Look, it’s ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.'”
—Ray Kroc, creator of the McDonald’s Empire, 1972
Not satisfied with marketing to children through playgrounds, tys, cartoons, sweepstakes, games, and clubs, via television, radio, magazines, and the Internet, 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 district in the United States to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of school buses. […]
District 11’s marketing efforts were soon imitated by other school districts in Colorado, by districts in Pueblo, Fort Collins, Denver, and Cherry Creek. […] Hundreds of public school districts across the United States are now adopting or considering similar arrangements. Children spend about seven hours a day, one hundred and fifty days a year, in school. Those hours have in the past been largely free of advertising, promotion, and market research—a source of frustration to many companies. Today the nation’s fast food chains are marketing their products in public schools through conventional ad campaigns, classroom teaching materials, and lunchroom franchises, as well as a number of unorthodox means.
—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, pp 51, 52
The spiraling cost of textbooks has led thousands of American school districts to use corporate-sponsored teaching materials. A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumer’s Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor’s product and views.
—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 55
For years, some of the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA—and then distributed to school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated by pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by the Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones).
A 1983 investigation by NBC News said that the Cattle King Packing Company—at the time, the USDAs largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s—routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat.
—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 218
Children under the age of five, the elderly, and people with impaired immune systems are the most likely to suffer from illnesses caused by E. coli 0157:H7. The pathogen is now the leading cause of kidney failure among children in the United States. Nancy Donley, the president of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), an organization devoted to food safety, says it is hard to convey the suffering that E. coli 0157:H7 causes children. Her six-year old son, Alex, was infected with the bug in July of 1993 after eating a tainted hamburger. His illness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains. It progressed to diarrhea that filled a hospital toilet with blood. Doctors frantically tried to save Alex’s life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure, inserting tubes in his chest to keep him breathing as the Shiga toxins destroyed internal organs. […] He became ill on a Tuesday night, the night after his mother’s birthday, and was dead by Sunday afternoon. Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and dementia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquified.
—Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, p 200
Look, it’s ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.'”
—Ray Kroc, creator of the McDonald’s Empire, 1972
THERE ARE MANY THOUGHTS one could take away from this collection of information. I recommend the entire book Fast Food Nation. This is just the tiniest sampling, and a better picture can be had by reading the full narrative with its relentless onslought of gruesome revelation (yet with an organic Hope center!). All laid out in a narrative voice rather factual, and actually tastefully bereft of the emotional color that could have (rightfully) been employed. To my mind, this gives the book or tone therein a haunted, sad quality; the restrained, quiet voice reflects aurally, a certain (moral) emptiness it textually navigates.
The thread sketched in this post by my choices do not necessarily reflect the arc of narrative in the book. I chose a few quotes that had to do with children and the system we call “school,” and the uses that the fast food industry has had for this system, as well as the compromises that can arise out of this unsettling alliance. Some of the first grouping of facts in this book that began to boggle my mind…but in a way that wasn’t terribly shocking to my general views. Only sadly confirming.
From here, one could take the discussion a few ways. It probably depends a lot on our own beliefs and feelings about many things. We could talk about trusting companies or intermediaries on the mass-scale, who handle our food. We could talk about industrialization. Or packaging. We could talk about how many hands are between us and the neat, jazzy little box of munchie-munch we flip a buck or two for. We could talk about the speed of justice and the timeline of truth and possible consequences to relying on distant investigatory boards that hand down self-imposed inspections to massive corporations that exist outside our personal realm of understanding or control.
We could talk about trusting agencies to feed our children. We ought to at least admit there is no way the average person can ascertain any level of safety at all in such environs, that we don’t know a damn thing about what is in the school kitchen or how it is made, and that we are trusting a thousand people we do not know to keep our child healthy—when, as good as those people may be at heart, they cannot possibly control all variables that aid that agency. We could talk about other choices. Are there any?
We could talk about eating meat at all. Or we could talk about the way meat is being handled far too often. Just for the hell of it, let me underline that “meat” means “carcass.” It means “flesh,” it means “body.” So we could talk about the inferior, and yes, STUPID, way animals (alive and dead) are being treated, handled, and then fed into a mass-grinder that we have not cleaned, sterilized, nor even seen. We could talk about processed and mass-distributed food, and the philosophies that encourage and sustain such ideas. We could talk about a view on nature, and on animals vs. “human, not of animal descent.”
