Nave 9
Allie Jo Nave
Professor Leah Stahl
English 101.07
Mahara Copy
9 December 2010
Land of the French Fries, Home of the Burger
In the past centuries, it was an obligation that a family would spend the time to cook a homemade meal, and then sit together and eat it. It was quite idyllic, this dinner was. The father of course sat at the head of the table, the mother at the foot, and the children would entertain them with stories of their days at school and new things that they had learned. Dinner would sometimes last for hours, and if the children were lucky, mom would bring them out a dish of freshly-baked apple pie. Some good quality family time was spent at the dinner table, and what was better than that?
How often is it, though, that one gets to enjoy this tranquil luxury? Americans are constantly overloaded by their schedules that there is no time to slow down and cook a meal. We have resorted to eating by ourselves, in our cars, and while we are traveling. Where are we going for this food? Only the place with the big yellow arches, of course. This growing trend has caused McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants to skyrocket in popularity. One cannot travel anywhere and not see a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s. The fast food industry has impacted the lives of Americans so tremendously in ways of our technology, our health, our diets and our well being, that it has come to be the way of the American people. No longer are the brave eagle and the flag the symbol of this great country, but rather two bright yellow arches stood atop a giant red roof.
In Eric Schlosser’s eye-opening novel Fast food Nation, the history of the country’s first fast food restaurant is described as follows. Richard and Maurice McDonald were the original founders of McDonald’s. In 1937, after their failed attempts to succeed in the theater business, Richard and Maurice opened their own drive-in restaurant. The restaurant was located in Pasadena, California, and focused mainly on selling hot dogs. This grew to be quite the commonplace in Pasadena, and because of its growing popularity, the McDonald brothers opened up a larger building in San Bernardino. It was named the “McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In.” It was an instant hit; however, the brothers were growing bored of the drive-in business. In 1948, they fired all of their existing employees and closed down the restaurant. Three months later the business was reopened and had a totally different look. The brothers installed new and larger grills and had adopted a new method of preparing meals. This particular method was thought up to increase their speed and lower the prices, thus heightening the amount of sales. They threw out all of their silverware, plates, and cups, and replaced them with paper and plastic products. When the McDonald brothers prepared food, the tasks were broken up into an assembly line—just like one would see done in the making of an automobile. Schlosser describes this process in his book, “one person grilled the hamburger; another ‘dressed’ and wrapped it; another prepared the milkshake; another made the fries; and another worked the counter” (20). This was the very first time that this fundamental factory process was applied in a kitchen. Once their new business started growing, the two realized that they needed a new building that was easy to catch sight of on the road. Although Richard was no architect, he constructed a sign that combined to large arches to create the letter M. Through some better trained building efforts and the help of a neon light, America’s favorite fast-food restaurant was born.
Fast food is everywhere now. It is in cities, malls, universities, schools, and even hospitals. If one were to travel down any major highway, a Taco Bell billboard will be lit up on the side of the road. Then turn on the television, there is bound to be a commercial about Colonel Sanders’ newest chicken creation. Schlosser suggests, “Fast food is so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life” (7). It is a part of our lives, one that this nation could not go without. Today, there are over 30 thousand McDonalds in the world, stretching across 100 countries and touching 6 continents (Supersize Me). Why is fast food so popular? It is quick, inexpensive, and does not require any sort of effort as to cooking and cleaning up afterwards. The better question is: why not? It does not take a rocket-scientist to see that if one is looking for a meal that tastes good and meets the criteria (quick, easy, and inexpensive), that fast food is the place to go. This fact has obviously been noticed by millions of people across the globe. In his book, Fast Food Nation, Schlosser points out that one in every four people visit a fast food restaurant at least once a day (3). This “quick and easy” disposition has hit America by storm. It is recorded that “more than 4,500 schools now serve Taco Bell products, and… at least 30% of public high schools offer some type of name-brand fast food” (Markel par. 4). With its dizzying availability, low prices, and reputational fast service, fast food is quickly making its way to the top of America’s cultural ladder.
