America loves fast food. Last year consumers spent billions of dollars on the hamburger industry alone. Corporate giants such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King all boast of multi-million dollar incomes each year. Why? Because their foods are delicious! Americans everywhere love the rich flavors of gigantic Big Mac’s and king-sized whoppers. Our mouths water and noses flare at the enticing smell of a cheeseburger. Add a large order of hot sizzling French fries, and a large coke and you have a combo meal worth billions of dollars to the American public.
Indeed many of us love fast food. But what has our country gained from its huge appetite for greasy foods? Fast food has created a generation of new, mostly lousy jobs and triggered an epidemic of obesity. It is the stepchild of post-war progress in farming, slaughtering and packaging, refrigeration and transportation.
America is the fattest country in the world with 100 million overweight people and 400,000 individuals dying each year from obesity related ailments. The fast food mania in America just made Morgan Spurlock mad, and so he decided to make a documentary, Super Size Me! using himself as a guinea pig. He ate three meals a day only at McDonald's for 30 days in 20 cities. He hired a team of doctors to monitor the impact of this experiment on his body. The results were catastrophic: he gained over 25 pounds eating 5,000 calories a day and trashed his liver to the point of seriously jeopardizing his future health and well-being. Other side effects of the junk food binge included chest pains, depression, headaches, sugar/caffeine crashes, and heart palpitations. His vegan chef girlfriend was shocked at the deterioration of his health. This documentary wiped the smile right off my Happy Meal. As a self-proclaimed McDonald’s fan, this documentary was jaw dropping, but I still eat at McDonald’s. The documentary makes you think about what is in fast food, but I would never eat fast food for 30 days straight.
As a result of living a life on the go, eating fast food and microwave dinners, the health of the American people has been sacrificed. Instead of eating a diet of pure, wholesome foods coming directly from the land, Americans eat a diet of packaged, processed, and refined foods. Through technological advancement we have found ways to produce food in mass quantities, and make it last longer and taste better. Unfortunately, during this processing somewhere along the line, we seemed to have lost the food. The highly processed and refined products that are at our fast food restaurants and that pack our supermarket shelves are loaded with sugar, hydrogenated oils, and plenty more ingredients that we can't even pronounce.
Fast-food restaurants have become mainstream in the past 30 years and practically all of America takes advantage of the cheap prices, quick service and tasty meals. Convenient as they may be, these meals contain practically no nutrients. They are comprised mostly of saturated fats and highly refined carbohydrates and are loaded with sodium and sugar. So, why do we eat them anyways? I asked a couple of college students this same question and they responded by saying: “Sure I eat fast food, I love it, but I don’t eat it everyday and well its convenient” another student said “we eat it because we are lazy and spoiled and we like things handed to us rather than have to work for them.” I like to think of fast food as a system of instant gratification. Fast food restaurants make it easy for you to fall in love with them. From TV commercials that feature celebrities, and those catchy jingles that you cannot get out of your head. To that lovable Ronald McDonald and his posse. Sure we can say that fast food is one factor that contributes to obesity, but it is not the only reason why America is fat. America is a grab and go kind of society. We like things to be quick so that it doesn’t interrupt with our fast paced schedules. It ultimately is up to us, we decide if we want to fall for those advertisement gimmicks. None of these fast food places are holding us at gunpoint to eat their food, we have a choice, and we just don’t want to make it.
The fast food business reconceived the high tech, manual factory; it has always relied on poorly paid workers doing regimented robot-like work. It has attracted a disproportionate number of immigrants, poor, and minority workers.
Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation writes about IBP, a major beef packer and supplier of meat in the country. Allegedly, they run the processing lines at especially a fast rate of speed to maximize production and profit, although they are sacrificing food quality, employee safety, and public health. Schlosser visited many of these meat suppliers and talked to the employees. Each of the stories was different, but linked by common elements. “The same struggle to receive proper medical care, the same fear of speaking out, the same underlying corporate indifference.” Stories varied from Raoul, a Mexican born who got his arm stuck in a machine. He was taken to the hospital his shoulder was sewn shut; he was given painkillers and driven back to the slaughterhouse to continue working. A metal rim of a conveyor belt that pierced his lower back injured Kenny, an employee of almost sixteen years. He suffered from severe pain for months. Kenny suffered from a massive heart attack later on and not long after was fired. Another example is Renaldo who developed carpal tunnel syndrome while cutting meat.
