesigen Schweinemastbetriebe auch nur eine einzige Salmonelle
gefunden, bleibt der Hof bis zu einem negativen Salmonellen Test
zwangsweise geschlossen. Bei uns darf mit Salmonellen kontaminiertes
Hackfleisch problemlos im Supermarkt verkauft werden. Eine Vergiftung
durch Salmonellen ist zwar nicht unbedingt lebensgefährlich, aber
jährlich erkranken daran 1 Million Amerikaner mehr oder minder
schwer. Das zeigt, dass die Fleischindustrie die Behörden
kontrolliert, von denen sie eigentlich überprüft werden
sollte.
Das letzte Kapitel von Fast Food Nation
behandelt die BSE- Krise und die Möglichkeit, dass angesichts der
laschen Kontrollen der US-Behörden diese Rinderkrankheit jederzeit
auch in den USA ausbrechen könnte.
Dass die US-Regierung alle Warnungen in den Wind geschlagen hat,
könnte auch daran liegen, dass die jetzige
Landwirtschaftsministerin, Ann Veneman, der amerikanischen
Fleischindustrie sehr nahe steht und ihre Chefsprecherin zuvor bereits
Chefsprecherin der Nationalen Rinderzüchter Vereinigung war und in
beiden Funktionen stets beteuerte, dass BSE für die USA kein
Problem darstelle. Schlimmer noch: als ein Fleischereibetrieb in
Arkansas ankündigte, seine Schlachttiere auf BSE testen zu lassen,
drohte ihm das Ministerium mit gerichtlichen Schritten. So vermeidet
man auf Kosten unserer Gesundheit Verantwortung übernehmen zu
müssen. Sollte jedoch eines Tages McDonald’s verlangen, alle
Jungrinder auf BSE zu testen, würde dies unverzüglich in die
Tat umgesetzt.
Und je schneller die Fast Food Industrie wächst, um so dicker
werden unsere Kinder. Schon heute leiden besonders viele Kinder aus
afroamerikanischen und Latinofamilien an Diabetes. So rollt eine
riesige Gesundheitskostenlawine wie eine tickende Zeitbombe auf uns zu.
Bereits ein Fünftel aller amerikanischen Kleinkinder futtert jeden
Tag Pommes Frites.
Boykottieren Sie Mc Donald‘s und alle anderen Fast Food Ketten;
denn sonst bestimmen diese Firmen nicht nur die Politik der Bush
Regierung, sondern unser gesamtes Leben,
Vielen Dank für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit.
- 4 -
Kurze Zusammenfassung der Fragen und Antworten
Die Gefahr, durch den Verzehr von Fleisch zu erkranken, ist bei einem
Steak geringer als bei Hackfleisch. Besonders Alte, Kranke und Kinder
sollten kein oder nur sehr, sehr gut durchgebratenes Hackfleisch essen.
Bei Steaks werden Verunreinigungen und Keime an der
Fleischoberfläche durch sorgfältiges Braten unschädlich
gemacht. Für Hackfleisch dagegen wird gutes und verdorbenes
Fleisch vermischt und die Bakterien verbreiten sich nicht nur an der
Oberfläche. Selbst Biofleisch ohne Pestizid-Rückstände
kann wegen der Belastung durch die allgegenwärtigen Keime sehr
gefährlich sein. Trotzdem unterstütze ich die
Ökolandwirtschaft aus vollem Herzen, weil sie nachhaltig ist.
Mit ein Grund für den schlechten Gesundheitszustand amerikanischer
Kinder ist die Tatsache, dass es an 30% aller High Schools Marken Fast
Food gibt, täglichen Turnunterricht aber nur an 25%. Weil wir
nicht bereit sind, für die Erziehung unserer Kinder genügend
zu bezahlen, müssen die Schulen anderweitig Geld auftreiben. So
öffnen sie Fast Food und sogar auch Limonadegetränken ihre
Tore. Es gibt amerikanische Jungen die 10% ihres täglichen
Kalorienbedarfes mit Limonadegetränken abdecken. Wie schön
für Mc Donald’s und Coca
Cola! Um Steuern zu sparen, opfern wir die Gesundheit unserer Kinder.
Der rasante Anstieg der Fast Food Industrie hat nichts mit dem
Bevölkerungswachstum zu tun. Die Fast Food Industrie boomt, weil
die echten Kosten nicht auf der Speisekarte auftauchen. So war es auch
vor 30 Jahren als die Fabriken ihre Giftabfälle munter in die
Flüsse kippten und die Gesellschaft für die Gesundheitskosten
aufkommen musste. Würden die sozialen Aufwendungen
berücksichtigt, würden nicht nur die Hamburger teurer,
sondern auch die Produktionsbedingungen humaner werden.
Wir müssen endlich aufhören, all diese Mißstände zu ignorieren oder als unabänderlich zu betrachten.
