McDonald’s has become the best-known fast food brand in the world. It has 30,000 restaurants in 120 countries, and for many has come to symbolise the hopes and the fears of the Americanization of global culture. McDonald’s revolutionized the food industry, affecting the lives both of the people who produce food and the people who eat it. Explore the past, present and future of McDonald’s and with it the fast food industry.
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
Thursday 26 April 2007
fast food
McDonald’s has become the best-known fast food brand in the world. It has 30,000 restaurants in 120 countries, and for many has come to symbolise the hopes and the fears of the Americanization of global culture. McDonald’s revolutionized the food industry, affecting the lives both of the people who produce food and the people who eat it. Explore the past, present and future of McDonald’s and with it the fast food industry.
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
fast food
McDonald’s has become the best-known fast food brand in the world. It has 30,000 restaurants in 120 countries, and for many has come to symbolise the hopes and the fears of the Americanization of global culture. McDonald’s revolutionized the food industry, affecting the lives both of the people who produce food and the people who eat it. Explore the past, present and future of McDonald’s and with it the fast food industry.
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
fast food
McDonald’s has become the best-known fast food brand in the world. It has 30,000 restaurants in 120 countries, and for many has come to symbolise the hopes and the fears of the Americanization of global culture. McDonald’s revolutionized the food industry, affecting the lives both of the people who produce food and the people who eat it. Explore the past, present and future of McDonald’s and with it the fast food industry.
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
One World: One Taste”. This McDonald’s slogan emerges from an ambitious corporate vision of dominating the global fast food market. The golden arches of the red and yellow restaurants now bestride the globe, or “McWorld”, and excite both enmity and admiration from the foes and friends of capitalism. It all began quite humbly nearly fifty years ago when a salesman got excited by his visit to a California burger bar. Ray Kroc was 52 years old, and he had been selling paper cups, and then milk-shake mixers, for over 30 years. He was a driven man, obsessed by detail, ruthless in his ambition to get on. In San Bernardino, California in 1954, he saw the McDonald brothers’ hamburger restaurant selling tasty food to big queues, and he had a vision of its endless possibilities. Ray Kroc was attracted by the cleanliness, simplicity, efficiency and profitability of the McDonald brothers’ operation. They had stripped fast food delivery down to its essence, eliminating choices and needless efforts (no waitresses, no china) in order to make a swift assembly line for a meal at reasonable prices: 15 cents for a burger, ten cents for fries, and ten cents for a soft drink. The McDonalds applied automation to food, just as Henry Ford had to car-manufacture. Ray Kroc instinctively liked the friendly Scottish sound of their name and the golden arches in their restaurant. He struck a deal with the McDonald brothers to buy locations and franchise their restaurants all over the country, guaranteeing uniform quality, service, cleanliness and value. Later, Kroc and the McDonald brothers quarrelled, and Kroc brought the brothers out for US$2.7 million. When they would not sell him the original San Bernardino restaurant, now renamed The Big M, Kroc opened a McDonald’s across the road, and drove them out of business. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in June 1955. In five years there were 200 restaurants. After ten years the company went public, and the share price doubled to $50.00 in the first month. By 1995 there were over 18,000 restaurants worldwide. In 1996, McDonalds signed a ten year global marketing agreement with the Walt Disney Company to promote and help each other. Coincidentally, Ray Kroc and Walt Disney first met in an Army camp in Connecticut in 1918, when both were unknown visionaries. Xerox took 63 years to make its first billion dollars; IBM took 46 years. But the McDonald’s Corporation managed to surpass one billion dollars in total revenue in just 22 years. The perfectionist Ray Kroc was the driving force behind it. The largest fast food corporation in the world now has over 30,000 franchise outlets in 121 countries, and serves about 46 million people a day. It has become a symbol of the American way of life. When McDonald’s Pushkin Square opened in the heart of Moscow on January 31, 1990, it broke all opening day records for customers served, and is still the busiest branch in the world. The former Soviet Union now has 79 restaurants. The largest McDonald’s in the world opened in 1992 in Beijing, and there are over 400 McDonald’s in China. It was once suggested by a journalist, who called it “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, that no two countries with branches of McDonalds had gone to war. That record was broken in 1999 when US and NATO planes bombed Serbia, which had seven McDonald’s restaurants.
After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world. A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun. It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter. In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle. In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers. It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift. When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcase is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail. The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation. Much of this work, Schlosser contends, is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots. Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food. Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle. The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.