All these slaughterhouse employees suffered from the same thing, inhumane treatment and disregard for their person. The potential public health hazard of this system is huge. Much of the nations meat coming from the three meat-packing giants ConAgra, IBP, and Excel, combined with the poor health conditions that the cattle are kept in (sometimes being fed cattle scraps for food, furthering contamination possibilities), combined with the low quality standards of the industry, and contaminated meat.
The majority of the employees in the meat packing industry are immigrants who come looking for the “American dream.” They are trying to provide for themselves and their families; only to be treated the same way the animals they kill are treated. These meat giants target the immigrant work force. For example, Raoul after hearing a Monfort (slaughterhouse) ad on a Spanish-language radio station he applied for a job. The meat factories prefer immigrant workers for the following reasons: many of them are illiterate in English or Spanish, which makes it hard for them to work together or organize to make conditions better; they rarely spend more than a year in one factory, most slaughterhouse workers are without health insurance; and they also accept lower wages.
Schlosser sees stronger meatpacking unions as one possible solution. “There's no question that in some industries unions have become corrupted and a source of inefficiency and operate more like organized crime than a workers' rights group,” he said. “But if there was ever an industry in this country that needed more unions, it's this one." “McDonald's has instituted some strict rules for its suppliers on how livestock should be treated,” Schlosser said, “but what they really need to do is institute strict rules for their suppliers on how human beings should be treated.”
The meatpacking system that has been forged to supply the nation’s fast food chains —an industry molded to serve their needs, to provide massive amounts of uniform ground beef so that all McDonald’s hamburgers would taste the same—has proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease. E.coli 0157:H7 is one bacteria that has received a good deal of public attention, but scientist have discovered more than a dozen other food borne pathogens. The newly recognized food borne pathogens tend to be carried and shed by apparently healthy animals. Food tainted by these organisms has most likely come in contact with an infected animal’s stomach contents, or manure, during slaughter or subsequent processing. A 1996 USDA study found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with salmonella. As Schlosser points out in Fast Food Nation, “a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.”
The rise in grain prices has encouraged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle. According to Schlosser, about 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes (the remains of dead sheep and dead cattle) until 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as “mad cow disease.” Schlosser quotes Steven P. bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry who is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. “God-damn it, these cattle are ruminants,” Bjerklie says. “They’re designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs for a reason —to eat products that have high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals.”
Fast food giants, who receive their beef from these “special” slaughterhouses, could in fact have the e.coli bacteria, or salmonella, or mad cow disease, a body part from a factory worker, or cattle excrement. The thought of a scrumptious McDonald’s cheeseburger in any way associated with excrement is not only disgusting but also disturbing. It makes you think about what’s cooking behind the grill at these places. These fast food restaurants sell themselves on cleanliness, politeness, excellent service, fast service, and quality food. If at any moment excrement, or body part are even thought of in the same sentence it would ruin their image.
If fast food has such a huge impact on our society and our health, it is only natural that it should also have at least some effect on our environment. Presumably, the generalization of fast food in America, and now spreading all over the world, can lead to major negative impacts on our environment. The growth of the fast food industry has reached a staggering number. If there are so many millions or even billions of hamburgers, or chicken nuggets, or French fries sold each year, then imagine all the packaging that is thrown to waste. The impact of constantly using and throwing away plates, forks, spoons, napkins, condiment packs, straws, lids, and cups. Fast food has also hastened the malign of our landscape. Everywhere you go there is a McDonald’s and if you travel a few more miles after you see one there will be another one.
I have a few suggestions about things we can do to improve the fast food business. First, labor conditions should be made humane and they should be paid accurately and fairly. Workers whether they are immigrants or citizens should receive health insurance. Slaughterhouse workers should create a union that will fight for them and their rights as humans, and employees. Second, the treatment of cattle should be a lot better. They should be able to eat grain and grass and not themselves. The cattle should be kept clean at all times as well as their holding pens. Meat industries should take the example of Dale Lasater and his ranch. It is a profitable, working ranch that for half a century has not used pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers on the land, has not administered growth hormones, anabolic steroids, or antibiotics to the cattle. Schlosser says, “The Lasters are by no means typical, but have worked hard to change how American beef is produced. Their philosophy of cattle ranching is based upon a simple tenet: ‘Nature is smart as hell.’”
Third, all the packaging and things used to serve the food in should be recycled and reused. Or they should find less hazardous materials to produce that will not be as detrimental to our environment. Lastly, Americans need to blame themselves for their own weight problems and start taking action to prevent it, instead of blaming it on someone else. So, even though Super Size Me! made me think twice about eating fast food for 30 days straight and Fast Food Nation made me think about what’s cooking behind the grill, in the end “I’m lovin it."