We could talk about fast food, for sure. That’s right up front. I don’t eat the stuff anymore. My (vegetarian and hippie-consciousness) upbringing, and then job at McDonald’s (at 16) cured me of 99% of that. This book took care of that last 1% with energy to spare.
We could talk about children, the last group of people yet to be fully considered as equal beings in this world, the small, weak human beings with tiny vocabularies and trusting minds. Every ounce of energy and cost should be being expended to keep them safe and smart and well-fed, no corner ought to be cut, no consideration too small, no excuses made for preying upon them in the ways this book divulges, or that we all know of just turning on the TV or looking around us. We are a foolish, ignorant, and self-destructive people to disregard and play stupid with our most precious available commodity and potential for change.
We could talk, again, about trusting school systems to even teach our children. How many parents would have approved the ways in which the school lessons were being shaped by corporate interests as described in this book? How many knew about this? How could they have? In what ways are even today’s school lessons being influenced in a way that will not be revealed until tomorrow’s new Fast Food Nation? And thus, we could talk about ignorant (not in the emotional sense, but the strict definition of not knowing) parents and good teachers deceived and reliant upon a system that cannot be assumed, at every turn, to be concerned with truth and good information….and even assuming most of the institution’s influential members are, if a parent’s definitions of those concepts—truth, good information—jibe! We can look at how the corporate forces are invading even the centers of learning for our children to make hypnotized zombies out of them, we could talk about this educational system that began as a means of preparing humans to be good factory workers, that began by objectifying them in this cold economic fashion, and in a few ways, clearly, has not changed too much. We could talk about the mutagenic growth cycle and aggressive territoriality of the advertising beast.
How to get at the root? What connects these things?
Ultimately, as a philosophical sort of LCD (Lowest Common Denominator, I’m getting mathosophical on you), I see greed, yet again. In a past post I had a few words on greed, and I have before, and I will again, and that’s because it’s clear to see that this sense of eating everything that strikes our whim, shitting where we sleep, tearing through each hull without even cleaning off the old ones, tossing our bones in our drinking supply, chewing with our eyes closed—this sleephuntgathering, this distorted tapeworm-thirst baked brain dyslogic that informs so much of our so-called “progress,” this EXTRA 40% FOR HALFPRICE 25 HOURS A DAY SHIPPED FREE TO YOU!, this doing it in half the time, this devouring as much as possible and at the same time trying to expend as little care/energy/concern/cost as possible, this attempt to cheat a balance for a bigger horded stash….it is what is eating away at our human existence and our peace of mind. Behind every decision disruptive and destructive to the good of humankind is a decision to try and cheat that balance, to get more for less, to profit off of other beings, to control things to your own benefit at costs that don’t concern you. I return to this, because it informs all the other complaints here for me. So many wrongs spring from a simple lack of acceptance of a few basic principles. One is that For Every Shortcut, There is an Unseen Cost.
M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, spoke of something in a nearby neighborhood. He posited, in the first chapter, that we just don’t accept the delaying of gratification. We’d rather procrastinate all day about an hour of work than do that work at the beginning of the day and have the rest of the day carefree. That we will eat our ice cream first and then fret forever over the broccoli. He rests people’s dissatisfactions, complaints, angers and much emotional and mental immaturity to a habit of denial of the truth that you just have to suffer sometimes for a little while to get where and what you want. And I agree… I frame it differently, but it is the same point.
When thinking, it helps to overlap symbols/shapes/ideas. To just slide them around, turn them inside out, lay them over each other, remove tags and just run through the closet of ideas and try on whatever might fit. Maybe it’s the Language closet mostly. Or the Symbol closet. I don’t know. I don’t spend much time in the Definition closet. but I’ve sort of amalgamated lessons from Science with my own philosophical wandering (like the “Philosophical LCD” above, which uses a touch of math to make its point). And when I was learning (this is as basic as high school bio) that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted or otherwise carried along albeit in a new form, this made sense to me, it stuck with me, and it got tossed around with other intellectual garments and made its way into some of my favorite outfits. I have learned from living, the same lesson about energy. Not in a physically or empirically demonstrable fashion as the law described above, but along the same metaphorical lines. That energy is never thrown away. That it never has no effect. That where you invest it, it will return. Words begin to fail, when describing these things. And I think writing all out here that I’ve thought on this will sidetrack me. But I spend years thinking on certain ideas (not always actively) and very gradually give them shape as I test them and retry and superimpose and prod them…sometimes discard, sometimes rethink. I feel the truth of them all the while—that is what gives me the original impulse and direction—and it grows truer as I check back on it, as I sculpt away the inessential and inaccurate or limiting.