Um McDonald’s oder Taco Bell
gefährlich zu werden, reicht es, wenn 2, 3 oder 4% von uns nicht
mehr dort essen. Zu den moralischen und ethischen Beweggründen
für so einen Schritt kommen auch die horrenden Ausgaben für
eine übergewichtige und kranke Bevölkerung. Ich rufe auch zum
Boykott von Taco Bell auf, weil der größte Abnehmer von
Tomaten dank massiver Proteste für den Schutz von Tieren eintritt,
aber Tomatenpflücker weiterhin wie Sklaven behandelt. Könnte
es sein, dass es leichter ist, Mitgefühl für Tiere zu
mobilisieren als Menschenrechte für Zweibeiner durchzusetzen?????.
ERIC SCHLOSSER
Fast Food Nation
Aspen, Colorado 28 February 2004
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for
The Atlantic Monthly. He is the winner of a number of journalistic
honors including the National
Magazine Award. His book Fast Food Nation was a bestseller. His latest book Reefer Madness is also a bestseller.
With Fast Food Nation what I was trying to do is tell people what
you're eating and what the consequences are, not just for you who is
eating it but for the entire society. I had eaten fast food for most of
my life without ever thinking about it, without ever thinking about
where it came from or how it was made or what's in it. And I was
amazed. I consider myself a fairly well informed person; fairly well
educated person, and I had no idea what was going on behind the
counter. For me, Fast Food Nation is about fast food, but it's also
about this country. Because I think some fundamental changes have
occurred in the last 25 to 30 years in this country. Fast food has not
only been a cause of many of them but is also a very good symbol, I
think, is very emblematic of those changes.
I recently was rereading Edward Abbey. He was a great writer and
champion of the West, of the West that had not yet been paved. And what
he talked about could be a perfect synonym for fast food or the fast
food mentality. What he was opposing was the megamachine that was just
completely developing and raping the West, the megalomaniacal
megamachine. And in a lot of ways that's what the fast food system and
the fast food mentality have been.
We have seen in this country in the last 25 to 30 years an
extraordinary concentration of economic power into the hands of a few
corporations in each industry. That has been accompanied by a widening
gulf between rich and poor and, in the fast food industry, an
industrialization of our food system which comes out of the same
mentality, which is treating animals like they're commodities and
factors of production. And we have had in the last 25 to 30 years this
rise of factory farming, which is the first time in human history that
people have raised livestock this way. But I would also argue that
human beings are being turned into commodities and factors of
production. And whereas they're not being slaughtered and processed,
they've been greatly mistreated by this system. And it's all occurred
in a remarkably brief period of time. What we eat and how we eat it has
been transformed really in the last 25 or 30 years. So the book is
about fast food, but it's also about this country and what's happening
to it.
What's amazing to me is how much of this has happened with a
free-market ideology as a justification. So many of these changes have
been explained as the workings of the free market, freedom at work,
free enterprise. And yet in Fast Food Nation I look again and again and
again at how the free market had nothing to do with it, and about how
subsidies of corporations and a very close relationship between these
corporations and the government have been much more responsible than
anything like the free market that Adam Smith envisioned.
So it's interesting that the fast food world began in Los Angeles,
because you could not pick a city whose development had less to do with
the free market than Los Angeles. Here is a place that didn't have its
own water. Here is a place whose fundamental means of transportation,
the automobile, was created entirely through government subsidies. The
road building was subsidized by government. The bringing of water to
Los Angeles and the dam building was subsidized by government. And in
World War II, heavy industry came to Los Angeles for the first time
through direct government investment - the building of factories and
the aerospace industry. So this is where the fast food industry begins,
in an economy that may have been very productive and very dynamic but
had nothing to do with free enterprise and everything to do with
deliberate government intervention in the market and very close
relationships between the companies there and government.
I'm very, very critical of the fast food industry, but it all began
rather innocently in this Southern California of the 1950s, which was a
very, very optimistic place and a very optimistic time. Fast food came
out of the car culture of Los Angeles. Los Angeles was the first city
that was completely formed to serve the automobile, and so it was a
whole new urban culture arising, and it was a culture that really
worshipped speed and technology. And there was a real cult of science
that I think Walt Disney in many ways embodied, this whole idea of a
great big, beautiful tomorrow where we would have nuclear-powered cars
and our houses would be made out of plastic, and all these wonderful
inventions. And it really was an unlimited faith in science and in
technology. And that ultimately is where your Chicken McNugget began.
Again, it began innocently. It began with the McDonald brothers. The
McDonald brothers owned a drive-in restaurant in California. They had
carhops; they had young waitresses in short skirts bringing their food
to customers in their cars. And they had short-order cooks. It was a
typical California drive-in, except the McDonald brothers got sick of
having to pay all these carhops, these young waitresses, their
salaries, and they got sick of paying short-order cooks their salaries,
because they were constantly quitting and moving on to another
restaurant, and these teenage customers that they had were flirting
with the carhops and breaking and stealing a lot of cutlery and dishes.
