Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (37 page)

THE YEAR
2000 may some day be regarded as a milestone for the fast food industry. It may be remembered as the year that the leading chains began to unravel. According to NPD Foodworld, a market research firm, during 2000 the fast food industry did not gain any new customers in the United States. The stagnant sales preceded the headlines about mad cow disease and extended throughout most of the industry. Fewer people visited not only hamburger chains, but also pizza and Mexican food chains. Business did not improve in the first half of 2001. McDonald’s profits fell in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Customer traffic fell at Burger King restaurants worldwide. Burger King’s new french fries proved a marketing disaster and were scrapped, at a cost of more than $70 million. And its parent company, Diageo PLC, had to spend millions to keep some large Burger King franchisees afloat, while searching for ways to unload the chain.

Taco Bell — a brand that in many ways perfected the art of selling inexpensive, mass-produced, highly industrialized foods — has lately encountered some financial difficulties. In 1989 Taco Bell introduced a “K minus” program. The K stood for “kitchens”, which the chain strove to eliminate from its restaurants. Precooking the beef and the beans at central locations allowed Taco Bell to offer low prices, with most of the core menu items selling for less than a dollar. The strategy was a success during the 1990s, but eventually backfired, as Taco Bell gained a reputation for cheap, bland food. Sales at its company-owned restaurants fell by 9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2000,
causing financial problems for as many as a thousand Taco Bell franchisees. Tricon Global Restaurants, the chain’s parent company, had to set aside millions of dollars to help struggling franchisees, and PepsiCo Inc. sent them early “soda-rebate” checks worth additional millions to keep them in the business of selling Pepsi. A major recall of taco shells — sold under the Taco Bell name only at supermarkets and containing genetically engineered corn not approved for human consumption — no doubt also hurt the brand.

Taco Bell’s problems, however, extend far beyond passing fears of tainted tacos. “We are not doing a great job in terms of quality, in terms of speed, in terms of cleanliness in the store,” Emil Brolick, the chain’s new president, confessed. The speed at which Taco Bell’s financial health deteriorated, with relatively minor sales declines threatening widespread restaurant closures, shows how vulnerable the world’s largest fast food chains have become. A 2 percent decline in sales is enough to send their stock prices spiralling downward.

The glory days of the major chains seem to be over. Smaller, regional restaurant companies are the ones now enjoying rapid growth in the United States, as many larger ones lose customers. Although the McDonald’s Corporation continues to hunt for promising new American locations (a McDonald’s recently opened at the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston), the chain’s problems increasingly resemble those of the British Empire a century ago. For imperial Britain, rapid expansion overseas was a sign not of economic strength, but of underlying weaknesses at home. An empire that looked impressive and invincible on the map later proved to be remarkably fragile, shrinking much faster than it had grown. During the 1990s McDonald’s opened restaurants overseas at a furious pace, distracting attention from the fact that it was gaining few new customers in the United States. The mad cow epidemic in Europe, combined with economic downturns in Asia and Latin America, have created doubts on Wall Street about McDonald’s imperial strategy. It costs a great deal of money to open new restaurants on distant continents. The McDonald’s Corporation remains profitable, but now intends to grow by doubling its sales within the United States over the next decade. That goal may be unrealistic. A recent survey of American consumers found enormous dissatisfaction with McDonald’s. Among the two hundred national organizations examined in the study, McDonald’s ranked just a couple of places from the bottom.

