Decline of the American Diet

Decline of the American Diet

Food Nation (summary) - Schlosser for Author Schlosser

Food Revolution (summary) - Robbins for Author Robbins

Engineered Food (summary) Teitel / Wilson for Authors Teitel / Wilson

Remarks

Abstract chose these three books because they are among the most respected and most often referenced titles about food and its interrelationship with our culture in libraries today. The problems facing America in terms of poor nutrition, widespread obesity, inhumane treatment of animals, and the growing corporate influence on what Americans eat and how our lives are affected cry out for examination at the university level.

The Food Revolution is written by John Robbins, who left his father's ice cream company, Baskin & Robbins, to become a writer and to investigate what is happening to the American food options. Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, is a shockingly honest, very easy-to-read and yet highly revealing look at American's addiction to fast food. And the book by Teitel / Wilson about genetically engineered food - that is so widespread now no one can grasp just how pervasive it has become in the grocery store - is a valuable tool for any person who is paying attention to our culture. This paper reviews and analyzes many of the issues presented in the three books.

Summary of Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

The subtitle of Schlosser's book is The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, and one doesn't have to read very far to see that "dark side." On page 3 of the Introduction, readers learn that Americans spend more on fast food - which the book goes to great lengths to document as a highly unhealthy substitute for truly nutritious meals - than "higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars." In fact, Schlosser goes on, Americans shell out more money for fast food than music CDs, magazines, newspapers, videos, books and movies "combined." That's a large amount of money; in fact, in the year 2,000, the author says, Americans spent $110 on fast food, up from $6 billion in 1970.

On any given day in the United States, about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant," Schlosser explains on page 3. And whereas "a generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food" in America went into preparing meals in the home, today about half of the money spent on food goes to restaurants - and the majority of those are of the fast food type.

There are ramifications to these facts, and they are not cheerful, for the most part. Much of Schlosser's book points out how the diet of fast food negatively affects Americans who eat theses meals, what unhealthy processes McDonald's and other fast food chains embrace in order to supply their outlets with the beef and chicken needed, and how America has become a land of corporate power brokers. The large multinational corporations that dominate agriculture today, Schlosser points out on page 8, have, since the Richard Nixon administration, been working closely with their "allies in Congress and the White House to oppose new worker safety, food safety, and minimum wage laws."

On page 240, Schlosser points to some of the health-related problems associated with eating a high-fat diet of fast food; "more than half of all American adults and one-fourth of all American children are now obese or overweight," he writes. The obesity rate today is double what it was in the early 1960s. In 1991, there were four states with obesity rates of 15% or higher, but today, 37 states have obesity rates of 15% or higher.

And being overweight isn't just an inconvenience to those trying to get into jeans they wore last year; overweight can be a killer; Schlosser quotes the Center for Disease Control (CDC) as reporting that 280,000 Americans die every year from being grossly over weight. And the health-related costs of American's obesity is $240 billion. Ironically, Americans also spend $33 billion on "weight-loss schemes," Schlosser explains on page 241.

One of the food items in fast food restaurants that sells amazingly well is French fries; in fact, Schlosser writes on page 115 that "French fries have become the most widely sold food service item in the U.S." The typical American in 1960 ate about 81 pounds of "fresh potatoes and four pounds of frozen potatoes." But today, that typical American eats around 49 pounds of fresh potatoes and 30 pounds of frozen potatoes. And of those 79 pounds of potatoes, 90% of them are purchased at fast food restaurants.

Speaking of potatoes, which Schlosser does a lot of - there is a huge profit in French fries for the fast food giants, but not for potato farmers. For example, fast food companies buy frozen French fries for about thirty cents a pound, and sell them over the counter for around $6.00 a pound (page 117). And for every $1.50 spend on a large order of fries at McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's, the potato farmer up in Idaho or elsewhere gets about two cents.

The potato farmer is something of a distant memory in America, as corporations have taken over the industry. On page 118, Schlosser points out that over the past 25 years, Idaho "has lost about half of its potato farmers"; however, during those same 25 years, "the amount of land devoted to potatoes has increased" as corporations buy farmers out then hire them back to manage small parcels of the mega-farms.