So they came up with a revolutionary new way to produce and serve
restaurant food. They fired the carhops. They fired the short-order
cooks. They broke down everything in the kitchen into one task that was
repeated again and again and again. So instead of having a skilled
short-order cook who knew how to make a lot of dishes and had to be
paid a pretty good wage, they trained one person to do nothing but
French fries, one person to do nothing but milk shakes, one person to
do nothing but flip burgers. And because these were unskilled jobs,
they could pay less money. And they persuaded their customers to walk
up to the counter and get their food themselves as opposed to being
served. This cut their costs enormously. What the McDonald brothers had
done was to bring the old factory assembly-line system to the
restaurant kitchen for the first time.
And it wasn't entirely bad, because their food was really inexpensive
and working-class people could afford restaurant food. Everyone loved
McDonald's hamburgers. And when there was that one McDonald's in San
Bernardino, California, it really didn't have a huge impact on America
at all. So that was in 1948. One McDonald's. A couple more McDonald's
opened up. And by the late '50s it was an extremely successful
business, but it really didn't have a big impact on this country.
The person who changed this industry was a traveling salesman named Ray
Kroc, who went to McDonald's, saw people waiting on line to get their
own food, saw the huge lines of cars waiting to get in McDonald's and
thought, This is a great business. And Ray Kroc went into partnership
with the McDonalds briefly before he bought them out and drove them out
of business. But Ray Kroc dreamed of taking this system and putting it
at every intersection throughout the United States, and eventually the
world. So he was the big thinker.
And I'm going to read you a quote that embodies Ray Kroc's philosophy
and really the fast food industry of the last 25 years and, I think, a
lot of the culture of the United States over the last 25 to 30 years.
And that is about uniformity and conformity. This is Ray Kroc.
“We have found out that we cannot trust some people who are
nonconformists,” said Kroc. “We will make conformists out
of them in a hurry. The organization cannot trust the individual. The
individual must trust the organization.” That is the guiding
philosophy of McDonald's. Everything exactly the same, at thousands of
locations. Uniformity, conformity, and control.
This did not have a very big impact on the United States until the
early 1970s, because in 1970 there were about a thousand McDonald's.
Today there are closer to 30,000 worldwide. You have an enormous,
enormous increase in the size of this one company, to the point where
McDonald's is the most widely advertised brand. McDonald's is one of
the world's biggest distributors of toys. McDonald's has huge impact in
this country: biggest purchaser of beef, biggest purchaser of potatoes,
second biggest purchaser of chicken. Overseas, enormous. McDonald's is
the biggest private employer in Brazil. And in some ways one of the
freakiest factoids, and something that Mel Gibson might want to
consider, is that the Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than
the Christian cross. So I look forward to The Passion of Ronald.
This has all happened in my lifetime, and happened in a remarkably
brief period of time, historically speaking. And to get to Colorado for
a second, this push towards uniformity and conformity you see in the
landscape. The fast food industry became the avant garde of sprawl. At
first, McDonald's was opening up along the new intersections of the
California freeways. But as their siteselection technology became more
sophisticated, at first Kroc would fly in an airplane and look for
schools, and they would open a new McDonald's near the school. And then
they got more sophisticated and they used helicopters. And then they
were one of the first companies to make widespread use of satellite
photography. And what they were looking at were growth patterns. And
they would find real estate in advance of the sprawl, because the real
estate would still be inexpensive, and they would put a McDonald's in
advance of where the sprawl was growing. It would become
self-perpetuating, because everyone knew that McDonald's had the best
technology to figure out where growth was occurring. So the building of
a McDonald's at an intersection would lead to the construction of a
Burger King across the street or a KFC down the block, and McDonald's
again and again. The fast food industry was intimately connected to
sprawl.
So one of the influences that the fast food industry has had has been
to make one place look very much like another, and all of them
ultimately reminding you of Orange County, California. The success of
Kroc's philosophy of uniformity and conformity was recognized by people
in other industries. So not only other restaurant chains but every
other kind of franchise saw the success of McDonald's and imitated it.
So you not only have the same fast food restaurants, but you have the
same muffler stores, eyeglass stores, GAP, etc., etc. So fast food has
had this effect on what the landscape looks like. And that's an
aesthetic issue.
The loss of wilderness and the loss of nature is upsetting, but more
upsetting to me in many ways is the impact of McDonald's on how people
work in America, again, in a very brief period of time. It's no
coincidence that the minimum wage reached its peak in United States,
adjusted for inflation, in 1968 and that the huge growth of the fast
food industry would coincide with the minimum wage declining in value,
or that American workers' hourly wages peaked in 1973 and then declined
for over 20 years 3 afterwards. Because the fast food industry has
profited enormously from cheap labor and has a system, in fact, that is
dependent on cheap labor.