Ever since the débâcle of the McLibel trial, the McDonald’s
Corporation has tried to improve its public image and at times behave in a more socially responsible manner. During the spring of 2001 it began to offer discounts on health insurance and other benefits to employees at company-owned restaurants in the United States, which comprise about one-seventh of the chain. During the summer of 2001 it disclosed the basic ingredients of its natural flavors (and, perhaps in deference to Hindus, has taken the beef extract out of its McNuggets). In addition to forcing compliance with the FDA’s feed regulations, McDonald’s has required that its meatpacking suppliers handle and slaughter animals more humanely. For years, excessive line speeds and improper stunning have led to cattle and hogs being dismembered while fully conscious. McDonald’s new policy on humane slaughter did not arise in a vacuum. Animal rights groups, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, were staging protests at McDonald’s, asking the company to seek changes from its suppliers. Whatever the true motive, McDonald’s acted decisively and hired Temple Grandin — one of the nation’s foremost experts on animal welfare and proper livestock handling — to devise an auditing system for the slaughterhouses that provide the chain’s beef and pork. According to Grandin, McDonald’s threat to stop purchasing meat from companies that mistreat animals changed many of the industry’s practices within a year. Although McDonald’s auditors are employed by the same companies that manufacture its hamburger patties, Grandin says they seem genuinely committed to the new policy, making unannounced visits to slaughterhouses and observing whether animals are properly handled and stunned. When advocated by animal rights groups, such an inspection program had gone nowhere; demanded by McDonald’s, it received the enthusiastic support of the meatpacking industry and the American Meat Institute.

Having shown a strong commitment to the ethical treatment of animals, the McDonald’s Corporation should now demonstrate the same level of concern for the ethical treatment of the human beings who work in the nation’s slaughterhouses. After the publication of
Fast Food Nation
, the photographer Eugene Richards and I visited meatpacking communities in Texas for
Mother Jones
magazine. We were appalled by what we found: conditions even worse than those in Nebraska or Colorado, conditions that bring to mind the worst abuses of the nineteenth-century Beef Trust. In Texas, the big meatpacking companies don’t have to manipulate the workers’ compensation system — they don’t even have to participate in it. Texas is the
only state in the union that allows a company to leave the workers’ comp system and set up its own process for dealing with workplace injuries. Taking advantage of that unique opportunity, IBP has established a remarkable system there. When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP’s Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once they sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment — for life. Under the program’s terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot. The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that companies operating outside the workers’ comp system can fire workers simply because they’re injured.

Today an IBP worker who gets hurt on the job in Texas faces a cruel dilemma: sign the waiver, perhaps receive medical attention, and remain beholden, forever, to IBP. Or refuse to sign, risk losing your job, receive no help with your medical bills, file a lawsuit, and hope to win a big judgement against the company years from now. Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker’s signature. When Lonita Leal’s right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand, as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.

The recent purchase of IBP by Tyson Foods has created the world’s biggest and most powerful meatpacking firm, with the largest market share in beef and poultry, the second-largest in pork. The Tyson/IBP merger fulfills every independent rancher’s worst nightmare about being reduced to the status of a poultry grower — and portend even faster line speeds at meatpacking plants. In order to complete the purchase, Tyson Foods had to assume $1.7 billion in debt. As a result, the new meatpacking colossus will likely be under great pressure to ship as much meat as possible out the door.

Over the past year, the McDonald’s Corporation has proven,
beyond any doubt, that it can force its meatpacking suppliers to make fundamental changes quickly. If McDonald’s insisted that the large meatpackers improve working conditions and reduce injury levels, these companies would do so. The cost of slowing down their production lines would be insignificant compared to the cost of losing their biggest customer. If McDonald’s can send auditors into slaughterhouses to monitor the ethical treatment of cattle, it can certainly do the same for poor immigrant workers. As to the company’s ability to influence this sort of behavior, I agree wholeheartedly with the American Meat Institute: “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect.” Unlike compliance with the FDA’s feed rules, which required an elaborate new system of paperwork and affidavits, it wouldn’t take weeks to make America’s slaughterhouses safer. If McDonald’s were to demand that the line speeds be slowed down, preventing untold misery and harm, it could be accomplished in an instant.

AS OF THIS WRITING
, about a hundred people have died from vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Although every one of those deaths was tragic and unnecessary, they must be viewed in a larger perspective. Roughly the same number of people die every day in the United States from automobile accidents — and yet we do not live in fear of cars. At the moment there is no cure for vCJD, and it is impossible to predict how many people will get the disease by eating tainted meat. A great deal of scientific uncertainty still surrounds various attributes of the pathogen, such as the degree of infectivity among humans and the size of an infectious dose. About 800,000 cattle with mad cow disease were unwittingly eaten by people in Great Britain. One crucial determinant of the eventual death toll is the average incubation period for vCJD. That statistic is currently unknown. If it takes about ten years for most infected people to develop the disease, then we are now in the middle of the epidemic, and perhaps a thousand or so will die. If the average incubation period is twenty, thirty, or forty years — as the latest science suggests — then the epidemic is just beginning, and hundreds of thousands may die. Time will tell.

