Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World (51 page)

My views on how to restructure the nation’s food safety system were influenced by a recent report by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine.
Ensuring Safe Food: From Production to Consumption
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998) contains many reasonable recommendations that should not be — as so much of the previous food safety advice from National Academy of Sciences has been – ignored. Dale Lasater was a gracious host during many of my visits to Colorado. His ranch is a national treasure. The family’s role in the southwestern cattle industry is eloquently described in Dale Lasater’s
Falfurrias: Ed C. Lasater and the Development of South Texas
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985). Laurence M. Lasater’s
The Lasater Philosophy of Cattle Raising
(El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1972) outlines a holistic system of range management that treats both the animals and the land with respect.
The Shortgrass Prairie
(Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Publishing, 1988), by Ruth Carol Cushman and Stephan R. Jones, conveys through text and photographs the beauty of an American landscape that is largely unappreciated.

I am grateful to the Conway family, who allowed me to poke around their restaurants and hang out in the kitchens. The last hamburger I ate was served at the Conway’s Red Top on South Nevada in Colorado Springs. It was as good as it gets.

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“Nature is smart as hell”:
Interview with Dale Lasater.

257
Recent findings that grass-fed cattle:
See Francisco Diez Gonzalez, Todd R. Callaway, Menas G. Kizoulis, and James B. Russell, “Grain Feeding and the Dissemination of Acid-Resistant
Escherichia coli
from Cattle,”
Science
, September 11, 1998.

259
one of America’s most profitable fast food chains:
It is difficult to gauge In-N-Out’s financial details because the company is privately owned. Nevertheless, a decade ago the financial analyst Robert L. Emerson speculated that “In-N-Out enjoys the highest level of return on invested capital in the fast-food industry.” See Emerson,
Economics of Fast Food
, p. 94.

259
generating more than $150 million in annual revenues:
The estimate of $150 milion comes from a recent
Los Angeles Times
article on the chain and its future after Esther Snyder. The actual figure may be as much as two times higher; in 1990 Emerson claimed that individual In-N-Out restaurants had annual revenues of $1.7 million. See Greg Hernandez, “Family-Owned In-N-Out at Crossroads,”
Los Angeles Times
, July 2, 2000; Emerson,
Economics of Fast Food
, p. 93.

The starting wage of a part-time worker:
Representatives of In-N-Out declined my requests for an interview, citing the Snyder family’s wariness of the press. The information on the chain’s wages and food preparation techniques come from the In-N-Out Web site and from the following articles: Greg Johnson, “More Than Fare: A Simple Menu, Customer Service, and a Familial Touch Prove to Be a Recipe That Is Working for In-N-Out,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 15, 1997; Deborah Silver, “Burger Worship: In-N-Out — the Small Fast Food Chain with the Big Following,”
Restaurants and Institutions
, November 1, 1999; Hernandez, “Family-Owned In-N-Out at a Crossroads.”

260
In-N-Out ranked first:
See Deborah Silver, “Primary Choices,”
Restaurants and Institutions
, March 1, 2000.

the lowest-quality food of any major hamburger chain:
Ibid.

262
“advertising directed at children”:
Quoted in Harry Berkowitz, “Pediatricians Want Check on Kids’ Ads,”
Newsday
, February 9, 1995. See also “Policy Statement: Children, Adolescents, and Television,” American Academy of Pediatrics, October 1995.

more than 90 percent of the children in the United States:
Cited in Rod Taylor, “The Beanie Factor,”
Brandweek
, June 16, 1997

263
safest food supply in the world:
The National Academy of Science’s Committee to Insure Safe Food from Production to Consumption recently found “little evidence to either support or contradict that assertion.” The committee’s reluctance to pass judgment was based on the unreliable reporting system for foodborne illness in the United States. The panel did not compare the American food safety system with systems in Western Europe. See
Ensuring Safe Food
, p. 25.

about 0.1 percent of Swedish cattle:
Cited in “Swedish
Salmonella
Control Programmes for Live Animals, Eggs and Meat,” National Veterinary Institute, Swedish Board of Agriculture, National Food Administration, January 16, 1995.

lower than the rate in the United States:
At the time, roughly 7.5 percent of American ground beef contained
Salmonella
. Cited in “Nationwide Federal Plant Raw Ground Beef Microbiological Survey, August 1993-March 1994,” United States Deartment of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service, Science and Technology, Microbiology Division, April 1996.

The Netherlands began to test ground beef:
Interview with Steven Bjerklie.

a dozen federal agencies:
Cited in
Ensuring Safe Food
, p. 26.

if a pizza has pepperoni on it:
Ibid., p. 27.