The McDonald brothers came up with it in a very innocent way. But if
you go to a fast food kitchen today, you see a work force that is
totally under the control of their employer. And not only totally under
the control, but under the control of machines. This has been very,
very deliberately structured this way. They do not want workers with
skills at all, because workers who have skills have to be paid well.
They want workers who are interchangeable and who will follow orders
well. All of the knowledge, all of the skill is built into the
McDonald's operating system or is built into the machinery in the
kitchen. And that's why the turnover rate in the fast food industry is
amongst the highest in the American economy. The average fast food
worker quits or is fired every three or four months. But that doesn't
hurt the bottom line, because these workers are interchangeable. This
is a McJob. And unfortunately, again, other industries have seen this
model and have imitated it, and you see a growing low-wage work force
and incredible control over the workplace.
McDonald's is one of the most anti-union companies in the world.
McDonald's on at least three occasions has shut down a restaurant as
soon as the workers voted for a union. There are very few industries
that would rather shut down than do business with the union. Most of
the time they will let the union in and then very carefully and quietly
work to get the union out within a year or two. So the McDonald's labor
system has had a huge, huge impact.
The fast food industry is the largest employer of minimum-wage labor in
the United States, and it should come as no surprise that the fast food
industry is one of the biggest opponents of minimum- wage increases in
this country. And some of the fast food chains, like Wendy's and
Jack-in-the-Box, have even thrown support behind making the federal
minimum wage voluntary and allowing states to have minimum wages lower
than the federal minimum. So that's what they want, are cheap,
interchangeable workers.
Being a fast food worker is a tough job, but being a meatpacking worker
is about a thousand times worse. And the meatpacking industry was
restructured enormously by the power of the fast food industry.
McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the United States. When
they were a small company, McDonald's bought their meat from 125-150
small suppliers all over the United States. But when Kroc’s edict
became the rule - uniformity, conformity, everything the same at every
location - they didn't want to deal with small meat suppliers anymore.
They wanted to deal with big, big meatpacking companies. And you saw
incredible concentration in the meatpacking industry in the last 25 to
30 years.
I'm going to read you a little part from the book that describes
another part of Colorado. How many of you have spent any time in
Greeley? A fair number. Greeley is a city that has been transformed
largely to serve the needs of the fast food industry. And I'm just
going to read you a little bit about Greeley.
"You can smell Greeley, Colorado, long before you can see it. The smell
is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live
animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The
smell is worse during the summer months, blanketing Greeley day and
night like an invisible fog. Many people who live there no long even
notice the smell. It recedes into the background, present but not
present, like the sound of traffic for most New Yorkers. Others can't
stop thinking about this smell, even after years. It permeates
everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with
their sleep. Greeley is a modern factory town, where cattle are the
main units of production, where workers and machines turn large steer
into small, vacuum-sealed packages of meat. The billions of fast food
hamburgers that Americans now eat every year come from places like
Greeley.
“ConAgra’s used to run the slaughterhouses in Greeley, but
now it's a company called Swift & Company. And there are two
enormous feedlots in Greeley. Each one of them can hold up to 100,000
head of cattle. At times, the animals are crowded so closely together
in these feedlots it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass
of brown and white fur that goes on for acres. These cattle don't eat
grass off the prairie. During the three months before slaughter, they
eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway
dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic
steroids implanted in their ears. A typical steer will consume more
than 3,000 pounds of grain during its stay at a feedlot just to gain
400 pounds in weight.
“The process involves a fair amount of waste. Each steer deposits
about 50 pounds of urine and manure every day. Unlike human waste, this
manure isn't sent to a treatment plant; it's dumped into pits, huge
pools of excrement that the industry calls lagoons. The amount of waste
left by the cattle that pass through Weld County,” which is where
Greeley is, “every year is staggering. The two feedlots run by
Swift & Company outside Greeley produce more excrement than the
cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis combined.”
So this is the modern meat machine. These are the feedlots that feed
the mega-slaughterhouses. And no nation in the history of the world has
ever had feedlots like this or slaughterhouses like this or raised
animals like this.
I talked about the impact of McDonald's. The concentration of the
meatpacking industry was largely driven by the need to serve the fast
food industry. And one of the things these meatpacking companies did,
as soon as they got big and powerful, was to cut wages and break
unions. So that at the Greeley slaughterhouse you had very well paid
union workers until the early 1980s, when the union was broken.
Slaughterhouse workers were some of the highest paid industrial
workers in the United States, like autoworkers, until the last 20-25
years. Now they are some of the lowest paid industrial workers in the
United States, and there is a very high turnover rate. It's the most
dangerous job in the United States, measured by the amount of serious
injury. So at these slaughterhouses the typical worker is three times
more likely to be injured than at an ordinary American factory. The
rate of cumulative trauma injury, which is severe neck, back, shoulder,
wrist injuries, not the kind of carpal tunnel you get from your
keyboard, but really serious cumulative trauma injury, is 33 times
higher than in American industry as a whole.