Regardless of whether mad cow causes a small outbreak among
humans or a deadly modern plague, it will haunt the beef industry for years, much as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl changed attitudes toward nuclear power. The spread of BSE in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures and led to some absurdities. The British decision to keep some of the most infective cattle parts (brains, spleens, spinal materials, thymus glands, and intestines) out of the human food supply was prompted not by health or agricultural officials, but by a leading manufacturer of pet foods. Worried by mounting evidence that mad cow disease might have the ability to cross species barriers, Pedigree Master Foods decided to keep cattle offal out of its products and told the Ministry of Agriculture that it was a good idea to do the same with food intended for human consumption. Meanwhile, British children were being served some of the nation’s cheapest meats — hamburgers, sausages, and mince pies full of potentially contaminated offal — because the 1980 Education Act had eliminated government subsidies for nutritious school meals.

A great many British pets were eating safer food than the British people, until November of 1989, when the government banned the sale of cattle offal and its use in the manufacture of ground beef. Seven months later, the worst fears of Pedigree Master Foods were confirmed; a Siamese cat named Max died in Bristol from a feline variant of BSE, after eating contaminated cat food. The death of “Mad Max,” as the tabloids dubbed him, proved that mad cow could indeed cross the species barrier. Nevertheless, the British government denied for six more years that the disease posed any risk to human beings.

Governments throughout Europe ignored the interests of consumers while protecting those of agribusiness. A recent report by the French senate found that from 1988 to 2000 the agriculture ministry in that country minimized the danger of mad cow and “constantly
sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures.” Health officials were repeatedly ignored in order to block decisions that “might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry.” Great Britain banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants in 1988, but continued to export animal feed potentially contaminated with BSE for another eight years — shipping about 150 million pounds of the stuff to dozens of countries and thereby turning a local outbreak of mad cow into one with worldwide ramifications. Other countries in the European Union imported the cheap British feed and then exported it to North Africa and the Middle East.

The recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan was most likely caused by infected feed from Europe. Japanese agricultural officials displayed remarkable incompetence in responding to the threat of BSE. Five years after the British government acknowledged the link between BSE and serious illness in human beings, Japanese farmers were still feeding meat-and-bonemeal to their cattle, without violating any law. When the Scientific Steering Commission of the European Commission warned in June of 2001 that such practices created a high risk of a BSE outbreak, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) strongly denied the risk and blocked publication of the EU report. Three months later, a Japanese cow tested positive for BSE. A senior MAFF official assured the public that the animal’s carcass had been “disposed of.” In fact, MAFF had inadvertently allowed the tainted meat to be rendered into animal feed.

Today nations with BSE must not only confront the prospect of slaughtering millions of potentially infected cattle, but must also figure out what to do with their remains. In Great Britain, about a billion pounds of rendered cattle sit at waste sites, vast mounds of fine brown powder, awaiting incineration. In Japan, plans are being made to blend rendered cattle with concrete — and use the mixture as a building material. In Denmark, a company is now erecting the world’s first power plant that generates electricity by burning cattle.

Thanks to the McDonald’s Corporation, the FDA’s animal feed restrictions are most likely being obeyed in the United States. But those prohibitions may not be strict enough to prevent the spread of BSE. The feeding of all animal proteins to all farm animals has been banned throughout the European Union. Such a ban was justified as a means of preventing hog and poultry feed from winding up in cattle
troughs. The ban will also, however, halt the transmission of mad cow through new and unexpected means. John Collinge — a professor at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine and a prominent member of the British government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee — believes that BSE may easily cross the species barrier and survive undetected in animals that outwardly show no symptoms of the disease. If pigs or poultry were to be found silently carrying mad cow, the FDA’s feed restrictions would prove futile. The continued use of cattle blood in cattle feed seems especially unwise. “All cannibalistic recycling is potentially dangerous,” Collinge warns, “and I have said that repeatedly.”