264
Eggs are regulated by the FDA:
This example of bureaucratic folly was cited by Carol Tucker Foreman, a prominent food safety advocate, during recent testimony before Congress. For an excellent critique of our current food safety sys-tem and some rational proposals for reform, see Prepared Statement of Carol Tucker Foreman, Director of Food Policy Institute, before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Oversight of Government Management, Restructuring, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee, August 4, 1999.

264
more than 500,000 people become ill:
Ibid.

on average, once every ten years:
Cited in
Ensuring Safe Food
, p. 87.

roughly 200,000 fast food restaurants:
Cited in “Top 100 Share of Restaurant Industry Units by Menu Category,” Technomic Top 100, Technomic Information Services, 2000.

They said IBP slowed down the line:
In 1996, an official at the U.S. Meat Export Federation recommended slowing down the line speeds at American plants on export days in order to improve the “hygiene.” See Keith Nunes, “Attitude Adjustment: U.S. Beef and Pork Exporters Need to Develop an ‘Export Mentality,’”
Meat & Poultry
, March 1996.

the maximum OSHA fine:
See
OSHA Field Inspection Reference Manual
, Section 8 — Chapter IV, C.2.M.

266
“I do not believe”:
Quoted in Rudolph J. R. Peritz,
Competition Policy in America, 1888–1992: History, Rhetoric, Law
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 15.

“veggie libel laws” backed by agribusiness:
See Ann Hawk, “Veggie Disparagement: Laws in 13 States Prompt Fears Activists and Journalists Will Be Stifled,”
The Quill
, September 1998; Ronald K. L. Collins and Paul McMasters, “Veggie Libel Laws Still Out to Muzzle Free Speech,”
Texas Lawyer
, March 30, 1998.

267
“Grow or die”:
Quoted in Richard Gibson, “Beef Stakes: How Bill Foley Built a Fast Food Empire on Ailing Also-Rans,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 2, 1998.

268
environmentalists criticized the chain:
For the story behind the “greening” of Mc-Donald’s, see Sharon M. Livesey, “McDonald’s and the Environmental Defense Fund: A Case Study of a Green Alliance,”
Journal of Business Communications
, January 1999.

269
it continues to use them overseas:
See “An Incoherent Policy,”
South China Morning Post
, May 15, 1995; Jo Bowman, “Little Relish to Scrap Burger Boxes,”
South China Morning Post
, October 24, 1999.

it would no longer purchase frozen french fries:
For McDonald’s decision on biotech fries, see Scott Kilman, “McDonald’s, Other Fast Food Chains Pull Monsanto’s Bio-Engineered Potato,”
Wall Street Journal
, April 28, 2000; Hal Bernton, “Hostile Market Spells Blight for Biotech Potatoes,”
Seattle Times
, April 30, 2000.

Since writing
Fast Food Nation
I’ve come across a number of relevant and noteworthy books. Almost twenty years ago Orville Schell issued an eloquent warning against treating livestock like industrial commodities. Schell approached the subject not only as a journalist, but as an innovative rancher. Had the recommendations in his book
Modern Meat
(New York: Random House, 1984) been followed, the American meatpacking industry would have avoided many of the health scares and export restrictions it now faces. In
The Great Food Gamble
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), John Humphrys explains the mentality and the institutional changes that have led Great Britain from one agricultural distaster to another. George Monbiot’s
Captive State
(London: Macmillan, 2000) brilliantly outlines the corporate takeover of the British government during the past twenty years. Naomi Klein’s
No Logo
(London: Flamingo, 2001) offers a damning critique of global corporate power and the reigning cult of the brand. Klein has rightly emerged at the forefront of today’s young rebels. Tony Royle’s
Working for McDonald’s in Europe
(New York: Routledge, 2000) skillfully outlines how McDonald’s has exported its anti-labor policies to countries with long traditions of respecting workers’ rights. Among other things, Royle describes how the McDonald’s Corporation recruited low-wage workers in Bulgaria and Romania for its restaurants in Germany, providing these new immigrants with housing as a means of controlling them (see
pp. 76–8
). José Bové, the sheep farmer who became a national hero in France by demolishing a McDonald’s restaurant, offers a plea for sustainable agriculture in
The World is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food
(London: Verso, 2001). Written with François Dufour, the General Secretary of the French Farmers’ Confederation,
The World is Not for Sale
argues that important decisions about what we eat should never be made without considering their social costs and their impact on future generations. The most radical thing about Bové’s argument is how sensible it seems.