And what the meatpacking companies did was to get rid of skilled
workers and come up with an interchangeable work force. About 80% of
the workers are non-English-speaking; about a quarter of them are
illegal immigrants. They are living in terrible poverty and suffering
terrible injuries. This has consequences for everybody, not just for
the people in Weld County whose taxes are now higher to pay for the
emergency-room visits and for the schooling and for all the
social-service needs of these poor meatpacking workers.
But even those of us who can't work up pity and compassion for poor
meatpacking workers should be concerned about this. If you eat meat,
you should be very concerned about what's happening in these
meatpacking plants. Unfortunately, even if you're a vegan and you
wouldn't go near any meat, if you have children who go to school with
children who eat meat, this is of huge importance, because the rise of
the fast food industry and the changes in these slaughterhouses has
been accompanied but a huge rise in food-borne illnesses in this
country. Over the last 25 years it climbed to the point where every
year in the United States 76 million people are sickened by something
they ate and more than 5,000 people are killed by something they ate.
That's an incredible number. 5,000 people dying of food poisoning every
year. That's more than were killed at the World Trade Center. It's
extraordinary. I'm not claiming that these people ate fast-food
hamburgers, but there is no question that the centralized,
industrialized system for food production that we've created in a very
brief period of time to serve the fast food industry is just a perfect
way for spreading disease far and wide.
The workers, for example, at these slaughterhouses who get injured
usually get injured because they're being made to work too quickly.
They make mistakes and they cut themselves so they get hurt. And the
same mistakes can often contaminate the meat when they're trying to
remove certain parts of the animal that shouldn't be eaten.
Unfortunately, most people who are sickened by meat are sickened
because the meat contains fecal material and was contaminated in the
slaughterhouse. And it shouldn't be there.
People eat meat all over the world, and yet it's remarkable how loose
our food safety standards are. In the book I go into the very close
relationships between the meatpacking companies and the USDA and the
government regulators that are supposed to be keeping this stuff out of
the meat. It's remarkable how much power the meatpacking companies
have. For something like E. coli, E. coli 015787, which is a very
dangerous bacteria that can be in ground beef, the meatpacking
companies fought viciously against any testing of the ground beef for
E. coli.
In 1993, 700 people, most of them children, were sickened by E. coli
spread by Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers. And even though 700 people,
mainly children, had been sickened, when the USDA, under Clinton, said,
“We're going to start testing for E. coli,” the meatpacking
industry immediately took them to federal court to prevent any testing
of the meat. Right now the federal government has no power to order
contaminated meat off the market. If there is a toy in the Happy Meal
that could conceivably choke a child, the government can immediately
order it off the market, but if there is ground beef in a hamburger
that could kill the child, the government does not have that power
because the meatpacking industry doesn’t want them to have that
power. So all government recalls are voluntary.
It's quite remarkable when you step outside the United States to see
how things are done differently elsewhere. I was talking to some Danish
meatpacking officials. Denmark, believe it or not, is one of the
biggest meat exporters in the world. They have a gigantic hog industry.
At a Danish slaughterhouse, if any salmonella is found anywhere in the
building - it could be on a desk, it could be on the floor, in the
corner - the slaughterhouse is shut down, and it's not allowed to
reopen unless all the salmonella tests are negative.
We have a different system in this country. There is no limit on how
much salmonella can legally be in your ground beef. The Clinton
administration tried to impose a salmonella standard, but the Bush
administration doesn't feel that one is necessary. So when you go to
the supermarket to buy ground beef, that meat could be completely full
of salmonella, and it's perfectly legal to sell. Salmonella is not
likely to kill you, like this dangerous E. coli can, but over a million
Americans are sickened by salmonella every year and tens of thousands
are hospitalized. When you look at the meatpacking industry, you see a
textbook case of an industry controlling the government agencies that
are supposed to be regulating it.
The last chapter of Fast Food Nation looks at mad cow disease and the
possibility of mad cow disease coming to the United States. I wrote
that three years ago and felt very strongly that mad cow disease would
come here. It's not that I had some great prophetic wisdom or insight
into the future. It's just that anybody with common sense who looked
carefully at the problem would realize that our government was being
incredibly irresponsible in its measures to keep BSE out of the
country. So there were many scientists and there were many, many
investigative reporters who were warning that mad cow disease would
come here.
When you look at how the government has responded to it, you need only
look at the USDA. The head of the USDA right now, Ann Veneman, her
mentor, who brought her to the USDA, was the head of the American Meat
Institute. The chief spokesman for the USDA, who is constantly telling
us on TV that mad cow is not a problem in the United States, before
joining the USDA in the Bush administration she was the chief spokesman
for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. She set up a Website on
BSE and mad cow disease, and that Web site said mad cow disease is not
a problem in the United States. And you can go on and on and on.
