Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (34 page)

THERE IS NOTHING INEVITABLE
about the fast food nation that surrounds us — about its marketing strategies, labor policies, and agricultural techniques, about its relentless drive for conformity and cheapness. The triumph of McDonald’s and its imitators was by no means preordained. During the past two decades, rhetoric about the “free market” has cloaked changes in the nation’s economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice. From the airline industry to the publishing business, from the railroads to telecommunications, American corporations have worked hard to avoid the rigors of the market by eliminating and absorbing their rivals. The strongest engines of American economic growth in the 1990s — the computer, software, aerospace, and satellite industries — have been heavily subsidized by the Pentagon for decades. Indeed, the U.S. defense budget has long served as a form of industrial policy, a quasi-socialist system of planning that frequently yields unplanned results. The Internet at the heart of today’s “New Economy” began as the ARPANET, a military communications network created in the late 1970s. For better or worse, legislation passed by Congress has played a far more important role in shaping the economic history of the postwar era than any free market forces.

The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is
a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. Many of America’s greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools, and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.

Much like the workings of the market, technology is just one means toward an end, not something to be celebrated for its own sake. The Titan II missiles built at the Lockheed Martin plant northwest of Colorado Springs were originally designed to carry nuclear warheads. Today they carry weather satellites into orbit. The missiles are equally efficient at both tasks. There is nothing inexorable about the use of such technology. Its value cannot be judged without considering its purpose and likely effects. The launch of a Titan II can be beautiful, or horrific, depending upon the aim of the missile and what it carries. No society in human history worshipped science more devoutly or more blindly than the Soviet Union, where “scientific socialism” was considered the highest truth. And no society has ever suffered so much environmental devastation on such a massive scale.

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. The great challenge now facing countries throughout the world is how to find a proper balance between the efficiency and the amorality of the market. Over the past twenty years the United States has swung too far in one direction, weakening the regulations that safeguard workers, consumers, and the environment. An economic system promising freedom has too often become a means of denying it, as the narrow dictates of the market gain precedence over more important democratic values.

Today’s fast food industry is the culmination of those larger social and economic trends. The low price of a fast food hamburger does not reflect its real cost — and should. The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by losses imposed on the rest of society. The annual cost of obesity alone is now twice as large as the fast food industry’s total revenues. The environmental movement has
forced companies to curtail their pollution, and a similar campaign must induce the fast food chains to assume responsibility for their business practices and minimize their harmful effects.

IN
1995,
THE
American Academy of Pediatrics declared that “advertising directed at children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age.” The academy did not recommend a ban on such advertising because it seemed impractical and would infringe upon advertisers’ freedom of speech. Today the health risks faced by the nation’s children far outweigh the needs of its mass marketers. Congress should immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote foods high in fat and sugar. Thirty years ago Congress banned cigarette ads from radio and television as a public health measure — and those ads were directed at adults. Smoking has declined ever since. A ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening. Moreover, such a ban would encourage the fast food chains to alter the recipes for their children’s meals. Greatly reducing the fat content of Happy Meals, for example, could have an immediate effect on the diet of the nation’s kids. Every month more than 90 percent of the children in the United States eat at Mc-Donald’s.

Congress cannot require fast food chains to provide job training to their workers. But it can eliminate the tax breaks that reward chains for churning through their workers and keeping job skills to a minimum. Job training schemes subsidized by the federal government should insist that companies employ workers for at least a year — and actually provide some training. Strict enforcement of minimum wage, overtime, and child labor laws would improve the lives of fast food workers, as would OSHA regulations on workplace violence at restaurants. Passing new laws to facilitate union organizing might not lead to picket lines in front of every McDonald’s, but it would encourage the fast food industry to treat workers better and listen to their complaints. Teenagers should be rewarded, not harmed, by the decision to work after school. And if the nation is genuinely interested in their future, it will adequately fund their education, instead of inviting advertisers into the schools.

