Read Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World Online
Authors: Eric Schlosser
The dire predictions of the meat, feed, and rendering industries — their claims that new FDA rules would create havoc and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars — proved unfounded. Cattle remains that had previously been fed to cattle were instead fed to pets, hogs, and poultry. Aside from slightly higher transportation costs, the new feed restrictions had a negligible economic effect. One rendering industry supplier told
Meat Marketing & Technology
magazine that the whole rule-making process had proven to be “a remarkable example of cooperation between the industry and the FDA.” That cooperation, another rendering executive said, had “protected the beef industry and the rendering industry” without creating “a mood in the country that recycled protein ingredients would be harmful.” The trade journal noted that some of the wording of the new FDA rules had been taken “verbatim” from the rendering industry’s own recommendations.
In the United States, mad cow gradually receded from the headlines — until January, 2001. For more than a decade, countries in the European Union had assured the public that BSE had not been detected in their cattle. Which was true, because relatively few of their cattle had been tested for the disease. Once widespread testing began in Europe, the actual scale of the mad cow epidemic started to become clear. Switzerland was the first to begin routine testing; the number of BSE cases there soon doubled. Then Denmark began testing and discovered its first infected animal, followed by new cases in Spain and Germany. After widespread testing began in France, the number of BSE cases there increased fivefold. On January 1, 2001, the European Union launched a program that required BSE testing for all cattle older than 30 months. Intended to calm fears of mad cow, the EU program had the opposite effect, as more and more infected cattle were discovered. On January 15, the first case of BSE was found in Italy. The infected animal was discovered at a slaughterhouse near Modena that supplied ground beef to McDonald’s restaurants in a number of European countries.
The fear of mad cow disease caused beef sales in the EU to plummet
by as much as 50 percent, and news from the United States was hardly reassuring to consumers there. A federal investigation of American feed mills and rendering plants found that many companies had not been taking the threat of mad cow — or the FDA’s new feed regulations — very seriously. More than one-quarter of the firms handling “prohibited” feed neglected to add a label warning that it should never be given to cattle. One-fifth of the firms handling both prohibited feeds and feeds approved for cattle had no system in place to prevent commingling or cross-contamination. And about one out of every ten rendering firms was completely unaware that the FDA had passed feed restrictions to prevent the spread of mad cow. In Colorado, more than one-quarter of the cattle-feed producers had somehow never heard about the new rules.
The federal government’s apparent inability to keep prohibited feed away from cattle prompted the McDonald’s Corporation to take action. The company’s sales in Europe had already fallen by 10 per-cent, and American publicity about mad cow was raising doubts about the wisdom of eating any hamburgers, let alone Big Macs. Officials from the FDA and the USDA, as well as representatives from the leading meatpacking and rendering companies, were quietly invited to discuss the feed issue at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. On March 13, the McDonald’s Corporation announced that its ground beef suppliers would be required to supply documentation showing that FDA feed rules were being strictly followed — or McDonald’s would no longer buy their beef.
IBP, Excel, and ConAgra immediately agreed to follow McDonald’s directive, vowing that no cattle would be purchased without proper certification. Every rancher and feedlot would have to supply signed affidavits promising that banned feeds had never been given to their cattle. The American Meat Institute, which routinely fought against any mandatory food-safety measures proposed by the federal government, made no complaint about these new rules. “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect,” said an AMI spokeswoman. What the FDA had failed to achieve — after nearly five years of industry consultation and halfhearted regulation — the McDonald’s Corporation accomplished in a matter of weeks. “Because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart,” a McDonald’s spokesman explained, “we can use that leadership to provide more focus and more order throughout the beef system.”
FOR THIS PAPERBACK EDITION
Penguin has included quotations from some favorable reviews of
Fast Food Nation
. In the interest of balance, I’d like to quote a few contrary opinions. “McGarbage,” wrote a correspondent for the
National Review Online
. “Schlosser wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word ‘dunce.”’ I was described, moreover, as a “health fascist,” and “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” and a “hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state.” The book was reviewed in the
Wall Street Journal
not by one of the paper’s fine investigative journalists, but by a right-wing member of its editorial staff. Among other things, she accused me of producing a “hodgepodge of impressions, statistics, anecdotes, and prejudices.” A spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute said that my evidence of worker safety problems in meatpacking plants was “anecdotal,” and that I had “vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair.” The restaurant industry did not like
Fast Food Nation
, either. “In addition to acting like the ‘food police’, and trying to coerce the American consumer never to eat fast food again,” the National Restaurant Association said, “[Schlosser] recklessly disparages an industry that has contributed tremendously to our nation.”