One of the most remarkable cases unfolding right now, the USDA feels
it's unnecessary to test for mad cow disease widely in this country,
but there is one meatpacking company in Arkansas that out of some sense
of social responsibility, and also because they want to be able to
export their meat, has announced that they're going to start testing
every cattle that they slaughter for mad cow disease. And the USDA's
response has been they're threatening criminal action against any
company that tests those cattle for mad cow disease. This government
and this industry does not want any testing of the meat done. And like
I said, you can look back to the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak. They don't
want any trace-back of the meat and they don't want any recall powers.
And it's not because they want you to get sick. They just don't want to
be held legally liable for the meat; they don't want to be held
responsible for it.
So these are some of the consequences of the fast food industry, which is at the height of our food pyramid.
If McDonald's were to say tomorrow that every steer that's slaughtered
has to be tested for mad cow disease, they would be. And in looking at
food-borne illness, I mentioned, even if you're a vegan, this is an
issue for you. E. coli 015787, which is carried in ground beef and is
one of the most dangerous pathogens, about 10% of the cases are spread
hand to hand. So you don't have to eat a hamburger, you don't have to
eat any meat to be at risk or to have your children at risk from these
pathogens.
I've talked about some of the consequences of the fast food industry. I
could go on and on. And I won't, because I'm interested in hearing
questions. But we could talk about the rise in obesity that has
coincided perfectly with the rise in the fast food industry; the fact
that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes that of
the children born in the year 2000, one out of every three will develop
diabetes in this country, and of the African American and Latino
children born in the year 2000 one out of every two will develop
diabetes. This is a catastrophe not only for their health but for the
society that's going to pay the medical costs. So, again, even if
you're completely self-interested, these are huge, huge costs for our
society.
You wonder why children are becoming obese. They're being targeted by
the fast food chains with their advertising, which is aimed at children
as young as . In Time magazine a few months ago, a study was done
of the eating habits of American toddlers. These are kids roughly 16
months old. And more than one-fifth of American toddlers are eating
French fries every day. So this is a health time bomb waiting to go off.
None of this was inevitable. And a lot of my book is an attempt to show
how it didn't have to be this way and about how decisions that were
made led to it being this way. Each of you is connected to this system
immediately by your purchasing. And when you buy food, you are
supporting the companies that produce it and the way in which it's
produced. So if you care about these problems, the first thing I would
recommend is, don't go to McDonald's. Don't go to any one of these
restaurants. I stopped once I finished my research. It's quite possible
to eat without going to fast food restaurants. Somehow Americans did
for more than 200 years before this industry became so powerful. In
addition to this boycott of fast food, people can get involved on all
these different issues.
Whether it's sprawl, whether it's food safety, whether it's worker
safety, it's amazing what a small group of very determined and highly
motivated people can do. Just look at the Bush administration right
now. They believe fully in what they're doing. And it's in a direction
that I don't like.
The other couple of points I just want to make before finishing my rant
is I have been strongly attacked because of this book and I've been
called a socialist and a communist and all kinds of stuff. And I am
really not antibusiness at all or anti-corporate. I was in the Soviet
Union when it was the Soviet Union, and you don't want your government
doing any of these things for you. But in the great pendulum of
American history, the pendulum has swung way too far. It's one thing to
believe that corporations can be the most efficient means of producing
the things we like, and it's another thing to have corporations running
the foreign policy of the U.S. or running the energy policy of the U.S.
or having coal companies coming up with the clean air policies of the
U.S. or lumber companies determining what we should do with our
national forests. So it's not a question of being a socialist or
anti-business. It's about a sense of proportion. And that proportion
has been completely lost.
I'm about to end my rant. But I'm a great believer in looking outside
the bubble and believing that we have the power to change things and
not just sit in the drivethrough on the way back home to watch the
big-screen TV. So thank you very much.
I was wondering how safe it is to just get a steak in a supermarket as opposed to eating fast food. Is it safer?
And also organic beef is that better? Is that safer and cleaner?
With the safety issue, I really tried hard in the book -- and I don't
know if I succeeded -- I don't want people to be afraid of their meat.
When I think of the things that I personally worry about, it's so much
more likely to end for you on the road to Denver than because of any
steak you eat. The reason that I'm angry about it is if statistically
the odds are slim that I'm going to get sick from eating a steak,
they're pretty high that somebody is right now as we speak. When I was
mentioning the dangerous forms of E. coli, E. coli 015787 and other
ones that create these Shiga toxins, which can destroy your vital
organs, 100,000 Americans are going to be sickened by it every year.
That's a lot of people. That's way too many.
In terms of who is really at risk, children are really at risk.
Children and the elderly I think shouldn't eat ground beef. Or if they
eat ground beef, it should be cooked completely. And the elderly
shouldn't probably prepare ground beef because bringing it into your
home, it's almost like the ground beef that you would buy in the
supermarket, you almost have to treat like a biohazard. It's horrible
to say, but these organisms live on the countertop for days. It only
takes a few of them to make you very, very ill. If you're a healthy,
fit adult, most likely you won't get sick. But some people do.
