Dear Marjorie,
So did you enjoy your Burger King cheeseburger? And the Diet Coke? I’m anything but a health food fan, and I’m not a food snob either–my lunch of choice is a hot sausage from a pushcart on the street–but fast food doesn’t appeal to me at all. I can understand stopping at McDonald’s on the highway, where there may well be nothing else to eat for hours in either direction, but here in New York City your average Greek diner serves a better cheeseburger than any of the fast food chains–it’s larger, rarer, plumper, with fresher lettuce, ketchup ad libitum, with a nice pickle spear on the side, and the ceremonial cole slaw in a little paper cup. You get a china plate, plus a metal knife and fork, even if you don’t need them, and you can be pretty sure your lunch hasn’t been sitting around for an hour or so sweating grease under a heat lamp. And as if that weren’t enough, you can sit in a booth instead of those plastic seats designed to be uncomfortable so you won’t linger, and bolted to the floor as if the company was afraid you were going to walk off with them. Fast food pizza is even worse than the burgers–doughy, flabby slabs laden with bland cheese. Or rather, “cheese food.” Where is the delicately basil-flavored tomato sauce? The drizzle of olive oil? The crisp browned crust? Nobody would choose Pizza Hut in a blind taste test against the product of any of literally thousands of local pizzerias here in New York. And yet I know people who when they send out for pizza choose Domino’s and not only have a ghastly meal but fund the fabulously reactionary anti-choice politics of Domino chief Thomas Monaghan, who has made enough money from terrible pizza to start his own right-wing Catholic law school!
I blame parenthood. Kids eat this awful food because they don’t know any better, and their parents gradually become numb. I had never even been to a McDonald’s until I had my daughter. In a city where many restaurants don’t welcome little kids, McDonald’s is child friendly–your child spills, they clean it up, no problem; your child screams, nobody gives you the hairy eyeball. Before you know it, you and your child are going there for French fries (the one thing they make that’s actually kind of good) all the time. Then it’s oh heck, it’s lunch time, might as well have the McNuggets. The McDonald’s in my neighborhood are full of parents and small children, as well as an assortment of oddball characters who are interesting to chat with. One thing I have to say I like about fast food restaurants is that the brutal and degraded environment, the lack of amenities and formality and symbolic privacy of any kind, the experience of standing in line for food as if you were standing in line in the subway to renew your metro card, encourages conversation among strangers. It’s like being stuck at the bus terminal together in a snowstorm or sheltering in the gym after a tornado.
I loved Fast Food Nation. As you say, Eric Schlosser neatly combines research with first-hand observation, and I felt I learned something on every page. Schlosser examines fast food from every conceivable angle–the consumer angle is the one most reviews pick up on, I imagine, because most reviewers and review readers experience fast food as customers rather than urban planners or workers or potential franchisees–but the quality of the food is only one strand in the book. For Schlosser, fast food is the place where a striking number of new American social, economic, and political trends come together. For him, fast food is not just about standardization, mechanization, reliability, predictability, and speed–all things Americans have historically admired. It’s both cause and consequence of the latest phase of modernization in America: the development of endlessly replicable, environmentally tone-deaf suburbs and edge cities, with their attendant strips and malls. From Anaheim in the l940s and 1950s (home of the original Carl’s Jr. as well as Disneyland) to Colorado Springs today, these burgeoning, sprawling mini-megalopolises are made possible by cars and underwritten by huge government expenditures in military spending, which produces jobs that attract middle-class whites in flight from older urban centers. He notes that the fast food industry began in Southern California, where World War II military spending had transformed Los Angeles into the first major city fueled by internal rather than foreign immigration, where cars were cheap and also necessary, and where teens had wheels to take them cruising around to drive-in burger and hotdog joints. Interestingly, the McDonald brothers, who started the original McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, were moved to develop the prototype of fast food service because of the trouble and expense of running a drive-in: Teen-age boy customers hung around flirting with the pretty “car-hops” who brought orders out to the cars; they stole too much silverware and china and kept older customers away. The fast food style of service was supposed to attract whole families–and it did. For many working-class families, it was their first and only experience of dining out. No silverware and china for them, though. Let alone a waitress or waiter.
As explicated by Schlosser, fast food stands at the center of so many interconnected contemporary trends: business synergy and “just in time” production; the de-skilling of work and the de-unionization of the labor force; the commercialization of just about everything (there’s a great section on the infiltration of the public schools by Coke and other food companies); the transformation of children into consumers and of teens into a casual labor force; environmental and agricultural degradation; right-wing politics; not to mention the expanding American waistline.
Sure, there were moments when I took issue with Schlosser–he notes, for example, the generally right-wing and Republican bent of the fast food industry giants but forgets to mention that Joan Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonald’s, has given millions to the Democratic Party. And surely there is an upside to a phenomenon that has freed burdened, working mothers from cooking dinner every single day for the rest of their lives! It’s not like working fathers leapt to take on their share of kitchen duties when Mom went out to work. I am really tired of having everything bad in America blamed on working women.
But those are quibbles. Basically, I think Schlosser takes the reader on a fascinating and rather ominous guided tour of a new America taking shape inside the hollowed-out form of the country you and I grew up in. At least I did. Or thought I did.
Feeling rather antiquated and in need of a Scotch on the rocks individually prepared for me,
Katha