As for the food now served at school cafeterias, it should be safer to eat than what is sold at fast food restaurants, not less safe. The USDA should insist upon the highest possible food safety standards from every company that supplies ground beef to the school lunch program — or it should stop purchasing ground beef. American taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for food that might endanger their children. The USDA’s recent decision to perform
E. coli
0157:H7 tests on the ground beef it buys for schools, though commendable, was made more than seven years after the Jack in the Box outbreak. It was made after countless children were needlessly sickened. The meatpacking industry’s ability to sell questionable meat, for years, to the federal agency responsible for ensuring safe food is just one more symptom of a much broader problem — of a government food safety system that is poorly structured, underfunded, and unable to detect most outbreaks of food poisoning.

Federal officials and meatpacking executives often claim that the United States has the safest food supply in the world. There is little evidence to support that contention. Other countries have enacted much tougher food safety laws and implemented much more thorough food inspection systems. Sweden began a program to eliminate
Salmonella
from its livestock more than forty years ago. Today about 0.1 percent of Swedish cattle harbor
Salmonella
, a proportion vastly lower than the rate in the United States. The Netherlands began to test ground beef for
E. coli
0157:H7 in 1989. The Dutch food safety program is administered not by agriculture officials, but by public health officials. Strict regulations cover every aspect of meat production, prohibiting the inclusion of animal wastes in feed, banning the use of hormones as growth stimulants, limiting the stress that cattle endure during transport (and thereby reducing the amount of bacteria shed in their stool), and confiscating tainted meat. At Dutch slaughterhouses the speed of the production line is determined by food safety considerations.

At the moment, a dozen federal agencies in the United States are responsible for food safety, and twenty-eight congressional committees oversee them. The welter of competing bureaucracies leads to confusion, gaps in enforcement, and numerous food safety absurdities. The USDA has the power to conduct microbial tests on cattle that have already been slaughtered, but cannot test live cattle in order to keep infected animals out of slaughterhouses. The manufacture of frozen cheese pizzas is regulated by the FDA, but if a pizza has pepperoni on
it, the USDA has food safety jurisdiction. Eggs are regulated by the FDA, but chickens are regulated by the USDA, and a lack of cooperation between the two agencies has hampered efforts to reduce the levels of
Salmonella
in American eggs.
Salmonella
has been almost entirely eliminated from Swedish and Dutch eggs. Every year in the United States, however, more than half a million people become ill after eating eggs contaminated with
Salmonella
, and more than 300 people die.

Congress should create a single food safety agency that has sufficient authority to protect the public health. The two main tasks currently assigned to the USDA — to promote American agriculture and to police it — are incompatible. The nation’s other leading food safety agency, the FDA, spends much of its budget regulating prescription drugs. An American food processor can expect a visit from an FDA inspector, on average, once every ten years. The new food safety agency should be given the power to track commodities throughout the production cycle, from their origin on ranches and farms to their sale at restaurants and supermarkets. At the moment, the nation’s roughly 200,000 fast food restaurants are not subject to any oversight by federal health authorities. The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. And the harms caused by food poisoning are usually inadvertent and unanticipated. People who smoke crack know the potential dangers; most people who eat hamburgers don’t. Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior.

The steps taken to improve sanitary conditions at the nation’s slaughterhouses can have the added benefit of lowering the injury rate among meatpacking workers. The line speeds at Dutch slaughterhouses average less than one hundred cattle an hour; the American average is more than three times as high. IBP workers that I met in Lexington, Nebraska, told me that they always liked days when their plant was processing beef for shipment to the European Union, which imposes tough standards on imported meat. They said IBP slowed down the line so that work could be performed more carefully. The IBP workers liked EU days because the pace was less frantic and there were fewer injuries.