Why do French fries taste so good? Because they have a secret "flavor" added to them that makes them taste like they did before 1990, when they were forced by investigative reports on high fat content - and the subsequent outrages public - to stop frying their potatoes in "beef tallow" (fat). The secretive post-1990 "natural flavor" has a distinct beefy taste, Schlosser explains, and the "flavor" industry itself is a $1.4 billion annual business in America.

The manufacture of the perfect, evenly cut French fries results from an invention by Gilbert Lomb (130); Lomb created the "Lomb Water Gun Knife" which uses a high-pressure hose to shoot potatoes at a speed of 117 feet per second through a grid of highly sharpened steel blades.

Schlosser devotes a lot of his book to the ugliness associated with the king of fast food fare, McDonald's; and by ugliness, we mean that as fatty as burgers are, McDonald's "Chicken McNuggets" contain "twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger," according to a research report from Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, Chicken McNuggets were introduced in McDonald's in 1983, and within one month, Schlosser explains (140), McDonald's had become "the second largest purchaser of chicken in the U.S.," right after KFC.

Also ugly is the fact the beef cattle raised by ConAgra, one of the largest suppliers to McDonald's, are fed 3,000 pounds of grain in three months to have them gain 400 pounds prior to slaughter. Those cattle have "anabolic steroids" implanted in their ears, to fatten them up faster.

Those cattle - ConAgra raises 100,000 head crammed into a single feed lot near Greeley, Colorado - produce around 50 pounds of manure and urine daily, and also produce about $25 billion a year for ConAgra. The money is good in beef production, largely because every American eats about 94 pounds annually (compared with 68 pounds annually in 1976), according to Schlosser's book (142). And how much do ranchers make on the beef that is sold to McDonald's? On page 138 Schlosser writes that over the past 20 years, "...the rancher's share of every retail dollar spent on beef has fallen from 63¢ to 46¢."

Do big corporations dominate the beef industry? Yes. Indeed, the top four meatpacking firms (ConAgra, IBP, Excel, and National Beef) slaughter 84% of the nation's cattle, and own 20% of all live cattle being fattened up for slaughter. And not surprisingly, McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the U.S. - and the fast foot giant buys from just 5 suppliers, down from 175 suppliers in 1968. (McDonald's is also the largest employer of new employees in the U.S.).

In his book, Schlosser also finds praise for those smaller ranchers who raise beef without additives like growth hormones and anabolic steroids, and who don't jam in hundreds of thousands of head of beef cattle into a small space. He mentions Dale Lasater, who owns a ranch in Colorado where beef cattle roam free and eat short grass that for over half a century has not used "pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers" (255). Grass-fed cattle "may be less likely to spread E. coli 0157:H7," Schlosser writes on page 257, and that is why the Lasater family allows their cattle to be "free-range" and "organic" when sold to market. Also, Lasater finds it "hard to justify feeding millions of tons of precious grain to American cattle while elsewhere in the world millions of people starve," Schlosser continues.

The author also praises Conway's Red Top four hamburger stands in Colorado Springs; the family-owned restaurants feature hamburger patties "formed every day by hand, using fresh, not frozen, ground beef" (258). The meat comes from a local independent packing company that doesn't buy beef that has been injected with growth hormones; the buns are from a bakery in Pueblo, Colorado; and two hundred pounds of potatoes are "peeled every morning in the kitchen and then sliced with an old crank-operated contraption." The cooks make $10 an hour, and all other employees earn $8.00 an hour. When asked why the Conway family provides health insurance for all full time employees, Rich Conway said, "We want to have healthy employees."

The author also calls for changes in the way the U.S. Congress oversees advertising, asserting on page 262 that Congress "should immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote foods high in fat and sugar." The justification for that ban would be that 30 years ago, congress banned cigarette ads from TV and radio, because of course cigarettes were seen as a public health hazard. Today, a ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children "would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening," Schlosser insists.