Why is it that mostly every single person in the American population knows what a Big Mac is? Why is it that younger children do not recognize a picture of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Jesus; but can quickly tell you the identities of Wendy and Ronald McDonald (Supersize Me)? In his article “Junk Deal”, journalist Michael Crowley writes that “The food industry spends $30 billion a year on advertising…” (139). It is essential to the industry that their company’s newest profit-maker is introduced and desired by the American people. They do this by means of commercials, billboards, classified advertisements, the World Wide Web, magazines, and even movies. However, the fast food’s latest approach is targeting their ads at a younger group of consumers—children.
In the early 1980s, inclining advertisements towards children was a new angle that the food industry was working with. In fact, the 1980s has been coined “the decade of the child consumer” according to one marketing executive (qtd. in Schlosser 42). Schlosser continues to state, “Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending more money on them” (42). The idea in this is to not only initiate today’s expenditures, but the future’s as well. If these children find that McDonald’s or Burger King is their go-to fast food chain, then they will pass that along to their children, and so on and so forth. It is estimated that children (from ages eight to twelve) see up to 21 product advertisements a day. Out of these 21, four are linked to fast food (Zwillich pars.1, 4).
Another method of marketing to children that is being used by the fast food industry is that of giving away novelty items along with their food. The most known example of this would be McDonald’s Happy Meal. Mostly every child knows that when you buy a Happy Meal, a toy comes along with it. The toy could be a character from the latest Disney movie, a Barbie doll, or if you’re lucky, a Beanie Baby. With Burger King, if a child chooses to join the Big Kids Club, they will receive a neat toy of one of Burger King’s signature characters, a free meal on the child’s birthday, and a monthly newsletter of the happenings at Burger King. In Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” when talking about the main objective of this technique, one marketer explains that “It’s not just getting the kids to whine; it’s giving them a specific reason to ask for the product” (qtd. in Schlosser 43). So is this morally questionable method paying off for the fast food company? Well, as reported by a Burger King executive, the buying of the kid’s meals heightened total sales as good as 300 percent (Schlosser 45). With this fact, to put it simply, yes.
Fast food, in controlled portions, can be a nice change of pace from boring and mundane food. However, if these portions start to grow, or if one chooses to eat fast food every day, many problems can arise. One main problem that has been associated with fast food consumption is obesity. Obesity is the condition of being exceedingly overweight. It is a direct result of taking in more calories than are being burned. In “Junk Deal,” Crowley claims that according to the surgeons general, 300,000 American people succumb prematurely to obesity-related deaths each year. This number exceeds the rates affected by either smoking or drinking (138). This seems to be the case because the products that are sold in fast food restaurants are extremely high in saturated fats, added sugars, carbohydrates, and many other ingredients that provide little to no nutritional value. A study published in Pediatrics on the results of fast food consumption on the nutriment aspects and energy intake in children showed that throughout the course of a day, children who consumed fast food consumed an average of an additional 187 kilocalories (kcal)[1] than those children who did not eat any fast food (Bowman et al 114). Also, the study shows:
Because 30.3% of study participants ate fast food on any given day, these foods seem to contribute an additional 57 kcal (187 kcal × 30.0%) to the daily diet of the average child in the United States. This energy increment theoretically could account for an additional 6 pounds of weight gain per child per year, assuming 3500 kcal/pound of body weight, if energy expenditure were not changed. (Bowman et al 114)
It is easily seen from these two statistics that the overconsumption of fast food is not a joke. Obesity, in its slightest form, can cause many other health problems that may not be noticed until years later.
Although obesity is the main aspect that people focus on while eating fast food, it is the diseases that this growing epidemic will cause in the years to come that people should be more aware of. Type Two Diabetes, heart disease and even cancer are all health risks that are associated with obesity (WebMD par.2). The toll that these diseases have on the body is nothing short of disastrous. Heart disease is now the number one cause of death in the United States. It is explained on the WebMD website that the chances of a person who is obese to fall victim to these outcomes are doubled. Type two Diabetes depreciates the body’s capability to be able to manage its blood sugar. Obesity also doubles your chances of contracting this horrible disease. Lastly, the susceptibility to certain cancers such as prostate and colon are heightened with a high-calorie diet (WebMD pars. 8-11). All of these diseases are exceptionally taxing on the human body; however, they are all preventable in the eyes of obesity.