The USDA, the FDA, and the American Meat Institute oppose any additional prohibition on what can be fed to livestock. They argue that new restrictions are unnecessary, because mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States. Their argument on behalf of continuing to feed animal proteins to livestock is a risky form of denial, an exercise in wishful thinking. By the time Great Britain discovered its first two cows with BSE, at least 60,000 other cattle there were already infected. The claim that mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States is accurate, as of this writing. The USDA, however, has not tried very hard to find it. “If you don’t look, you won’t find,” says Dr Perluigi Gambetti, a BSE expert who heads the National Prion Disease Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University. “Unless we test more, we will never know if we have it here.” Since 1990, approximately 375 million cattle have been slaughtered in the United States, and about 15,000 of them were tested for mad cow. Belgium, with a cattle herd roughly one-thirtieth the size of ours, plans to test 400,000 for mad cow disease every year.

The current FDA feed rules are primarily concerned with efficiency and utility, not public health. They allow cattle to be fed pigs, pigs to be fed cattle, cattle to be fed poultry, and poultry to be fed cattle. They allow dogs and cats to be fed dogs and cats. Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so. A Canadian company, Sanimal Inc., was putting 40,000 pounds of dead dogs and dead cats into its dog and cat food every week, until discontinuing the practice in June, 2001. “This food is healthy and good,” said the company’s vice president of procurement, responding to critics, “but some people don’t like to see meat meal that contains any pets.”

Perhaps the most effective action taken by the federal government
to prevent the introduction of BSE to the United States — a 1989 ban on imports of livestock and feed from Great Britain — was the one action that threatened no economic harm to the American meat industry. The ban on imports, like any protectionist measure, helped American producers. But a strict FDA prohibition of all animal protein in animal feeds would reduce some of the profit that American agribusiness firms can derive from vertical integration. At the moment, the most common source of animal protein in poultry feed isn’t hogs or cattle. It’s poultry. Tyson Foods takes leftover chicken meat and skin and intestines from its poultry slaughterhouses, ships them to Tyson feed plants, adds them to chicken feed, and then provides the feed to Tyson growers, so that baby chicks can eat their ancestors. The Tyson feed mill in Buzzard Bluff, Arkansas, processes about 10 million pounds of chicken parts every week.

The mad cow epidemic has greatly reduced beef consumption in Europe and Japan, devastating farmers who raise cattle. Livestock practices that once seemed to be cost-efficient turned out to be disastrously inefficient. Feelings of anger and betrayal among consumers have prompted a fundamental reappraisal of agricultural policies. Food safety, animal welfare, and environmental concerns are gaining precedence over the traditional agribusiness emphasis on production levels. The Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Austria are seeking basic, structural changes in how European food is produced. Even Great Britain now seems to be questioning its reliance on high-volume, industrialized farming. For years the Labour government of Tony Blair had forged close ties with leading food processing, supermarket, and fast food companies. Blair’s handling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic seemed more influenced by the export needs of Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, than by the latest scientific evidence on the efficacy of vaccines. His unapologetic defense of a £15,000 political donation from the McDonald’s Corporation prompted critics to call the majority party “McLabour.” His appointee to serve as Rural Recovery Coordinator, Chris Haskins, headed a large food processing firm, ran a dairy that supplied the milk for McDonald’s milkshakes, and publicly belittled the prospects for small farms and organic agriculture. Nevertheless, even Lord Haskins proposed a shift of EU agricultural policy in October of 2001, arguing that subsidies should be awarded to farms whose production methods do not harm the environment.

The German government has taken the lead on this issue in the
EU, calling for the de-industrialization of agriculture and planning to make 20 percent of its farmland organic by the year 2010. “Things will no longer be the way they are,” declared Renate Kuenast, who serves as the German minister for agriculture — and for consumer protection. Kuenast says that Germans must develop the same reverence for their food that they’ve always had for their beer. Under a German law that dates back to the early sixteenth century, no additives can be put into beer, which must be made using only water, hops, and barley. Vowing to outlaw the use of antibiotics and other additives in animal feed, Kuenast offers a revolutionary alternative: “Our cows should get only water, grain, and grass.”

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century — a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science. The same mindset that would add 4-methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable — and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived. This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel. Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.