Congress should create a single food safety agency that has sufficient authority to protect public health," the author continues. He offers that because at the moment, the 200,000 or so fast food restaurants "are not subject to any oversight by federal health authorities." Far more American citizens are "severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use," and yet the war on drugs gets far more money and attention than any war on foodborne pathogens. Schlosser calls for a single food safety agency because a dozen federal agencies in the U.S. currently share responsibility for food safety, and "twenty-eight congressional committees oversee them." There is confusion, gaps in enforcement, and numerous food safety absurdities," he write on page 263. For example, the USDA has authority to conduct "microbial tests on cattle that have already been slaughtered, but cannot test live cattle" in order to prevent those infected animals from even getting into the slaughterhouse.

And frozen pizza safety is regulated by the FDA, but if the pizza has meat on it (pepperoni, in most cases), and then the USDA comes into the regulatory picture. Eggs are regulated by the FDA, he writes on page 264, but eggs come from chickens and chickens are regulated by the USDA; meanwhile, a "lack of cooperation between the two agencies has hampered efforts to reduce the levels of Salmonella in American eggs." That is a serious problem, because each year in the U.S. more than a half million people get Salmonella-related sicknesses - and 300 of those actually die from Salmonella. As an example of how public health issues should be approached, Schlosser mentions that Salmonella has been "almost entirely eliminated from Swedish and Dutch eggs."

When it comes to worker safety in meatpacking plants, Schlosser has plenty to say about that. When "one-third of meatpacking workers are injured every year, when the causes of those injuries are well-known, when the means to prevent those injuries are readily available and yet not applied, there is nothing accidental about the lacerations, amputations, cumulative traumas, and deaths in the meatpacking industry," he asserts. A death in a meatpacking plant results in a $70,000 fine to the corporation running the plant; "That amount does not strike fear in the hearts of agribusiness executives," Schlosser insists, when those companies earn "tens of billions of dollars" each year.

All that said, the author adds that the executives who run the fast food industry "are not bad men," they are "businessmen" (269). If citizens demand "free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers," they will offer it - "whatever sells at a profit." McDonald's has shown in the past "a willingness to act quickly when confronted with consumer protests," he writes on page 268. That is proved out by McDonald's decision to stop selling genetically engineered potatoes in 2000; and by changing from polystyrene containers (wasteful environmentally) to paper containers in 1990. Change can happen, he reminds readers; the heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald's are only three people; "they're outnumbered... [there are] almost three hundred million of you." A good "boycott, a refusal to buy, can speak much louder than words," he concludes.

Question for the author: How do you propose an effective boycott can be organized?

Summary of The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World - John Robbins.

Author Eric Schlosser isn't the only investigative food author to take on McDonald's. John Robbins has plenty to say about the fast foot behemoth with the golden arches. For starters, Robbins writes about the beef and chicken producers that McDonald's buys massive amounts from. McDonald's was nominated for a Business Ethics Award in 1999, which was denied by the Business Ethics Magazine (BEM) for good reasons. In a letter made public by BEM, and quoted by Robbins (177), BEM said that "Federal standards [require] that 100% of cows must be fully stunned before they are skinned, but...McDonald's training videos [allow that] it's acceptable if 5 cows in every 100 are conscious while skinned and dismembered...." And, BEM added, the "real error rate may be far more than 5%."

On page 178 of his book, Robbins points to the inhumane practices put into play by the companies that provide chicken to McDonald's franchises. "The USDA...requires at least 2 square feet of space 'per chicken,'" according to the letter made public by BEM. And yet, McDonald's suppliers "allow only.55 square feet [per chicken] - not enough space for a chicken to spread one wing."

Earlier, on page 171, Robbins' book shows a photo of a building literally crammed wall-to-wall tight with 30,000 chickens, and on page 172, he discusses the inhumane way in which pigs are fattened for butchering. Pigs are "highly social" animals, and when in free range environments, will travel up to 30 miles in a single day, "grazing, rooting and interacting with their environment." But in today's pig factories, "pregnant sows are isolated and locked into individual narrow metal crates...barely larger than the pigs' bodies." The pigs in those tiny crates are "unable to take a single step or turn around"; they are basically restrained in an "un-bedded, cement floor crate for months at a time."