The amount of fast food that is consumed every year is confounding to say the least; it is not realized just how much the nation actually eats. It has been counted that today the average American consumes in one year around 49 pounds of unprocessed potatoes. The frozen french fry count has toppled over 30 pounds. As for the burger, Americans ingest around three per week (Schlosser 115, 198). With as much popularity as it has, has anyone cared to ask what is in the meat that they are choosing to eat? What about the fries? Why do McDonald’s fries taste so good? Believe it or not, a lot of brainpower goes into making that one little fry. Chemistry, math, measurements of palatability[2], measurements of textures, and other sorts of knowledge are all needed to create the McDonald’s fry that nation has come to know and love. But what exactly are the ingredients in the fries? As Eric Schlosser goes out to seek this information for his book Fast Food Nation, McDonald’s would not disclose that information; it these special ingredients that set their fries apart from the rest. It was found out, however, that the production of the fries, when McDonald’s first opened, included cooking their them in a mixture of beef tallow and soy oil. This caused the fries to have that hint of burger taste, while also packing more saturated beef fat per ounce than a hamburger. After hearing about this and many other high cholesterol problems with the french fries, McDonald’s was banned from making their fries this way (Schlosser 120).
The next option for McDonald’s was to add “natural flavor” to their french fries. If one would look at the end of the list of ingredients of a box of McDonald’s fries, they would come across this particular term. But what is it—a natural flavor? In Schlosser’s book, he explains that natural flavor is a man-made additive that gives the flavor to processed food (120-121). After being frozen, canned, and stored for a long period of time, the processed foods can start to lose their flavor. Thus, natural flavors and additives made it so food could be preserved for a long period of time and still hold its taste. Each natural flavor or combination of flavors is what precisely gives those McDonald’s fries their unique taste. Any flavor one would like can be produced with today’s food chemistry and technology. For example, if one would like a popcorn taste, just add methyl-2-peridylketone. For marshmallows, add ethyl-3-hydroxybutanoate (Schlosser 126). Just about any flavor thought of can be created through these methods. This is exactly what is going on with the french fries. It’s all just, well, chemistry.
As for the burger, Americans don’t really care to know what exactly it is that they are eating. Sure, it’s beef—enough said. What has that cow, or cows, went through, though, on their trip to your plate? Is it even safe to be eating? Schlosser explains that in 1982, a sickness spread through many American children after what seemed to be their recent trip to McDonald’s. The infection caused terrible diarrhea, vomiting, and other horrible symptoms. It was given the name E.coli 0157:H7. The infection can be brought about by uncooked or contaminated meat, contaminated vegetables, and water. Unaware of the causes, E.coli struck the lives of 12 children in 1982, resulting from contaminated meat samples in McDonalds. The commotion was settled shortly after, but not to be forgotten. Ten years later, another breakout from E.coli 0157:H7 spread, killing several other children (Schlosser 199). Nowadays, says Schlosser, contaminated meat may seem like an impossible task to achieve; however, with the cattle feedlots that are more prominently known in today’s agribusiness, a feedlot is actually a prime spot for infectious bacteria and pathogens to survive (201). Once one part of the meat is contaminated, every consumer is in danger. It is said that “A tiny piece of hamburger meat can contain enough of [E.coli 0157:H7] to kill you” (Schlosser 201). Meat can be contaminated from many different circumstances; the food the livestock eat, the conditions they are living in, and the way they are handled after they are slaughtered can all contribute to meat poisoning. What are they fed? Well, a very sickening fact is that the livestock rose for slaughter in the feedlots tend to be fed food that is cheap, unhealthy, and quite disgusting. Yes, they are fed corn and grain, but the livestock were mainly fed waste from the farms. This would include deceased poultry, horses, and even the other livestock. For years even, they were fed deceased cats and dogs that were bought from nearby animal shelters (Schlosser 202). Now, this practice has been banned by the Food and Drug Administration; however, the practice of the deceased cattle and poultry has not. This can make the cattle prone to many different illnesses that can then be transferred directly to the consumer. Although we do not eat what is inside of the cow’s four stomachs, our food can be contaminated by what is inside of them. The cows are first removed of their hide, and then also of their digestive system. If this process is not done carefully and a stomach rips open and reveals its contents to the meat, it can be contaminated (Schlosser 203). Once a single piece is contaminated, a whole widespread of consumers could be in trouble.