I support organic production completely. And I don't know if it's
better for me to eat organic foods. When it comes to pesticide
residues, some of them may be bad, maybe some of them aren't. But when
you buy organic foods, you're supporting a whole system of production
that is sustainable, that is connected to how people have been raising
food for millennia, whereas this factory-farmed meat, this fast food
system of production is so recent. It's only in the last 25 or 30 years
we've been raising cattle this way, and already we have E. coli, mad
cow disease, unbelievable environmental harms from the runoffs from
these lagoons, etc. etc. So I would urge people to eat organic for the
sake of sustainability. And if you eat a burger, cook it well.
You're saying that the steaks do have the hazards, but they're safer than --
The reason that a hamburger is so much worse is – I’m just
going to be blunt. Let's say manure gets sprayed all over the meat at
the slaughterhouse. Muscle meat is sterile, so the manure will be
sprayed on the outside of the steak, and if you cook the steak, you're
cooking and killing the bacteria on either side. There are people who
are really paranoid about this, and it's true that if you pierce the
steak with a knife or with a fork, you're introducing bacteria from the
outside into the inside. I can't worry about that. If you cook the
outside of the steak, you will be fine.
Ground beef is so dangerous because you're mixing together -- a typical
fast food hamburger has pieces -- in the first version of the book I
had an error, and it bothered me, I said that there are pieces of
hundreds of cattle in one fast food hamburger. There are actually
pieces of more than a thousand, if not thousands, of different cattle.
So what you have is a much greater risk of being exposed to a
contaminated animal and many, many surfaces of the meat that are ground
together and exposed to bacteria.
What they do now is they take the bad meat sometimes - and this is
against the law - and they grind it up with the good meat. And if you
add a little bad meat to a lot of good meat, you don't smell or see the
difference. Bon appetit.
Could you give us your insights
regarding the collaborative trends between our public-school school
lunch programs and the fast food industry?
A very, very disturbing set of statistics that explains why American
kids are so unhealthy is that 30% of American high schools now serve
branded fast food in the school and 25% offer daily physical education.
Because we have not been willing to pay to educate our children,
schools have been forced to find money through all kinds of means. And
one of the ways that they've been able to find money is by inviting
fast food companies and, even more disturbing in some ways, the soda
companies into the schools. It's an immediate source of revenue for the
school. But I think they're not doing these kids any favor, because
they're imposing huge, huge costs on these children.
Soda consumption is right now one of the best markers for obesity, and
studies have found that you can have a very good sense of whether a
child is going to be obese by how much soda they're consuming. And some
American teenage boys are now getting 10% of their daily calories from
soda, which is really, really not a good thing. So the fast food
industry is looking and the soda industry is looking for any way they
can to market their goods. They know that eating habits are formed when
you're young, and you can fight against them your whole life but you
have them your whole life.
And McDonald's and Coca-Cola, for example, are like this. The most
profitable thing that the fast food chains sell is soda. McDonald's is
the largest seller of Coca-Cola in the world. The hamburgers they break
even on, the French fries are profitable, and the sodas that they sell
are just a gold mine. McDonald's would be delighted if you came in and
ordered a soda and then left and didn't bother to buy any of the food.
So it's tragic. Basically what's happening in the schools is
sacrificing the future health of our children in order to have annual
revenues right now.
I have two questions. One,
what’s the hardest part of the artistic process, being a writer
as it relates to your family doing this kind of in-depth research and
things like that?
And the second question is, the
expression that the pen is mightier than the sword, do you believe that
being a writer you can have more of an impact than being in politics?
And if that's not true, why don't you run for office?
The hardest part of my work is I've really tried to write about
subjects and people who don't get written about in the mainstream
media, and that means traveling. So the hardest part is traveling a lot
and being away from my family. The hardest part for them is probably
having to listen to me talk to them about soda when we're at a
restaurant and I just don't want to buy them soda. We're not food
Nazis. So my children have suffered, and I feel badly about that.
I am a writer because that's what I love to do. I think that all
writers and all artists have an obligation to the society to think
about what's happening and try to understand it and then try to express
something based on it. But I think everybody has that obligation.
Writers just get more public credit for it. But I think that everybody,
whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a bus driver, you all should be
concerned about these issues and in your own way trying to work on
them. So I don't want to give too high an elevated position to what I
do. Certainly I'd rather be the head of the USDA right now, because if
I was, I would have all kinds of things that I would do to the
meatpacking industry to make them produce safer meat. There is just no
way I would ever become a politician, because I'm totally ill equipped
for it.
I'm here with my book club, and one
of the gals sitting next to me was asking -- was kind of alarmed, and I
was too, about the statistic about children, one out of three with
diabetes, in the African Americans and Latino, one out of two. How is
that attributed to fast food or to food safety or to the food industry?