The industry calls this "full confinement," and it forces an animal that is used to grazing and walking about into a straight-jacket-like kind of confinement while it is stuffed with food for a fatter animal in the slaughterhouse. And McDonald's buys pigs from companies that treat the animals in such a way that anyone vaguely well-informed would see the inhumane treatment as an outrage. "Hundreds of millions of animals are forced to live in cages...barely bigger than they are," writes Robbins on page 175.

But in Robbins' book he doesn't just blast away at the horrific conditions that animals are put through on their way to being slaughtered, frozen, and then shipped out to the 30,000+ McDonald's franchises world-wide. He also provides solid advice for those who would like to eat in such as way as to avoid cancer. But there is a connection, since eating fast foods is not a healthy way to live - especially greasy fries, burgers, and chicken products - and in fact fast food causes weight gain which can lead to cancer.

On page 46, Robbins mentions that lung cancer "is the most common cancer worldwide," and in fact 150,000 Americans die of lung cancer annually. But, for those who "frequently eat green, orange, and yellow vegetables," their chances of getting lung cancer are reduced by a ratio of from 20% to 60%. And by the way, the vegetable that provides "the strongest protective effect" against lung cancer is the carrot. Meanwhile, the impact on people who not only eat the above-mentioned vegetables, but also eat lots of apples, bananas, and grapes, is that their chances of getting lung cancer are reduced by up to 40%.

He talks about breast cancer on page 44; the rate of breast cancer for women in Italy who eat "a lot of animal products" is three times greater than for Italian women "who don't eat animal products." And for women in Uruguay who eat meat "often," their chance of getting breast cancer is "4.2 times greater than women who don't eat meat." Japanese women of affluence who eat meat "daily," are 8.5 times more likely to get breast cancer, Robbins writes, than poorer Japanese women "who rarely eat meat" simply because they can't afford it.

So, if that doesn't make the connection between fatty animal products and vegetables and fruits, nothing will.

Closing his section on breast cancer, he points out that for American women who are 45 pounds or more overweight, their chance of contracting breast cancer is "double" that of the women who maintain a fairly normal weight.

Genetically engineered food, and its downside, is a topic that Robbins digs deeply into. For example, he criticizes the genetically engineered hormone rBGH, which is injected today into over a quarter of all cows at U.S. dairies; rBGH is called Posilac, and the milk from those cows contains two to ten times as much IGF-1 as normal cows. Posilac is an "insulin-like growth hormone," which Robbins admits increases milk production, but he states that the result of Posilac's presence in cows produces IFG-1 - which is indeed dangerous to public health.

Studies have shown the risk of prostate cancer for men over 60-year of age with high levels of IGF-1 to be eight times greater than for men with low levels of IGF-1," he writes on page 335.

And moreover, the risk of breast cancer for "pre-menopausal women with increased IGF-1 levels is seven times greater" than women in that category who have low levels of IGF-1. So, this is another example of why Robbins used the title that the correct diet "can help save your life..."

Saving lives is a concept Robbins pursues that is not strictly limited to humans. In fact, he reminds readers that at one time in each person's life, including his own, the idea of puppies and kittens being born was a sweet and wonderful concept. Then, when getting older, Robbins writes that he now realizes he had "been blind," because of the 70,000 puppies and kittens born each day in the U.S., only 15,000 will be adopted as pets. The rest are heading for slaughter. Indeed, "20 million cats and dogs are killed each year at U.S. animal shelters because there are no homes for them."

This is the portion of his book where Robbins is actually trying to raise the consciousness of readers to a level where better decisions can be made regarding not just food, but plants, and animals. He recalls watching the "Opening Ceremonies" of various Olympic Games, during which time thousands of doves were often released into the air, making a symbolic statement about peace. "It was a dramatic sight," he said, adding that he was very impressed as a young person. He brings up, however, the reality of what happens to those doves; in particular the 1988 Summer Games in Korea, where thousands of doves were released, and "many flew into the Olympic flame...and were burned alive."