The McDonald’s Corporation also gave
Fast Food Nation
an unfavorable review. “The real McDonald’s bears no resemblance to anything described in [Schlosser’s] book,” said a company statement. “He’s wrong about our people, wrong about our jobs, and wrong about our food.” Contrary to what McDonald’s executives may believe, a sincere passion for accuracy led me to document every assertion in this book. Although
Fast Food Nation
has been strongly attacked, thus far its critics have failed to cite any errors in the text. Spokesmen for the meatpacking industry and the fast food industry have shied away from specifics, offering general denouncements of my work and leaving it at that. I am grateful to those readers who’ve taken the time to inform me about typos, misspellings, and other small mistakes. Mike Callicrate — an iconoclastic feedlot owner in Kansas who would make a fine copy editor — pointed out that I’d miscalculated some cattle manure statistics. The error has been corrected.
There is one criticism of
Fast Food Nation
that needs to be
addressed. A number of people have said that I was too hard on the Republican Party, that an anti-Republican bias seems to pervade the book.
Fast Food Nation
has no hidden partisan agenda; the issues that it addresses transcend party politics. In retrospect, I could have been more critical of the Clinton administration’s ties to agribusiness. Had I devoted more space to the poultry industry, for example, I would have examined the close links between Bill Clinton and the Tyson family. The FDA’s failure to investigate the health risks of biotech foods and its lackadaisical effort to keep cattle remains out of cattle feed also occurred during the Clinton years.
Nevertheless, it is a sad but undeniable fact that for the past two decades the right wing of the Republican Party has worked closely with the fast food industry and the meatpacking industry to oppose food safety laws, worker safety laws, and increases in the minimum wage. One of President George W. Bush’s first acts in office was to rescind a new ergonomics standard, backed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), that would have protected millions of workers from cumulative trauma injuries. The National Restaurant Association and the American Meat Institute applauded Bush’s move. The newly appointed chairman of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which oversees all legislation pertaining to OSHA, is Representative Charles Norwood, a Republican from Georgia. During the 1990s Norwood sponsored legislation that would have prevented OSHA from inspecting unsafe workplaces or fining negligent employers. He has publicly suggested that some workers may actually be getting their repetitive stress injuries from skiing and playing too much tennis, not from their jobs.
One of the Bush administration’s first food-safety decisions was to stop testing the National School Lunch Program’s ground beef for
Salmonella
. The meatpacking industry’s lobbyists were delighted; they had worked hard to end the testing, which the industry considered expensive, inconvenient, and unnecessary. But consumer groups were outraged. In the ten months that the USDA had been testing ground beef intended for schoolchildren, roughly 5 million pounds were rejected because of
Salmonella
contamination. The decision to halt the tests generated a fair amount of bad publicity. Three days after it was announced, Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said that she’d never authorized the new policy, reversed course, and promised that the school-lunch program’s
Salmonella
testing would continue.
Ideally, food safety would be a non-partisan issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, Labour or Conservative, Social Democrat or Christian Democrat — you still have to eat. In recent years the Democrats have been far more willing than the Republicans to support tough food-safety legislation in the United States. But that was not always the case. It was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who had the nerve to condemn dangerous concentrations of economic power, battle the meatpacking industry, and win passage of the nation’s first food-safety law. Should that sort of spirit guide the Republican Party once again, there will be fewer reasons for criticizing its policies.