What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next. In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked. After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste. Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets. These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken. The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts. By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business. Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter. The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support. The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything. As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand. Children love chicken McNuggets, according to Eric Schlosser. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.“The french fry would become almost sacrosanct for me, its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously”, wrote Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography, Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Ironically, the company he founded fell foul of other religions. In June 2002 McDonald's was forced to pay out US$10 million to Hindu and vegetarian groups in the USA because it had misled them about whether its French fries were vegetarian. Hindus do not eat beef for religious reasons. And the McDonald's fries groups of Hinuds and vegetarians had eaten had been pre-cooked in beef tallow –which had been described as “natural flavoring.”
The logo for McDonald’s is the golden arches of the letter M on a red background. The M stands for McDonald’s, but the rounded m represents mummy’s mammaries, acccording the design consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. In the 1960's McDonald's was prepared to abandon this logo, but Cheskin successfully urged the company to maintain this branding with its Freudian symbolism of a pair of nourishing breasts. This may seem funny, but it is no laughing matter to the industrial psychologists and marketing consultants who are paid millions to find new ways to seduce us into buying by manipulating our unconscious desires. The work of “hidden persuaders” in the psychology of marketing has been going on since the 1920s. Nowadays, there are companies who even hypnotise focus groups of consumers to reach their innermost associations. Market research has found that children can recognize a brand logo before they can recognise their own name. One way McDonald’s ensured the visiblity of its brand, and in the process revolutionized fast food, was by making its restaurants easily accessible on the US highway system. Over half the population of the USA live within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s, and Ray Kroc, the founder of the restaurant chain, made sure they did so. He used the company plane in the 1960s to spot from the air the best locations and road junctions for new restaurant branches. Church steeples were often his guide, because Kroc wanted to attract church-going families to his temples of efficiency and nourishment, which always had clean toilets. In fact, in the USA more people now eat in McDonald’s than go to church or synagogue. Surveys have shown that the golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. “Give Mom a night off” was an early advertising slogan, so the meal out meant no cooking, serving and washing-up for her. Outside the USA, McDonald’s and other American fast food restaurants offer a bite of the American Dream. But the appeal now of McDonald’s and many other fast food outlets in the USA and elsewhere is aimed deliberately at children. There is a playground, in bright primary colours. There is sweet, salty, fatty food you eat with your fingers. There is a clown called Ronald McDonald to greet you, and there’s the prospect of free film and TV tie-in toys with the “Happy Meal”. Psychologists confirm a theory that Ray Kroc and Walt Disney traded upon, that “brand loyalty” can be established by the age of two.
info
You are what you eat. But do you really know what you’re eating?
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. Rates of obesity and food poisoning spiral upwards, but it seems we just can’t get enough of those tasty burgers and fries.
This myth-shattering book tells the story of America and the world’s infatuation with fast food, from its origins in 1950s southern California to the global triumph of a handful of burger and fried chicken chains. In a meticulously researched and powerfully argued account, Eric Schlosser visits the labs where scientists re-create the smell and taste of everything - from cooked meat to fresh strawberries; talks to the workers at abattoirs with some of the worst safety records in the world; explains exactly where the meat comes from and just why the fries taste so good; and looks at the way the fast food industry is transforming not only our diet but our landscape, economy, workforce and culture.
Both funny and terrifying, Fast Food Nation will make you think, but more than that, it might make you realize you don’t want a quick bite after all.
‘Fast Food Nation has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry … it could even change the way we eat’ Observer
‘Not only will it make you think twice before eating your next hamburger … it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the social and cultural landscape’ The New York Times
‘The grisliest description of fast food ever written’ Daily Telegraph
‘If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you’ Globe and Mail
about the author
ERIC SCHLOSSER has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. what the papers say
New York Times - "Here is another side of the unfettered money culture that has been celebrated as an exciting orgy of entrepreneurialism and opportunity."
San Francisco Chronicle - Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is a good old-fashioned muckraking expose in the tradition of "Th American Way of Death" that's as disturbing as it is irresistible ..."
USA Today - Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
The Washington Post - "Schlosser is part essayist, part investigative journalist. His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare;..."
Christian Science Monitor - Not all of this exposé is dark and dreary. Most, but not all. While the prevailing wisdom suggests the highly efficient business model of McDonald's and other chains is the only way to profit, Schlosser finds evidence to the contrary."
Evening Standard (UK) - If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.
Salon - Schlosser never comes off as a "sky is falling" street-corner raver or bullheaded finger-pointer. His fury is evident, but his voice is measured and his methods are subtle."
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