This came from a study that the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention did this past year, which is looking at the trends in
obesity in the United States, and particularly the huge growth in
obesity among American children. In looking at obesity, it's not
related to ethnicity as much as it's related to poverty. The more well
educated and the wealthier you are, the less likely you are to be
obese, because you have access to good medical care, and when you get
too big, your doctor says you've got to do something about it. It's the
poor. It's the poor who are really suffering from this.
So what they did was they did a study of the rise of obesity and the
rates of the rise in obesity, the connection between obesity and the
development of early-onset diabetes. Early-onset diabetes was a very
rare, very rare condition until the last 25 or 30 years. It's a
terrible disease, and it's a terrible disease for children to have.
Fast food is not the only cause of obesity, but when you look at what's
changed in the American environment over the last 20 to 30 years, it's
not our gene pool. Perhaps people are less active, but our diet has
changed and the amounts of food and the types of food that we're eating
have changed. And it's happened overseas. You can make a graph
internationally and look at Japan, look at Great Britain, and look
overseas. As fast food consumption rises, so does obesity. I don't
think it's the only cause. All of these epidemics have a variety of
vectors. But I would argue that the super-sizing of America has been
connected to this fast food.
Do you think any of the increases in
the future of the fast food industry are going to be in some ways
necessitated by our population growth rates?
No, I don't. I think that the fast food industry has been able to
expand because the real cost of the food is not reflected in the menu
price. So it's very cheap food when you buy it. I think that the
movement against fast food right now is where the environmental
movement was 30 years ago. It used to be that factories could dump
their pollution into a river or pollute the air freely, without any
repercussions, and the people who would be sickened down river or the
people who would breathe the polluted air, that was just the way it
went. Those factories and those companies were able to impose their
costs on the rest of society. I think the same thing is true of the
fast food industry and the meatpacking industry right now.
And if you were to take all these social costs that they're imposing on
us and make them pay the price, not only would their menu price go up,
but they would have to produce food differently.
I don't think that you can produce livestock - we haven't even talked
about how chicken is being raised - I don't think you can produce
livestock this way without all kinds of social costs. Antibiotic
resistance is one. When you have this many animals crammed together,
you need to give them antibiotics to prevent them from just being wiped
out. I don't think there is anything inevitable or necessary about this
system.
ESPN X games is one of the great
events that has come to Aspen in the last few years, extremely
successful. You walk into the X games and the first thing you see is a
giant trailer for Mountain Dew and a giant trailer for Taco Bell, two
of the main sponsors. And no one even seems to flinch. What frustrates
me, and maybe you can talk about it more, is how do we begin to change
this. It just seems it's so accepted and so okay to be just pumping
this stuff down kids' throats. No one even questions, really, how
tightly that marriage is.
It's not okay. That's the first point. And you can't take on for
yourself the obligation to change the world, because if you start with
that premise, you're going to fail immediately. But to the degree that
you can control your own purchases, it's amazing. For McDonald's or
Taco Bell to be harmed, it's not that everybody tomorrow decides not to
eat there. These are businesses that are predicated on growth, and
constant growth. Their stock price is very much pegged to their growth.
If their growth diminishes because 1%, 2%, 3% decide not to go there
anymore, it has a huge impact. Taco Bell was in terrible financial
trouble just a few years ago because they were showing declines of 2,
3, 4%. There are more people than you would think who are starting to
feel this way. Europe is way ahead of us in terms of their awareness of
food and consciousness of food. And, again, aside from all the moral
and ethical reasons not to eat this food, the costs are going to be
incredible from having a nation of obese and sick people. It's that
simple.
If there were one company I would really urge you to boycott, it would
be Taco Bell. It is a huge purchaser of tomatoes from Florida, where
there have been half a dozen cases of slavery among tomato pickers and
other migrant workers. And the workers there are asking for the
unreasonable raise of one penny per pound of tomatoes that they pick.
Taco Bell is the purchaser. Taco Bell, thanks to some of the animal
rights groups, has a very strong animal welfare policy. They say they
will not buy any meat from suppliers who mistreat animals. And we're
trying to get them to extend the animal welfare policy to two-legged
animals.
I guess that's a perfect introduction
to my question. I was going to ask, if the USDA is not protecting
humans, and meat that's not fit for human consumption goes to the
animals, and it is in pretty much all of our animal products, have you
investigated anything at all in the animal fields with the illnesses of
animals being related to not-fit-for-human-consumption meat?
First, as I said, the USDA is doing a very bad job of protecting
animals even, because cattle may be getting mad cow disease. I've
investigated animals to the extent of having visited some of these
factory farms and seeing how the animals are treated and the use of
antibiotics and steroids. And we were talking about the factory-farm
chicken. These birds are hatched and then delivered to one of these
poultry houses, where they live with tens of thousands of other
animals. And they don't leave until they die, and they have a terrible
life. So I have investigated it to that point. But there are a lot of
very well organized, very effective animal rights campaigners. And I'm
focusing my energy more on human rights, which is much harder to get
sympathy for. Thank you.
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