Great Throughts Treasury

"The fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other American industry. Consequently, a low minimum wage has long been a crucial part of the fast food industry?s business plan."

"The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible."

"The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years. During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants -- mainly at fast food restaurants."

"The fast food chains' vast purchasing power and their demand for a uniform product have encouraged fundamental changes in how cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed into ground beef. These changes have made meatpacking -- once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation -- into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated. And the same meat industry practices that endanger these workers have facilitated the introduction of deadly pathogens, such as E. coli 0157:H7, into America's hamburger meat, a food aggressively marketed to children. Again and again, efforts to prevent the sale of tainted ground beef have been thwarted by meat industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress. The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal -- but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat."

"The fear of murder has grown so enormous in the United States that it leaves a taint, like the mark of Cain, on everyone murder touches."

"The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal?but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat."

"The federal government has more power to recall a defective stuffed animal who's little glass eye may fall off than to recall contaminated ground beef that could sicken or even kill hundreds if not thousands of people. The meat-packing industry is so powerful that it's managed to prevent the government from having this basic power of recalling a defective product."

"The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices."

"The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross."

"The first duty of the command and control system is to survive, Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller blocks, sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran?s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet."

"The Food and Drug Administration does not require flavor companies to disclose the ingredients of their additives, so long as all the chemicals are considered by the agency to be GRAS (generally regarded as safe). This lack of public disclosure enables the companies to maintain the secrecy of their formulas. It also hides the fact that flavor compounds sometimes contain more ingredients than the foods being given their taste."

"The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power."

"The industry doesn?t want you to know the truth about what you?re eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it,"

"The key to a successful franchise, according too many texts on the subject, can be expressed in one word: ?uniformity.? Franchises and chain stores strive to offer exactly the same product or service at numerous locations."

"The obesity epidemic among American children is becoming so bad that I think there's a growing realization across the country that we've got to change what we're feeding our kids and that school may be a really good place to start."

"The impact of McDonald?s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross."

"The importance of recalls is to show that contaminated meat is getting out the door. And when you look at these recalls, in many ways the most disturbing thing about these recalls is how little of the meat actually winds up back at the plant."

"The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth."

"The McDonald's Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America's service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country's new jobs. In 1968, McDonald's operated about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about twenty-eight thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. 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. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald's spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world's most famous brand. McDonald's operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nation's largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald's on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross."

"The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it."

"The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat."

"The pathogens from infected cattle are spread not only in feedlots, but also at slaughterhouses and hamburger grinders. The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of an animal?s hide and the removal of its digestive system . . . if a hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of dirt and manure may fall from it onto the meat."

"The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this."

"The relentless low-cost competition from IBP presented old-line Chicago meatpackers with a stark choice: go west or go out of business. Instead of symbolizing democracy and freedom, going west meant getting cheap labor. One by one, the packinghouses in Chicago closed down, and slaughterhouses were built in rural states hostile toward labor unions."

"The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn?t fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany."

"The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a horror strategy."

"The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the US is now about three times higher than the national average. The issue briefly received attention during the 1980s farm crisis, but has been pretty much ignored ever since. Meanwhile, across rural America, a slow and steady death toll mounts. As the rancher?s traditional way of life is destroyed, so are many of the beliefs that go with it."

"The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle."

"The symptoms of food poisoning often don't appear for days after the contaminated meal was eaten. As a result, most cases of food poisoning are never properly diagnosed."

"The southern California drive-in restaurants of the early 1940s tended to be gaudy and round, topped with pylons, towers, and flashing signs. They were ?Circular meccas of neon,? in the words of drive-in historian Michael Witzel, designed to be easily spotted from the road."

"The spread of BSE [mad cow disease] in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures."

"The thing that's been inhibiting long-form investigative reporting is fear - fear of being sued, of being unpopular, of being criticized by very powerful groups."

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

"The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers."

"The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald?s should feel daunted; they?re outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you."

"The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. And the harms caused by food poisoning are usually inadvertent and unanticipated. People who smoke crack know the potential dangers; most people who eat hamburgers don?t. Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior."

"There's a real strong link today between soda consumption and obesity among children."

"The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000?. Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn?t just about what we?re eating. It?s about what we?re allowed to say. What we?re allowed to know."

"There is a growing market today for local, organic foods produced by small farmers. And farmers' markets have played a large role in making that happen."

"There's also a growing trend toward having gardens in schools to literally show kids where food comes from by having them grow and prepare their own food. There's also a movement that's bringing farmers into schools and creating relationships between local farms and local cafeterias, so that instead of frozen mystery meat, you have fresh produce that's coming from the area that has a name and a face associated with it."

"There's been a growing effort to kick soda out of the schools. And governors as different as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas have worked hard to get soda and junk food out of their state schools, which is good."

"This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both as a commodity and as a metaphor. What people eat (or don't eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, and technological forces. The early Roman Republic was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves. A nation's diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite."

"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."

"Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States."

"Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves."

"To know a country you must see it whole."

"Today?s fast food industry is the culmination of larger social and economic trends. The low price of a fast food hamburger does not reflect its real cost?and should. The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by losses imposed on the rest of society. The annual cost of obesity alone is now tice as large as the fast food industry?s total revenues."

"Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn?t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption."

"Toward sunset we spotted a herd of antelope and roared after them. That damn minivan bounced over the prairie like a horse at full gallop, Hank wild behind the wheel . . . we had a Chrysler engine, power steering, and disk brakes, but the antelope had a much superior grace, making sharp and unexpected turns, bounding effortlessly . . . ."

"Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk."