Fast Food Nation (Chp 2)

I almost forgot what day it is! That's right: Tuesday, aka Fast Food Nation day. As stated previously, the book has ten chapters, an introduction, an epilogue, and an afterword, so this feature will go into December. I'm hoping to make the posts a center for thoughtful discussion about the issue, but if that doesn't happen at least I know I'm getting the word out. :) Oh, and to read previous posts on the book, just click on the "fast food nation" tag at the end of this one.

Last week, I promised that this post would get people's blood boiling. Let's see if I can make good on that promise

Chp 2: Notes

+"Walt Disney and Roy Kroc [the guy who made McDonald's a nationwide franchise. -Eva] were masterful salesmen. They perfected the art of selling things to children. And their success led many others to aim marketing efforts at kids, turning America's youngest consumers into a demographic group that is now avidly studied, analyzed, and targeted by the world's largest corporations." (33-4)

+Kroc donated $250K to Nixon's reelection fund in return for presidential support of a bill allowing companies to pay sixteen and seventeen year olds 20% less than minimum wage. Not only did Nixon oblige, he also "permitted McDonald's to raise the price of its Quarter Pounders, despite mandatory wage and price controls restricting other fast food chains." (37)

+"[Kroc] liked to tell people that he was really in show business, not the restaurant business. Promoting McDonald's to children was a clever, pragmatic decision. "A child who loves our TV commercials," Kroc explained, "and brings her grandparents to a McDonald's gives us two more customers." (41)

+"Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children-Disney, McDonald's, candy makers, toy makers, manufacturers of breakfast cereal. TOday children are being targeted by phone companies, oil companies, and automobile copmanies, as well as clothing stores and restaurant chains. The explosion in children's advertising occurred during the 1980s. Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending more money on them. One marketing expert has called the 1980s "the decade of the child consumer." After largely ignoring children for years, Madison Avenue began to scrutinize and pursue them. Major ad agencies now have children's divisions, and a variety of marketing firms focus solely on kids." (42-3)

+"The bulk of the advertising directed at children today as an immediate goal. "It's not just getting the kids to whine," one marketer explained in Selling to Kids, "it's giving them a specific reason to ask for the product." Years ago sociologist Vance Packard described children as "surrogate salesmen" who had to persuade other people, usually their parents, to buy what they wanted. Marketers now use different terms to explain the intended response to their ads-such as "leverage", "the nudge factor," "pester power." The aim of most children's advertising is straightforward: get kids to nag their parents and nag them well." (43)

+"Today's market researchers not only conduct surveys of children in shopping malls, they also organize focus groups for kids as young as two or three. They analyse children's artwork, hire children to run focus groups, stage slumber parties and then question children into the night." (44)

+In the late 80s, the Federal Trade Commission tried to ban TV advertising for kids under eight, arguing that they couldn't make informed decisions and were being exploited. However, lobbyists from the TV, advertising, and toys killed it. (46)

+Some stats: average American kids spend 21 hrs/wk watching TV (equals 1.5 months/yr), the only thing they do more other than school is sleep, see 30,000+ commericials. 25% of kids 2-5 have a TV in their bedroom.

+"...fast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising-free outposts of American life. In 1993 District 11 in Colorado Springs started a nationwide trend, becoming the first public school distrct in the US to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of its school buses....For $12K, a company got five school-bus ads, hallway ads in all fifty-two of the district's schools, ads in their school newspapers, a stadium banner, ads over the stadium's public address system during games, and free tickets to high school sporting events." (51)

+"The nation's three major beverage manufactureres are now spending large sums to increase the amount of soda that American children consume...Eight-year-olds are considered ideal customers; they have about sixty-five years of purchasing in front of them. "Entering the schools makes perfect sense," the trade journal concluded." (53-4)

+"...sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutrious beverages in the American diet. Excessive soda consumption in children can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fragmentation." (54)

+"Soft-drink consumption is now common among American toddlers. About one-fifth of the nation's one and two year olds now drink soda...."Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Seven-Up encouraged feeding soft drinks to babies by liscensing their logos to a major maker of baby bottles..." A 1997 study published in the Journal of Dentistry for Children found that many infants were indeed being fed soda in those bottles." (54)

