Dear Katha,
Hope that scotch slipped down well. I never actually had that Burger King cheeseburger (only my children are allowed to indulge their every craving for fast food), but perhaps I’ll take the kiddies on a field trip later. Instead I went out and met a friend in Bethesda for a great $15 lunch of Thai food at a new place with the yuppie-luring name Green Papaya.
Lucky me. But one of the things I think Schlosser avoids grappling with, which you mentioned in your last entry, is the awkward fact that all the evils of fast food are inextricably linked to the democratization of Eating Out. “Working class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food,” wrote a McDonald’s company historian in summarizing the chain’s early evolution. That ain’t nothing. I know that in Schlosser’s ideal world, everyone could afford to eat out in small, cheerful, family-owned delis or diners. But they don’t call them economies of scale for nothing. And though my mouth watered at the recollections you conjured up of all those wonderful New York diners with the clunky white china coffee cups and cheerful, chivvying waiters, most of us–alas–don’t live in places with such options. (Don’t even ask about Washington pizza. I promise you that Pizza Hut, where my son actually persuaded me to take him a few weeks back because he had his 7-year-old heart set on a hideous innovation called The Insider, in which a layer of cheese is baked into the pizza crust, is better than most of what you can get in pizzerias here. Naturally, having pestered me for two weeks to take him there, he ate half a slice and pronounced himself done. Anyway, you can get better pizza here at about two places, but it’s fancy, high-yuppie pizza where you’ll walk away with a bill for $30 for two.)
And there is indeed an upside to the proliferation of options that don’t involve, well, me cooking dinner. The fast-foodization of America is inextricable from one of the biggest social shifts of all over the past 40 years, which is our group social decision that everyone–mothers as well as fathers, kids as well as parents–belongs in the labor force. From time to time I felt there was something stubborn in Schlosser’s effort to isolate fast food from the rest of this web.
But mostly I want to say a mitigating word for the Fast Food Impulse on the part of the consumer. The yearning for a known quantity isn’t necessarily a base human instinct; it’s just a universal one, and there is a kind of genius in how assiduously the chains have learned to serve both that instinct and the constant craving to cut a little corner–to have something, anything, made easier–that is the lot of the parent of young children. The parent who takes the kids out for fast food is, in the popular imagination, a pliant, incompetent soul too stupid to know that the food isn’t good for you. I submit that many of these parents know the difference between Good Parenting, which involves broccoli, and giving their kids the half-hour of transitory happiness that comes from tossing them into the car and taking them out for a Happy Meal.
The answer for everyone else is education and more education. We do a dreadful job of explaining nutrition to kids; schools discuss it only in passing. This is the part of the equation we can actually do something about. (And thanks for bringing up the Coke-in-the-schools issue. I wrote a column about this, after reading that chapter of Schlosser’s book, because guess who was running the Houston schools when they signed their million-dollar soda contract? Bush’s new secretary of education, that’s who.) A great resource for nutrition info on fast foods, by the way, is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the folks who bring you bad news like the fat content of the popcorn you buy at the movies.
End of public service announcement. I don’t mean to quarrel too energetically with Schlosser because like you, I found something that entertained or interested or outraged me on almost every page of the book. Did you know that McDonald’s makes most of its money as a landlord? The real dough comes from owning its outlets and renting them back to its franchise holders. “We are not basically in the food business,” an early McDonald’s executive once said. “We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell 15 cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenues from which our tenants can pay us our rent.” I also loved learning that McDonald’s is one of the biggest buyers of commercial satellite photography; that’s how Big Brotherly the science of spotting new locations has become.
Schlosser is especially good on the early histories of the fast food chains, where you feel that he can’t help sort of liking the quirky old coots who started it all. (Every behemoth, after all, had its start as the kind of freewheeling, entrepreneurial enterprise they’ve now exterminated.)
But my favorite thing of all is a quote from cuddly Ray Kroc, who once said about his business rivals, “If they were drowning to death, I would put a hose in their mouth.” Nice, huh? This is the same ruthlessness that has given the chains their genius for milking the federal Treasury (in the form of tax credits for worker training and small-business loans and subsidies to franchisees) and hogtying almost all efforts at federal regulation. The fast food conglomerates’ lobbying power and campaign contributions have forced or bought some really astounding forms of protection (they are one of the major players in every battle over the minimum wage, for example); this is one great thread that runs through Schlosser’s book, and if anything I wished there had been more of it, more systematically collected in one place.
Beyond that minor complaint, I really only have one other: I was looking for an exegesis of the latest chain that has come to my neighborhood. It sells chicken and is inexplicably called “Lil’ Peckers.” Every time we pass it my husband shakes his head and says, “Now what man in his right mind is going to set foot in a place called Lil’ Peckers??!!” I like to think they accidentally convened a focus group of mischievous women who had been reading Fay Weldon. Were you by any chance one of them?
Best,
Marjorie