Two alarming books have been published about the risk of mad cow disease in the United States. Richard Rhodes’s
Deadly Feasts: The Prion Controversy and The Public’s Health
(New York: Touchstone, 1998) contains fascinating information on the health risks posed by cannibalism and a fine account of the detective work that linked BSE to the consumption of tainted animal feed. In
Mad Cow U.S.A.
(New York: Common Courage, 1997), Sheldon Rampton and John C. Stauber reveal how the beef industry and the federal government collaborated to thwart public discussion of mad cow. The duo’s efforts at the Center for Media and Democracy offer a necessary antidote to the P.R. industry’s relentless propaganda. As of this writing, the most definitive and disturbing investigation of mad cow disease is the sixteen-volume report on BSE submitted to the British government by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. Its official title is
Return to an Order of the Honourable the House of Commons dated October 2000 for the Report, evidence and supporting papers of the Inquiry into the emergence and identification of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and the action taken in response to it up to 20 March 1996
. Its full text is available online (
www.bse.org.uk
). Also known as
The BSE Inquiry: The Report
, it offers some extraordinary glimpses of bureaucratic cowardice and incompetence.

In addition to those works, my account of mad cow disease and the FDA rulemaking process is based on the following documents: “Finding of No Significant Impact and Environmental Assessment for 21 CFR 589.2000, Prohibition of Protein Derived from Ruminant and Mink Tissues in Ruminant Feeds,” Center for Veterinary Medicine, Food and Drug Adminstration, November 1996; “Substances Prohibited for Use in Animal Food or Feed; Animal Proteins Prohibited in Ruminant Feed; Proposed Rule,” Part IV,
Federal Register
, January 3, 1997; “Cost Analysis of Regulatory Options to Reduce the Risk of an Outbreak of Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs) in the United States, Addendum to the Final Report,” Office of Planning and Evaluation, Food and Drug Administration, April 30, 1997; “Substances Prohibited from Use in Animal Food or Feed; Animal Proteins Prohibited in Ruminant Feed; Final Rule,” Part II,
Federal Register
, June 5, 1997. I also relied on transcripts of two public forums held by the FDA to allow discussion of its proposed feed rules: “Food and Drug Administration, Public Forum on the Proposed Rule 21 CFR 589: Substances Prohibited from Use in Animal Food or Feed, St. Louis, Missouri, February 4, 1997” and “Public Meeting for Consumers Regarding
Federal Register
21 CFR Part 589, Substances Prohibited from Use in Animal Food or Feed; Animal Proteins Prohibited in Ruminant Feed; Proposed Rule; Washington D.C., February 13, 1997.” For years the reporting about mad cow disease in
Food Chemical News
has been objective and first-rate.

Interviews with software designer Hitesh Shah, journalist Viji Sundaram, and attorney Harish Bharti helped me understand how revelations about McDonald’s fries and the flavor industry led to riots in India. I am grateful to Eugene Richards for pushing hard to complete our photoessay on the lives of meatpacking workers, and to Roger Cohn, the editor of
Mother Jones
, for publishing it without hesitation. The plight of Latino meatpacking workers in Texas was eloquently described to me by Trini Gamez at the Centro Gamez in Amarillo and by Michael Wyatt, the director of Texas Rural Legal Assistance. Attorneys Jim Wood, Channy Wood, and Kevin Glasheen explicated for me some of the unique features of Texas workers’ comp law. They have demonstrated real courage in their legal battles with the meatpacking giants. Karen Olsson, editor of the
Texas Observer
, was extremely generous with her own research on IBP. Michael J. Broadway, an expert on meatpacking who heads the Department of Geography at the University of Michigan, provided much information and encouragement. Most of all, I am grateful to the injured meatpacking workers who shared their stories with me: Kenny Dobbins, Hector Reyes, Raul Lopez, Rita Beltran, Dora Sanchez, and Michael Glover, among others. Their suffering cannot adequately be put into words.

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the agency would “expedite”:
Quoted in Lawrence K. Altman, “Cow Disease Sparks Voluntary Rules on Feed,”
New York Times
, March 30, 1996.

“keen consumers of beef burgers”:
Quoted in Claire O’Brien, “Scant Data Cause Widespread Concern,”
Science
, March 29, 1996.

American cattle were eating about 2 billion pounds:
According to the USDA, the rendering industry at the time handled about 7.6 million tons of ruminant protein per year, about 5.5 million tons of it derived from cattle. Approximately 13 percent of the animal protein handled by industry (992,099 tons) was used in cattle feed. I have converted the tons into pounds to give a sense of the massive amounts of slaughterhouse waste involved. The figures are cited in “Finding of No Significant Impact and Environmental Assessment for 21 CFR 589.2000, Prohibition of Protein Derived from Ruminant and Mink Tissues in Ruminant Feeds,” Center for Veterinary Medicine, Food and Drug Administration, November 1996, pp. 15–16, 21.

three-quarters of all American cattle:
Cited in Michael Satchell and Stephen J. Hedges, “The Next Bad Beef Scandal? Cattle Feed Now Contains Things Like Chicken Manure and Dead Cats,”
U.S. News & World Report
, September 1, 1997.

