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Notions for a Fast Food Nation
By Todd Seavey
Fast Food Nation -- in which (as noted earlier this year on HealthFactsAndFears) journalist Eric Schlosser argues that America is having its health and environment ruined by a sinister system of fast food mass-marketing and animal cruelty, all in the name of evil food manufacturers' profits -- has now become a slightly dull film from director Richard Linklater.
Linklater and Schlosser answered questions after a Nov. 16 screening of the film at Hunter College. I asked them what they would consider the bare minimum of changes necessary to make America's food production system morally acceptable.
Linklater and Schlosser were somewhat divided in their responses, with Schlosser wanting immediate changes in regulations and agriculture subsidies and Linklater, a more interesting mix of radicalism and caution, wanting mainly to change consumers' thinking. Unlike Schlosser, Linklater is a vegetarian, so presumably no matter how feces-free, cruelty-free, and uncrowded the cows in our feedlots become, he'll still be unsatisfied -- but he also thinks that changing consumer tastes may be the most efficient way to make changes in food production (if one grants for the moment that changes are desirable). If enough people want meat from cows who were raised in spacious, comfy environments -- or stop wanting meat altogether -- Linklater is confident, and rightly so I think, that the market will shift to reflect those preferences (in that small way, his thinking is not so completely different from that of a pro-market figure like Milton Friedman, whose death was announced the same day as the screening -- and who remains one of only two Nobel Prize winners I've met, the other being ACSH Trustee and modern agriculture defender Dr. Norman Borlaug).
The Linklater/Schlosser film interweaves roughly five plotlines about people involved in different stages of hamburger production in a small, rural U.S. bordertown. The main charges against the food industry, if the film were to be taken very literally, seem to be that (1) there is fecal matter in hamburger (though little enough, it is implied, to be rendered harmless through cooking, a reasonable enough admission from what is meant to be a radical film, but the point is made by an unlikable character played by a tough-sounding Bruce Willis), (2) illegal immigrants do much of the hard manual labor involved in meat processing, (3) some of them get sexually harassed, and (4) fast food restaurants are boring and homogeneous anyway, like much of our clueless civilization.
Now, I know Linklater and Schlosser have more sweeping objections to modern food production and industrial civilization, but the film almost seems to imply that if we just slowed down the cow-disassembly line of one particularly bad plant (and we do see the gory details, by the way) enough to ensure that we kept the feces out of the meat, everything would pretty much be OK, aside from the immigration, sex, and boredom issues, which aren't exactly problems exclusive to the food industry. But aesthetically, we're still left with the vague impression that things are too deeply awry for such an easy fix. Likeable and ostensibly well-informed characters claim, in the sort of "Austin, TX bull sessions" for which Linklater films are known, that we are immersed in lies so pervasive that we can barely know what's real.
Linklater's jumpy, nervous, watch-out-man-they're-all-out-to-get-you approach to politics has been displayed in at least four of his films, Fast Food Nation, and earlier Slacker, Waking Life, and this summer's A Scanner Darkly (though his best film unquestionably remains the mainstream comedy School of Rock with Jack Black). A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel by the quintessentially paranoid proto-cyberpunk author Philip K. Dick, depicted frightened stoners coping with the intrigues of both the drug-using underground and the even more creepy system of government control meant to thwart that underground.
Fast Food Nation almost works as a companion piece to Scanner, trying to arouse the same sense of foreboding about the food industry that Scanner did about the drugwar. The sinister drug treatment centers in Scanner, masking the darker details of the drug trade and drug control efforts, resemble the antiseptic corridors of Fast Food Nation's UMP meat packing company, where tours, we are told, are never taken to the killing floor (we eventually see the killing floor in the film, and, sure, it's a bit gross -- what do you expect? -- but I seem to recall seeing footage of meat production in my childhood, and somehow what is treated as taboo and politically volatile imagery now didn't seem that traumatic in the 1970s; perhaps the imagery isn't as volatile as Linklater expects, though, since I heard at least one audience member after the screening saying he was hungry).
At the end of the day, I suspect few Americans will see the film, and few who see it will stop wanting hamburgers -- which is just as well. Our food supply is very safe, and there's little reason to believe that a return to primitive "sustainable" or "organic" methods of production would make it any safer, especially since organic farmers eschew chemical fertilizers in favor of the very cow manure that Linklater and Schlosser fear -- and since organic farmers are hostile to modern practices such as food irradiation and pasteurization that decrease the odds of customers encountering deadly microbes.
Indeed, the film itself, perhaps out of sheer pessimism on the part of Linklater and Schlosser, does a fairly good job of suggesting just how unlikely it is that food production will change radically in the near future. The most ardent activist in the film attempts a mass-liberation of penned cows awaiting slaughter, leading to the cows milling around apathetically instead of galloping for the hills. I half-expected the activists to lament, "These cows are just like Americans! We show them the way to freedom and they just keep milling around in their own filth!" But the activists are actually depicted as rather naive. I almost feel sorry for all the idealistic college kids in the screening audience, who must see themselves in those naive activist characters, and who I suspect have almost been trained by such tales of futility to feel like disillusioned Baby Boomers before they're even old enough to have become illusioned in the first place (they would probably all say, if asked, that the world should become green, vegetarian, New Age, socialist, free of greed, and pacifist to boot, and they would probably also say there is absolutely no chance of these things happening).