Of the many reactions to
Fast Food Nation
, the most surprising were the international events partly set in motion by
Chapter 5
, “Why the Fries Taste Good.” A couple of months after the book’s publication, Hitesh Shah, a software designer in Los Angeles, contacted McDonald’s to find out if their french fries really did contain animal products. He was a regular customer at McDonald’s, a vegetarian, and a devout Jain. His religion, Jainism, prohibits not just eating animal products but also wearing them. Jainist monks cover their noses and mouths with cloth to avoid inhaling any insects. Hitesh Shah was upset by the e-mail that McDonald’s Home Office Customer Satisfaction Department sent him on March 28. “For flavor enhancement, McDonald’s french fry suppliers use a minuscule amount of beef flavoring as an ingredient in the raw product,” it said. “… (W) e are sorry if this has caused any confusion.” McDonald’s fries did in fact contain some beef; that’s why they taste so good. Shah forwarded the e-mail to Viji Sundaram, a reporter at
India-West
, a California weekly with a large Hindu readership. Cows are considered sacred animals by Hindus and cannot legally be slaughtered in India. Sundaram briefly conducted her own investigation, confirmed the pertinent details of my french fry chapter and of Hitesh Shah’s e-mail, then wrote an article for
India-West
(“Where’s the Beef? It’s in Your French Fries”) that outraged Hindus and vegetarians worldwide.
After reading the
India-West
article, Harish Bharti, a Seattle attorney, filed a class-action lawsuit against the McDonald’s Corporation, alleging that the chain had deliberately misled vegetarians about the true content of its fries, causing great emotional damage and endangering the souls of Hindu consumers. “Eating a cow for a Hindu,” Bharti later explained, “would be like eating your own mother.”
When news of the lawsuit reached India, a crowd of five hundred Hindu nationalists marched to a McDonald’s in a suburb of Bombay and ransacked the restaurant. At another McDonald’s in Bombay, an angry crowd smeared cow dung on a statue of Ronald McDonald. In New Delhi, activists from the nationalist Shiv Sena party staged a demonstration in front of McDonald’s Indian headquarters. “We came to warn them to shut down the restaurants,” a Shiv Sena leader said, calling upon the McDonald’s Corporation to leave India immediately. The timing of the protests was unfortunate for the company. McDonald’s was planning to triple the number of restaurants in India over the next few years and had just opened the nation’s first drive-through, near the Taj Mahal.
“If you visit McDonald’s anywhere in the world, the great taste of our world famous French Fries and Big Mac is the same,” a company Web site declared. “At McDonald’s we have a saying, ‘One Taste Worldwide.’” Given such pronouncements, the outrage among Hindus in India seemed justified. The dispute over beef in the fries soon revealed, however, that McDonald’s was in fact using different ingredients in different countries. McDonald’s India assured customers and protesters that its fries were never cooked in oil containing animal products, a fact that Bombay health authorities later confirmed through chemical analysis. Nor was beef added to the fries at McDonald’s in Great Britain, a country with a sizeable Hindu population. The company was quietly adjusting its french fry recipe to suit varying cultural preferences and taboos. In Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Australia, McDonald’s still made fries the macho, old-fashioned way, cooking them in beef tallow.
In the United States, the McDonald’s Corporation took the highly unusual step of issuing an apology. “We regret if customers felt that the information provided [about the fries] was not complete enough to meet their needs,” the company said. “If there was confusion, we apologize.” The statement did not satisfy Harish Bharti or the other attorneys who’d filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of America’s 1 million Hindus and 15 million vegetarians. Bharti argued that “confusion” was the wrong word; McDonald’s had been lying to Hindus and vegetarians for years, telling them it used “100 percent vegetable oil” when it didn’t. Bharti refused to drop the lawsuit, hoping to punish McDonald’s for its insensitivity toward religious minorities and to teach it a lesson that other American companies would not ignore. “We apologize for any confusion,” a McDonald’s spokesman
responded, “but again, we have never made any vegetarian claims about our french fries — never.”
Not long afterward, Bharti received a letter from a woman in Florida. The letter had been written on May 5, 1993, by a manager at McDonald’s Customer Satisfaction Department. The letter was a response to the woman’s inquiry. It said: “Thank you for contacting us regarding McDonald’s menu selections for vegetarians. We appreciate your thoughts, and hope the following information will interest you… we presently serve several items that vegetarians can enjoy at McDonald’s — garden salads, french fries and hash browns (cooked in 100 percent vegetable oil)…”