+"The spiraling cost of textbooks has led thousands of American school districts to use corporate-sponsoed teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumers Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor's products and views. Proctor & Gamble's Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was actually good for the environment; teaching aids distributed by the Exxon Environmental Foundation said that fossil fuels created few environmental problems and that alternative sources of energy were too expensive; a study guide sponsored by the Americna Coal Foundation dismissed fears of a greenouse effect, claiming that "the earth could benefit rather than be harmed by increased carbon dioxide."" (55)

+"The money that these corporations spend on their "educational" materials is fully tax-deductable." (56)

+"The American School Food Service Association estimates that about 30 percent of the public high schools in the US offer branded fast food. Elementary schools in Fort Collins, CO, now serve food from Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and Subway on special lunch days." (56)

Chp 2: Thoughts

If you're not screaming mad by the end of reading those notes, then I don't think you'll be ruffled by anything. For me, it's almost enough to make me not want to have kids! Of course, I know that I can try to raise them as aware consumers, and of course send them off with packed lunches to try to avoid fast food in elementary school (!), but it'll take some strong swimming to go against this tide. I wonder what kind of parents let their little kids participate in the focus groups Schlosser mentions ad agencies run; would you have your son or daughter go to a sleep over with adults? Kind of weird, imo. I cannot believe that corporations can not only create biased textbooks, but do it for free! Meanwhile, public schools are facing such a budget crisis they create advertising packages. There's something very wrong with that picture.

You'll note that my thoughts aren't very coherent this week. Basically, I think it's wrong, immoral, and should be illegal. These companies take kids and treat them as money-making machines. So sad.

I can't wait to see y'alls reactions to this, so even if you don't normally comment, please share any experiences/opinions about this one. So many of you are parents, which would be an interesting view.

Fast Food Nation (Chp 1)

Preface: I've decided to make Tuesdays my Fast Food Nation day; the book has ten chapters, an introduction, an epilogue, and an afterword, so this feature will go into December. I'm hoping to make the posts a center for thoughtful discussion about the issue, but if that doesn't happen at least I know I'm getting the word out. :)

Chapter One: Notes

This chapter talks about the men who created the biggest fast food chains today, as well as the origin of the whole phenomenon of fast food.
+It started in southern California.
+Originally, fast food restaurants were like Sonic and catered to a teenage clientel; owners wanted to shift to a family-based clientel so that they would've have to worry about teens doing dumb stuff.
+The McDonald brothers designed standard fast food techniques:
[They] eliminated almost two-thirds of the items on their old menu. They got rid of everything that had to be eaten with a knife, spoon, or fork. The only sandwiches now sold were hamburgers or cheeseburgers. The brothers got rid of their dishes and glassware, replacing them with paper cups, paper bags, and paper plates. They divided food preparaion into seperate tasks performed by different workers....For the first time, the guiding principles of a factory assembly line were applied to a commerical kitchen.
+Oddly enough, McDonald's and Hell's Angels were founded in the same year, in the same area. :)

Chapter One: Thoughts
I only found this chapter mildly interesting; I've never been interested in business, so I wasn't really taken by the various stories of entrepeneurs (sp?). Of course, seeing how few notes I took, I bet y'all guessed that. I did enjoy Schlosser's brief forays into cultural history (that's my unofficial term for it).

What struck me most about this chapter was the assembly line restaurant idea. Schlosser points out that thanks to new, idiot-proof techniques, fast food places didn't have to hire talented short order chefs, and they also didn't have to hire waitresses. This whole dumbing down of jobs, which then justifies lower wages, bothers me. I mean, I know in principle that many economists like it because it increases efficiency, but I've never been an efficiency kind of person. Before this, I bet short-order chefs enjoyed their job, or at least got some kind of rush from the variety. Afterwards, doing to the same thing all day, it can't be interesting work.

This was a very short chapter, thus the short post, but I promise next week's will be really, really interesting. It's all about how the fast food industry feeds off of children; guaranteed to get your blood boiling!

Fast Food Nation (introduction)

I finished Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser on Friday night, and I immediately began thinking about my review. I knew that I couldn't praise it high enough; the engaging writing style, the important information, the humane objectivity to be found in this book is, quite simply, amazing. This book shows why non-fiction is so important. It raises essential issues, deftly introduces the evidence, and allows the reader to evaluate everything in bright light. How, then, to review it? I suddenly realised that this book needs more than a review: it needs an audience. The topics discussed in this book are very important to me (and it was even more fun to read about Colorado Springs, as a newcomer to the town!), so I've decided to follow Dewey's model. She discusses a non-fiction book chapter-by-chapter, providing notes and her personal reaction (currently, she's working through Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney Martin).