The working conditions and food safety standards in the nation’s
meatpacking plants should not improve on days when the beef is being processed for export. American workers and consumers deserve at least the same consideration as overseas customers. Toughening the food safety laws could also reduce the number of slaughterhouse workers who get hurt. The greatest gains in worker safety, however, will come when state and federal authorities look at the meatpacking industry’s injury rate from a new perspective. Almost any workplace injury, viewed in isolation, can be described as an “accident.” Workers are routinely made to feel responsible for their own injuries, and many do indeed make mistakes. But when at least one-third of meatpacking workers are injured every year, when the causes of those injuries are well known, when the means to prevent those injuries are readily available and yet not applied, there is nothing accidental about the lacerations, amputations, cumulative traumas, and deaths in the meatpacking industry. These injuries do not stem from individual mistakes. They are systematic, and they are caused by greed.

OSHA fines imposed on meatpacking companies have done little to change the safety practices of the industry. At the moment, the maximum OSHA fine for a death caused by willful employer negligence is $70,000. That amount does not strike fear in the hearts of agribusiness executives, whose firms annually earn tens of billions of dollars. Much tougher sanctions should be imposed on behalf of the thousands of meatpacking workers who are needlessly injured each year. These injuries are by no means impossible to foresee or prevent. The new penalties should include greatly increased OSHA fines, mandatory plant closures, and criminal charges for negligence. The prosecution of a few meatpacking executives for the deaths or injuries of their workers will serve as a wake-up call for the industry. It will convey a blunt message that most Americans would instinctively support: allowing innocent people to be maimed and killed is a crime.

The working conditions in America’s slaughterhouses demonstrate what can happen when employers wield virtually unchecked power over their workers. When labor unions have too much influence, they can become corrupt and encourage inefficiencies. But the absence of unions can permit corporations to behave like continuing criminal enterprises, to violate labor laws with impunity. If the meatpacking industry is allowed to continue its recruitment of poor, illiterate, often illegal immigrants, many other industries will soon follow its example. The rise of a migrant industrial workforce poses a grave threat to democracy.
Workers who are illegal immigrants cannot vote and have little ability to defend their legal rights. Without the countervailing force of labor unions, companies will increasingly seek out and exploit the most vulnerable members of society. As in the meatpacking industry, the progress made by American workers over the course of a century will literally vanish overnight. The rural ghettos of Lexington and Greeley should not represent the future of America’s heartland.

Any reform of the current system of industrialized agriculture will have to address the needs of independent ranchers and farmers. They are more than just a sentimental link to America’s rural past. They are a unique source of innovation and long-term stewardship of the land. Throughout the Cold War, America’s decentralized system of agriculture, relying upon millions of independent producers, was depicted as the most productive system in the world, as proof of capitalism’s inherent superiority. The perennial crop failures in the Soviet Union were attributed to a highly centralized system run by distant bureaucrats. Today the handful of agribusiness firms that dominate American food production are championing another centralized system of production, one in which livestock and farmland are viewed purely as commodities, farmers are reduced to the status of employees, and crop decisions are made by executives far away from the fields. Although competition between the large processors has indeed led to lower costs for consumers, price fixing and collusion have devastated independent ranchers and farmers. The antitrust laws outlawing such behavior need to be vigorously enforced. More than a century ago, during the congressional debate on the Sherman Antitrust Act, Henry M. Teller, a Republican senator from Colorado, dismissed the argument that lower consumer prices justified the ruthless exercise of monopoly power. “I do not believe,” Teller argued, “that the great object in life is to make everything cheap.”

Having centralized American agriculture, the large agribusiness firms are now attempting, like Soviet commissars, to stifle criticism of their policies. Over the past decade, “veggie libel laws” backed by agribusiness have been passed in thirteen states. The laws make it illegal to criticize agricultural commodities in a manner inconsistent with “reasonable” scientific evidence. The whole concept of “veggie libel” is probably unconstitutional; nevertheless, these laws remain on the books. Oprah Winfrey, among others, has been sued for making disparaging remarks about food. In Texas, a man was sued by a sod company
for criticizing the quality of its lawns. In Georgia and Alabama, the veggie libel laws have been framed in imitation of British libel law, placing the burden of proof upon the defendant. In Colorado, violating the veggie libel law is now a criminal, not a civil, offense. Criticizing the ground beef produced at the Greeley slaughterhouse could put you behind bars.