But even for those doves that were not burned, they had been "trucked in, crowded underground, and then propelled upward." They were clearly "terrified, confused, and disorganized...exhausted and panicked." "We are learning," Robbins writes, "to see what we didn't see before."

Among the many things Robbins sees now that he didn't see before is the proliferation of genetically-engineered food (GEF). "Tens of millions of people are eating Monsanto's Roundup Ready Soybeans," he writes on page 336. The problem with that brand of soybean is that has 29% less of "brain nutrient chorine and 29% more trypsin" (a potential allergen that interferes with protein digestion) than normal, non-GEF beans," he explains. Moreover, the trypsin causes slower growth in children.

And even though public interest polls "have consistently found that 80 to 95% of the American people want genetically engineered food to be labeled," the FDA has not lifted a finger to create any kind of format for labeling GEF (Robbins 343). Not one company is labeling any "seeds, crops, or food products with information about their genetically engineered origins, so consumers have no way to exercise informed choices in the grocery stores." And by the year 2,000, "more than half of soybean and cotton crops and one-third of corn crops" in the U.S. were genetically engineered.

The problem of genetically engineered products that are out there on the market but not labeled affects milk production, as well. On page 344, Robbins alludes to rBGH, the Monsanto product that increases milk production but is potentially cancer-causing; labeling milk products as containing rBGH "would unfairly stigmatize rBGH milk as unhealthy," the FDA is quoted by Robbins as saying. But it the genetically engineered rBGH is not good for the health of certain men and women, what's unfair about that, from the consumer's point-of-view? Meantime, the bureaucrat at the FDA who made the decision not to put a label on milk products identifying rBGH as an ingredient was Michael R. Taylor, an attorney who represented Monsanto prior to his appointment to the FDA, and upon leaving FDA, was re-hired by Monsanto. This kind of cronyism and corporate coziness with politicians is a problem as big, as or bigger than the actual danger to human health posed by various genetically engineered foods, the author implies.

Question for the author: What can an ordinary citizen do to protest against Monsanto?

Summary of Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature by Martin Teitel & Kimberly A. Wilson.

The issue of labeling (and not labeling) genetically engineered foods is a big point as well in the Teitel / Wilson book. On page 59 the authors note that the public "is at the mercy of the labels" when making choices about what foods to feed our families. And meanwhile, when GEF are not labeled, what is a consumer to do or think about the product? Is it safe? The authors say - and this sounds similar to the excuse for not putting the rBGH as a label on milk products - that "makers of genetically modified foods resist labeling" their products because, they say, "the information will just provoke incorrect decisions based on ignorance or emotion." It sounds like the makers of GEF don't trust American consumers to be wise enough to make purchasing decisions; or, possibly, they know many Americans will be suspicious of GEF, and they will turn instead to natural and organic food products.

In fact, when Vermont passed legislation that required dairy products to be labeled rBGH, Monsanto "filed a lawsuit against Vermont, claiming that their constitutional rights were being violated because of Vermont's labeling law" (65). There are countries that have flat-out banned the use of rBGH in dairy products, so many that it makes a person wonder how corrupt the U.S. Food & Drug Administration is, and/or at least, how cozy FDA is with Monsanto. The countries banning rBGH include Ireland, Canada, Great Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, among many others.

The authors point to the fact that Ben & Jerry's ice cream - based in Vermont - had to go to court to label their products "rBGH-free"; that's because some states, like Illinois, had laws against dairy manufacturers saying their products were rBGH-free. But fortunately, Ben & Jerry's won out over those states, and their ice cream does say it is rBGH-free.

In addition to the potential negative heal effects mentioned in Robbins' book, Teitel / Wilson add: "special risk of colon cancer"; may cause bone tumors in children; "implicated in lung cancer"; "possesses angiogenic properties - important to tumors."