I've decided to make Tuesdays my Fast Food Nation day; the book has ten chapters, an introduction, an epilogue, and an afterword, so this feature will go into December. I'm hoping to make the posts a center for thoughtful discussion about the issue, but if that doesn't happen at least I know I'm getting the word out. :) And with that, I'll be discussing the Introduction this week.

Introduction: Notes

+The workers of the top-secret Air Force base Cheyenne Mountain have Domino's delivered.

+"In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music-combined." (3)

+"On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast-food restaurant." (3)

+"Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage for the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years." (4)

+"An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald's. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonald's is the nation's largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes-and the second largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald's Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world." (4)

+"The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week." (6)

+"The current methods for preparing fast food are less likely to be found in cookbooks than in trade journals such as Food Technologist and Food Engineering. Aside from salad greens and tomatoes, most fast food is delivered to the restaurant already frozen, canned, dehydrated, or freeze-dried." (6-7)

+"I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem now haunting the United States. In some cases (such as the malling and sprawling of the West), the fast food industry has been a catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other cases (such as the rise of franchising and the psread of obesity) fast food as played a more central role. By tracing the diverse influences of fast food I hope to shed light not only on the workings of an important industry, but also on a distinctively American way of viewing the world." (9)

+"Fast food is heavily marketed to children and prepared by people who are barely older than children. This is an industry that both feeds and feeds off the young." (9)

+"During the two years I spend researching this book, I ate an enormous amount of fast food. Most of it tasted pretty food. That is one of the main reasons people buy fast food; it has been carefully designed to taste food. It's also inexpensive and convenient. But the value meals, two-for-one deals, and free refills of soda hive a distorted sense of how much fast food actually costs. The real price never appears on the menu." (9)

+"Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not-so-subtle ramifications of their purchases. They rarely consider where the food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in. The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten. I've written this book out of a belief that people should know what lies behind the shiny, happy surface of every fast food transaction." (10)

Introduction: Thoughts

I was surprised at the opening, a description of Cheyenne Mountain Air Force base. I'm actually going on a tour of that soon! But I quickly became more serious. For me, the most striking points Schlosser brought up were the sheer popularity of fast food and its appeal to children. The size of McDonald's was pretty staggering as well! When we were little, my sister and I played soccer. My dad coached my sister's team, and they needed funding. So, in return for money, her team was named the Mickey Dee's. At the time, it seemed pretty harmless. My favourite two passages are the last two quotes I listed. I like that Schlosser doesn't try to pretend; he freely admits that fast food tastes good. I personally don't like a lot of fast food, but I love Wendy's Spicy Chicken sandwiches. Oh-I should probably give a brief background of my own eating history, so that y'all know where I'm coming from. I became a vegetarian at 16, and at 19 I took an eight-month hiatus. Two of those months were spent in the States, getting my system readjusted to meat, and then I went to Russia (I stayed with families, in a very non-vegetarian friendly culture, hence why I started eating meat). On getting back in December (of 2005), I became a veggie again cold-turkey. Then, in April of this year I started eating meat again in preparation for the Peace Corps. I'm probably going to West Africa, and it would be culturally difficult for me to be a veggie there. So, I'm currently a reluctant meat-eater. My dad hunts once a year, so we always have elk in our freezer. In fact, he's getting back tomorrow with this year's meat. Thus, most of the red meat I eat tends to be game. In restaurants, I tend to default to the vegetarian stuff (I love tofu! and bean burgers!), but sometimes I'll eat chicken. We don't eat out all that often, but we tend to go to chains like Chili's and Olive Garden. As far as fast food, sometimes I'll go to Wendy's (and get a Spicy Chicken sandwich) and more frequently I'll go to La Casita (a four-restaurant Mexican chain in Colorado Springs), where I get two or three bean and cheese tacos. I probably go to La Casita once a week, Wendy's every two or three months, and out to eat at other restaurants twice a month. Whew-ok that wasn't so brief. But I thought it was important for y'all to know where I was coming from! That's probably enough for this week. :)