Fighting Fodder

As fast food outlets colonise the world, there is even a McDonalds in Guantanamo Bay. 'Chew on This' chronicles the growth of this industry, the tactics it uses to attract children and the detrimental effects it has on the world's health. Rosita Sweetman reviews Eric Schlooser's latest critique of the fast food industry.

Chew on This Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food. By Eric Schlosser. Penguin Books, €10.50

Chew on This charts the rise and rise of an industry that has caused illness and suffering to millions of adults, children and animals; that has irrevocably changed eating patterns, agriculture, landscape and environment; that has led the race to the bottom in working conditions for the hundreds of thousands of it employs; that has turned slaughterhouses into charnel houses and 'farms' into places of unique horror; and that has unleashed a health plague on Americans in particular – and increasingly on populations worldwide – as it has spread its business tentacles from one end of the globe to the other.

It's the fast-food industry of course, and this is Eric Schlosser's (author of 2001's surprise bestseller Fast Food Nation) second bite at its tough hide.

It all started off innocently enough: energetic young oik sells meatballs squashed between bread to country folk. Fast-forward to the 1940s and the Californian boom: drive-ins are all the rage. Into this ripe-for-the-plucking scenario wander the brothers McDonald. Within a few years they have evolved their McDonald blueprint and sacked the teenage 'carhops' who had brought food to the cars; replaced cutlery, glass and plates with plastic; replaced the in-house chefs with an assembly line of low-skilled, easily replaced teenagers; taken everything off the menu that couldn't be eaten while walking or driving; and the final, golden rule – made everything the same.

A 750-page book, known within McDonalds as 'The Bible', details precisely how exactly the same everything in a McDonalds must be.

But the McDonalds brothers' triumph didn't last that long. Ray Kroc, a lean and hungry salesman, spotted expansion potential, franchised out before you could say McDippers, and McDonalds 'restaurants' were everywhere. Ray then bought out the brothers, leaving them their original joint.

Several years later he returned, opened a rival opposite it, and closed it down too. Bye Bye McDonald Bros and thanks for the golden arches. Kroc was no sentimentalist. Of his rivals, he said: "This is rat-eat-rat, dog-eat-dog. I'll kill 'em... You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest."

This "American way of the survival of the fittest", with the fast-food industry at its epicentre, spawned monstrous industrial and corporate practices – advertising being the main weapon of choice.

In America, children now watch 25 hours of television a week during which they are exposed to 40,000 ads, 20,000 of which are for junk and fast food. And the stuff itself is everywhere – even in Guantanamo Bay – with schools the prime location: catch 'em young and you've caught 'em forever.

In the UK, where food companies spend £300m a year on advertising to kids, it's mostly thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who abolished the real school-meal programme, that the rot started. British schoolchildren now spend £500m on their way to and from school (sweets, soft drinks, crisps, chips) – 50% less than what they spend on real food in school. Who can ever forget the Jamie Oliver School Dinners series where some of the children were so constipated from a diet of chicken nuggets, fries and burgers, that, a doctor quietly informed us, backed-up faeces came out of their mouths.

Another weapon in the armoury is the Happy Meal, with McDonalds – one of the largest toy companies in the world – giving away, or selling, over 1.5 billion toys per year. Schlosser is not impressed. Most of these toys are made by other children, in factories in China, where they earn as little as ten cents an hour, and sleep in crammed dormitories, on beds without mattresses.

The drive to find out what the (customer) child wants is relentless. Sleepovers for kids, conferences for kids, even brain scans for kids. Anything to get – literally – inside their heads, see what they want, then give it to them. The cost to health, the environment and to animal welfare is huge.

Prior to the McDonaldisation of agriculture, America was dotted with hundreds of independent ranches. These days chicken 'farms' are franchised barns where birds are raised 30,000 to a shed, half blind, unable to walk, covered with skin burns from kneeling or lying in their own urine and faeces and sheet white from never – from birth to death – spending time outside. Prior to the rise of the fast-food grip on agriculture, chickens lived to the ripe old age of 6 years. Today they 'live' for 6 weeks and are then delivered in truckloads to slaughterhouses where conditions for workers are so bad nobody gives a damn about the chickens strung up by their feet on an assembly line, still alive, electrocuted, boiled, some still alive, plucked and gutted. In one study, Schlosser writes, those who don't die immediately are thrown against walls, or jumped on. As one worker said, he liked the 'pop' sound they made. Cattle fare little better, held, their heads imprisoned between bars, in lots of up to 100,000; the manure produced creates lagoons of sewage that pollutes ground-water for miles around.

In the slaughterhouses, reduced from thousands to just 13 – where mostly non-unionised, migrant labourers work in appalling conditions, with 60 cattle per minute coming down an assembly line where five used to – toilet breaks are not allowed and workers relieve themselves on the floor. One worker signed a waiver against taking legal action holding the pen in her mouth: both her hands had been severed. The list of deaths and injuries include: Employee's Arm Amputated in Meat Auger. Employee Burned in Tallow Fire. One Employee Killed, Eight Injured by Ammonia Spill. Employee Killed When Head Crushed in Hide Fleshing Machine. And so the appalling list goes on.

The McJob (much to McDonalds fury) is now an official dictionary description of low-paid, non-unionised, unskilled employment. Then there's the vast flavouring industry: most fast food is so processed, the natural flavours are lost, and artificial flavours – many of them highly suspect – are added. If you thought a strawberry milkshake consisted of milk, yoghurt, honey and strawberries, think again. A fast-food strawberry milkshake has 50 additives, many of them with unpronounceable names and, most likely, unpronounceable outcomes. Some Neryl isobutyrate anyone?

Finally, as the fast food industry has grown, so have Americans. Thanks mostly to fast food, America faces an epidemic of obesity, resulting in heart disease, cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and strokes, diabetes. The suffering of ordinary, good, decent people is unbelievable.

But fast food's glory days are probably over. Last month, Disney dropped McDonalds: no more Happy Meals in the Happiest Place on Earth.

In the meantime surely there is only one thing to be done: beg forgiveness for having strayed in the past, and never, ever eat in McDonalds again. God dang those ghastly arches.p