273
“totally unsupported by any scientific evidence”:
Quoted in “Rendering Industry Supports Voluntary Guidelines for Cattle with Suspected CNS Disease,”
Food Chemical News
, July 29, 1996.

“unfeasible, impractical, and unenforceable”:
Quoted in ibid.

brains, spinal cords, eyeballs:
See “NCBA Urges Scientific BSE Prevention,” Press Release, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, February 18, 1997.

fats, blood, blood products:
See “Industry, Public Interest Groups Differ on FDA’s Proposed Ruminant Ban,”
Food Chemical News
, March 10, 1997.

allowing cattle to continue eating dead pigs:
See the statement of Dr. Beth Lautner, vice president of science and technology at the National Pork Producers Council, Transcript of “Food and Drug Administration, Public Forum on the Proposed Rule 21 CFR 589: Substances Prohibited from Use in Animal Food or Feed, St. Louis, Missouri, February 4, 1997,” p. 101.

“all mammal remains to all food animals”:
Quoted in “Controlling ‘Mad Cow Disease’: We call for stronger FDA action,”
Consumer Reports
, May 1997.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised:
See “CDC Rejects Any Weakening of FDA’s Ruminant Feed Ban Proposal,”
Food Chemical News
, March 31, 1997.

“The United States has no BSE”:
Quoted in “Substances Prohibited from Use in Animal Food or Feed; Animal Proteins Prohibited in Ruminant Feed; Final Rule,” Part II,
Federal Register
, June 5, 1997, p. 30939.

“mammalian-to-ruminant, with exceptions”:
Quoted in ibid., p. 30968.

274
these industry groups rightly worried:
See “FDA Public Forum,” pp. 36–9.

a remarkable example of cooperation’:
Quoted in Chuck Cannon, “Renderers Appear To Be Bearing Up Well to FDA’s Ban on Ruminant Protein in feed,”
Meat Marketing & Technology
, March 1998.

“protected the beef industry”:
Quoted in ibid.

“verbatim”:
Quoted in ibid.

“the number of BSE cases there soon doubled”:
Cited in “Developments in Mad-Cow History,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 1, 2001.

the number of BSE cases increased fivefold:
Cited in Geoff Winestock, “Tracking Spread of ‘Mad Cow’ in Europe Remains Random,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 8, 2001.

that supplied ground beef to McDonald’s restaurants:
See Melanie Goodfellow, “Italy’s First BSE Case Found in Cow Destined for McDonald’s,”
The Independent
, January 16, 2001, and “Final Tests Confirm BSE in Cow in Italian Slaughterhouse That Supplies McDonald’s,”
AP Worldstream
, January 16, 2001.

plummet by as much as 50 percent:
Cited in Geoff Winestock, “‘Mad-Cow’ Disease Cases Jump Despite EU Increased Testing,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 8, 2001.

275
one-quarter of the firms handling “prohibited” feed:
Cited in “Food Safety: Controls Can Be Strengthened to Reduce the Risk of Disease Linked to Unsafe Animal Feed,” GAO/RCD-00–255, United States General Accounting Office, September 2000, p. 12.

one-fifth of the firms handling both:
Cited in ibid., p. 12.

one out of every ten rendering firms:
Cited in ibid., p. 12.

In Colorado, more than one-quarter:
Cited in Michael Booth, “Mad Cow Rules Violated,”
Denver Post
, May 13, 2001.

sales in Europe had already fallen by 10 percent:
Cited in “McDonald’s Not Out of Mad Cows Woods Yet — CFO,”
Reuters
, February 28, 2001.

“If McDonald’s is requiring something”:
Quoted in Philip Brasher, “McDonald’s Forcing Beef Industry to Comply with Mad Cow Rules,”
Associated Press
, March 13, 2001.

“Because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart”:
Quoted in ibid.

276
“McGarbage”:
Douglas Kern, “McGarbage”,
National Review Online Weekend
, January 27–8, 2001.

“hodgepodge of impressions”:
Cynthia Crossen, “A Culinary Wasteland,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 12, 2001.

“anecdotal”:
The AMI spokeswoman was Janet Riley, quoted in Regina Schrambling, “Catching America with Its Hand in the Fries,”
New York Times
, March 21, 2001.

“The real McDonald’s”:
Quoted in Alby Gallun, “McDonald’s Mid-Life Crisis,”
Crain’s Chicago Business
, April 30, 2001.

277
One of President George W. Bush’s first acts:
For the implications of Bush’s move, see “Working America Challenges Corporate America,”
U.S. Newswire
, March 6, 2001; Victor Epstein, “Arguments over Ergonomics Keenly Felt by Injured Workers,”
Omaha World-Herald
, March 8, 2001; and Mike Allen, “Bush Signs Repeal of Ergonomics Rules,”
Washington Post
, March 21, 2001.