Schlosser said of the film's striking lack of resolution that he felt showing a successful cow herd liberation, or a change in UMP's practices, or the formation of a powerful reformist union at the processing plant in the film, would have been cheating, giving audiences a fuzzy Hollywood ending when "none of those things are happening in this country."
Today, one day after Schlosser uttered those words, there was in fact a mass walkout of disgruntled employees at a hog processing plant in North Carolina, protesting recent firings there of illegal immigrants. And some American and European scientists released studies today lamenting the potential for disease from what they see as under-regulated feedlots (Schlosser may actually know about these events, and the scientists, or at least the reporters who conveyed their message, probably knew _Fast Food Nation_ was being released this week -- it's not just the capitalists who like conspiracies, or rather well-timed public relations campaigns, you know).
Unlike Linklater, Schlosser and others on the panel -- including NYU nutrition scientist Dr. Marion Nestle, Michelle Simon of the Center for Informed Food Choices (and author of Appetite for Profit), and Grub author and organic food proponent Anna Lappe -- seemed quite eager to find public policy solutions to America's supposed food problems. Nestle aggressively called food the center of an "international social movement" and dismissed even the American Heart Association as part of the problem, since it puts its seal of approval on sugary foods so long as they are low in calories (thus helping to addict children to junk food, she suggests). Simon called for the use of zoning laws to decrease fast food restaurant density and mandate increased space for green markets and presumably "health food" stores. Simon added to criticism of the American Heart Association, saying she was dismayed by their role in what she sees as the Clinton Foundation's phony bid to combat obesity by negotiating the removal of soft drinks from schools.
Much of the conversation, though it began with lamentations about capitalism and some of the inevitable homogenizing effects of industrialization, came down in the end to a lamentation about what is being fed to the "captive audience" of school children. That message probably struck a chord with the screening's audience of college kids and with the event's organizers, the New York Coalition for Healthy School Lunches, vegetarians who promote exclusively "plant-based" diets out of the belief that, as their slideshow presentation put it, meat and processed or refined foods "contribute to disease." One additional panelist, Cornell nutrition professor emeritus Dr. T. Colin Campbell, claimed his research shows we could "prevent and even cure" many diseases by getting everyone to switch to plant-based diets.
If food activists like Schlosser, Nestle, and the others are finding sympathetic listeners these days, though, it may be less because of their concrete recommendations than because increasingly affluent Americans feel they have the luxury of demanding it all when it comes to food: once restricted to what they could eke out of family farms on their own, then restricted to very predictable mass-produced fare, Americans have come to expect a dazzling variety of food that's cheap yet gourmet, not artificial yet perfectly safe, preservative-free yet unspoiled, and now efficiently mass-produced yet not too gruesome or coldly factory-like -- and in the end, they may indeed get it all, thanks more to (dreaded) capitalism and its endlessly-increasing abundance than to "international social movements" or new government oversight committees.
David Kamp's delightfully optimistic book, The United States of Arugula, has gotten attention lately as a sort of anti-Michael-Pollan, anti-Schlosser tome, though his politics aren't so different from theirs, simply because Kamp properly celebrates the increasing variety of options Americans have. As Kamp noted when I saw him talk as part of a panel of food writers last month, Americans talk as if they are a nation of force-fed, fast-food-addicted zombies, while, bunch of ingrates that we are, we in fact have a range of choices undreamt of fifty years ago, from artisanal cheeses to tofu. Even the much-vilified fast food chains are constantly scrambling to introduce new and varied menu items, desperate to keep up with an ever more picky public.
But the panel at Fast Food Nation sees mainly homogeneity, disease, and mindless consumption. The film's grimmest wiseman, a rancher played by Kris Kristofferson, says that it sometimes seems to dispirited folk as if a terrible machine has taken over the Earth -- one that cares nothing for people, animals, or food, simply pursuing narrow efficiency and profit. But in fact, that ever-increasing efficiency is precisely what gives us the luxury to make dietary choices as variant as mine, yours, and Linklater's likely are.
We could not feed six billion people with the inefficient methods of so-called sustainable agriculture, and there would be nothing cruelty-free about the results, neither for the animals Linklate and Schlosser worry about nor for the humans who would starve in that more-natural world. Linklater's free to dream of a holistic transformation of the world in which everyone lives closer to nature and no two restaurants have the same interior decorator or plastic logo on the front -- and maybe, just maybe, the people of the future will slaughter their cows in a subtly more humane fashion because of the efforts of Linklater and company, which is fine -- but the food activists' vague implication that our current food system is a plot to hypnotize and then poison us is, as the Kristofferson character frankly says, "like science fiction." And if you want to see Linklater do sci-fi well, I'd recommend seeing A Scanner Darkly instead.
Todd Seavey is Director of Publications at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org) and editor of HealthFactsAndFears.com.
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