FYI: The typical American eats 30 pounds of French fries per year. French fries are the most frequently ordered dish in American restaurants.

What you don’t know about the fast-food industry could hurt you

BY TRACY IDELL HAMILTON

When San Luis Obispans turned their backs on the Carl’s Jr. restaurant at the corner of Broad and Higuera streets, forcing the fast-food retailer to pull out of its downtown location, residents bucked a major trend.

Americans spend more on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and music–combined.

Ronald McDonald is recognizable to 96 percent of schoolchildren–only Santa Claus ranks higher. The Golden Arches are more widely recognized than the Christian Cross. Every month, more than 90 percent of our children eat at McDonalds. The typical American adult eats three fast-food hamburgers a week. A quarter of us eats fast-food every single day.

Forty years after pioneers like Carl Karcher (Carl’s Jr.), Richard and "Mac" McDonald (started McDonald’s), and Ray Kroc (turned McDonald’s into empire) began transforming the Southern California landscape with quick, cheap, and always uniform meals, America’s love affair with fast food has homogenized cities, corporatized agriculture, added to the epidemic of obesity, and larded the job market with low-paying, dead-end jobs.

So says Eric Schlosser, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and National Magazine Award winner, in his new book: "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal."

In this, Schlosser’s first book, he takes on almost every aspect of the fast food industry, from what goes in those hamburgers (old dairy cows, generally the least healthy cattle stock), the industry’s goal of mechanizing its kitchens toward the goal of "zero training" (while still taking hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for "training" its workers), its efforts to market directly to children (like through billion-dollar deals with Disney), and its influence on agriculture (an entire new breed of chicken was developed for the McNugget.)

Schlosser wrote his New York Times-bestseller after more than two years of research. Much of his material first saw print as a series of articles for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and other magazines.

This award-winning journalist is no wild-eyed vegan out to transform America’s dependence on super-sized burgers and fries, either. A red-meat eater who has consumed plenty of fast food, he is more methodical muckraker than irate ideologue. He admits that most of the food he ate while researching his book "tasted pretty good." (It ought to–fast food restaurants depend on the billion-dollar a year "flavor" industry, which combines chemicals to bring us such flavors as "strawberry" and "char-broiled."

Instead of ranting, Schlosser makes his case with an avalanche of well-researched facts, statistics, anecdotes, and quotes. But he didn’t shy away from the ugly truth, either. The gross-out factor–this man who waded knee-deep in cow blood while researching slaughterhouses didn’t hold back with his subsequent descriptions–is serious, and not for the faint of heart.

For example, in the U.S., "Advanced Meat Recovery Systems" scrape off the very last shred of meat off the bones. In its efficiency, however, the system has been found to pull off a fair amount of bone marrow and spinal cord, as well, little extras that get mixed into your future burger. These are machines that are banned in Europe.

The meatpacking industry, once largely unionized, has automated and de-skilled much of its labor, much like the fast-food industry, lowering wages and working conditions in the process. Twenty years ago, the Monfort plant in Greeley, Colo. slaughtered 175 cattle an hour. Today, that number is up to 400. Schlosser says those increased speeds are responsible not only for increased injury rates, but increased rates of meat contamination.

Also, thanks to increased automation, each burger produced these days contains bits of dozens, or even hundreds, of different cows, increasing the likelihood that a sick one could spread its E. coli across the land.

With rising grain prices, corporations have looked for cheaper ways to feed cattle. Until 1997, many were fed what is known in the industry as "livestock waste"–rendered remains of sheep and other cattle, along with dead dogs and cats purchased from animal shelters across the land.

That law has changed, as fears of mad cow disease increased. Now, cows may only be fed the remains of horses, pigs and poultry (in an interesting twist, poultry may be fed dead cattle, and poultry plant-waste, including sawdust, may be fed to cattle). Feeding livestock the rendered remains of their animal brethren has increased illness among cattle stocks, Schlosser says, illness that may then find its way into your burger.

Moving from meat to workers, Schlosser examines not just low-paid fast-food workers, but everyone from the illegal immigrant labor doing the dangerous job of cleaning slaughterhouses, to independent cattle ranchers who’ve been run out of business by the corporatization of the beef industry.

Schlosser sat in on a fast-food convention where top members of the industry spoke openly about the goal of "zero training" in the kitchen. Jobs that have been so completely de-skilled can be filled cheaply, Schlosser says, reducing the need to retain any individual worker. Turnover rates are between 200 and 400 percent–the typical fast food worker either quits or is fired every three to six months.

Fast-food employees are the largest group of low-paid workers in the country. The nation’s million farm workers earn an average of $5.58 an hour. The 2.5 million fast-food workers earn an average of $5.74 an hour. Teenagers have long been the staple fast-food worker, ideal candidates, since living at home, they can afford to work for wages too low to support an adult.

But as other industries have laid off workers, fast-food restaurants are now the largest employer of the nation’s poorest, and most disadvantaged workers. But the industry’s infamous hostility toward unions, and workers rights in general, keep millions without benefits or overtime, stuck in a minimum wage job that offers little chance for upward mobility.

Then there’s workplace safety. While minor burns are still the most common workplace injury, industry expansion has coincided with a rising incidence of workplace violence. In 1996, Schlosser writes, more than twice as many clerks, cashiers, and retail managers were killed on the job than police officers. "Many features that make fast-food restaurants so convenient–such as their location near highway off-ramps," he writes, "also make them attractive targets for armed robbery."

Almost three decades ago, farm activist Jim Hightower warned of the "McDonaldization of America." Schlosser argues that much of what Hightower feared has come to pass: the fast-food trade has indeed become a threat to independent business, bringing the nation closer to a food economy dominated by giant corporations, homogenizing American life and culture.

In the brief closing section of his book, "What to Do," Schlosser attempts to set out ways we can break our dependence on fast-food, ways the industry should shape up. He calls for some action by government–starting, perhaps with giving the USDA the power to recall rancid meat, something they cannot do now, thanks to heavy lobbying by the meatpacking industry.

Schlosser calls for higher standards for food safety, a ban on advertising "unhealthy" foods for children, eliminating government subsidies for training fast-food workers, and passing new laws that might facilitate union organizing.

His last appeal, however, is aimed not at the industry, but at you and me: "Turn and walk out the door."

Schlosser might be proud to know that in downtown SLO at least, we’ve already done that.Æ

Staff writer Tracy Hamilton can’t stop thinking about spinal cord in hamburgers.