In our false paradigm of worshipping efficiency and profit, we are ignoring some axioms that cannot be so easily discounted. They come to collect the balance of which we try to cheat them, and they leave a receipt of (not unseen) harm, disease, violence, blanched fate.
Parents sometimes begin the first lesson of convenience by refusing to risk the child’s anger or unhappiness, and giving them all that they want or cry for. This is convenient for the adult, but begins to ruin the child. Why will they not, with this treatment as well as so much of USA culture, always seek the shortcut? The easier way? The convenient method? It is a dangerous focus.
It simply must be taught to children from the start that there is joy in investing energy and time and work has a great value. They must learn, in quite clear and direct terms, the danger in the reflex to shortcut, that the idea itself is already compromise of a sort that will affect the outcome, that energy and time invested into a Thing insure the conversion of that energy, not the loss; attention and focus and care as some disease of process that must be remedied by a trick? No. We must incorporate into our teachings that the translation of time and energy we take on making a thing will manifest into matter and a quality and an aura that lives on and radiates and affects everything else around it and that interacts with that thing. We must teach that spending more time doing a job means a job is done better. (There are always exceptions, their existence does not disprove this rule). It must be inculcated into our culture that Faster is not inherently Better, that Less is not More, that Cheaper is not Valuable, and that being in a rush is pointless and a way to destroy your peace of mind in the Now, sustain injuries, and waste energy conversion through lack of focus. How to shift the American (USA) culture in a diametrically opposed alignment to where it currently points? Good question. Feel it out. Let me know. I figure I’ll start with me. Thinking, speaking, living. (Not necessarily in that order.)
I have to admit, there is a line to be determined. Should we all hoe our own gardens? Is it wrong to attach a yoke to an animal and have them plow it? Is any “shortcut” at all bad? I cannot answer a broad question as this. I cannot say yes to that. I do not think any “shortcut” is bad. But I think a reflex to always find one is bad, causes harm, feeds decisions such as are made when feeding cattle other bits of rotted cattle, feeds kids rotted cattle, lies to the public. These are all greed-based shortcuts. If you feed that animal right, treat it right, give it care and good food and yoke it so that you can harness its larger, stronger frame, I do not see that as bad. You have to house that animal, feed it, care for it, tend it, fit it with the yoke, insure it does not suffer, tend its illness. So you don’t really cheat the balance I speak of. You put the energy you would use to hoe into a different area, and it is hoped that you save yourself physical energy, but perhaps that energy you use to care and house and feed the animals is but another form of paying that currency. Perhaps the energy equation balances. Perhaps the harm would come when you try to handle more oxen than you can feed or care for to turn over more ground to get ahead…and they suffer, go hungry, untended. And perhaps those decisions, that grow from the “more than you can rightfully handle” area are the ones that compromise to the point of harm. As I said, I haven’t finished thinking this all out. It’s not something I plan to have a final answer for. I want to keep these questions with me, rather.
As young as I am even, at only 38, I know that I have grown up in a remarkably young and ignorant culture. Headstrong on our marvelous biceps and wallet, which we stole from a lab corpse and a night watchman and appropriated by use of murder, mellifluous manifesto, and mad science. We use these same tools very often to continue growing this economic and military giant. If we live on, one day we must inevitably come to wiser philosophies, not simply to etch into statues or have our figureheads mouth in their speeches, but in a way that inform our international policies and personal dealings and national decisions on funding, buying, building, treating medically or legally or raising children or teaching them…and so on. We must grow this attitude (and I mean that both emotionally and in a metaphorical airspace sense) and aim it outward into the world, as well. If we want a world of peace and happiness for not just the ultra rich but for even the poorest of the poor, then we must change the yardstick that determines who is favored and funded and who is not, the measurement that determines who is bullied and who is bought. In essence, we must change our view on nearly everything we do. Or perish. And that’s why it is in all our interests, even if we don’t care about everyone’s happiness. If we forge on using the philosophies that favor quick, cheaper, better, faster (and at the cost to many along the way), we rush to our doom. Liquified children’s brains from E. Coli crawling rampant in a negligent meatpacking/distribution/marketing system is but one symptom of such terrible ideology and mispriority that too often are part and parcel of the economic flex we call the American Way.
You cannot ignore truths, no matter how many dollars talk back. And not keeping a tally of debt doesn’t mean it’s not adding up.
crossposted at the unapologetic mexican