The Decline of the American Diet: Fast Food, GMOs, and Health

Introduction

These three books were chosen because they are among the most respected and most frequently referenced titles about food and its interrelationship with American culture available 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 cry out for examination at the university level.

The Food Revolution was 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 American food options. Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, is a shockingly honest, highly readable, and yet deeply revealing look at Americans' addiction to fast food. The book by Teitel and Wilson on genetically engineered food — now so widespread that few can grasp how pervasive it has become in the grocery store — is a valuable resource for anyone paying close attention to American food culture. This paper reviews and analyzes many of the issues presented in all 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 far to encounter that "dark side." On page 3 of the introduction, readers learn that Americans spend more on fast food — which the book documents at length as a highly unhealthy substitute for truly nutritious meals — than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. In fact, Schlosser goes on to note that Americans spend more on fast food than on music CDs, magazines, newspapers, videos, books, and movies "combined." In the year 2000, Americans spent $110 billion 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. Whereas a generation ago three-quarters of the money used to buy food in America went toward preparing meals at home, today about half of all food spending goes to restaurants — and the majority of those are fast food establishments.

There are serious ramifications to these facts. Much of Schlosser's book points out how a fast food diet negatively affects the Americans who eat these meals, what unhealthy processes McDonald's and other chains use to supply their outlets with beef and chicken, and how America has become a land of corporate power brokers. The large multinational corporations that dominate agriculture today have, since the 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" (p. 8).

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

Being overweight isn't merely an inconvenience — it can be fatal. Schlosser quotes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as reporting that 280,000 Americans die every year from being grossly overweight, and that the health-related costs of American obesity total $240 billion. Ironically, Americans also spend $33 billion on "weight-loss schemes" (p. 241).

One of the best-selling items at fast food restaurants is French fries. 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 annually. Today, that figure has shifted to roughly 49 pounds of fresh potatoes and 30 pounds of frozen potatoes — and 90% of those 79 pounds of potatoes are purchased at fast food restaurants.

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 (p. 117). For every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's, the potato farmer in Idaho or elsewhere receives about two cents. Over the past 25 years, Idaho "has lost about half of its potato farmers," yet during that same period "the amount of land devoted to potatoes has increased" as corporations buy farmers out and then hire them back to manage small parcels of the resulting mega-farms (p. 118).

Why do fast food French fries taste so good? Because a secret "flavor" is added to them — one that replicates the taste they had before 1990, when public outrage over high fat content forced chains to stop frying potatoes in beef tallow. The post-1990 "natural flavor" carries a distinct beefy taste, and the flavor industry itself is a $1.4 billion annual business in America. The manufacture of perfectly uniform fries is made possible by the "Lomb Water Gun Knife," invented by Gilbert Lomb (p. 130), which uses a high-pressure hose to shoot potatoes at 117 feet per second through a grid of razor-sharp steel blades.

Schlosser also examines McDonald's chicken products. According to a research report from Harvard Medical School, McDonald's Chicken McNuggets "contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger." Introduced in 1983, Chicken McNuggets were so successful that within one month McDonald's had become "the second largest purchaser of chicken in the U.S.," right after KFC (p. 140).

On the beef side, ConAgra — one of the largest suppliers to McDonald's — feeds cattle 3,000 pounds of grain over three months to produce a 400-pound weight gain before slaughter, using anabolic steroids implanted in the animals' ears to accelerate fattening. ConAgra raises 100,000 head of cattle crammed into a single feedlot near Greeley, Colorado. Those cattle produce around 50 pounds of manure and urine daily and generate approximately $25 billion a year for the company. The average American now eats about 94 pounds of beef annually, up from 68 pounds in 1976 (p. 142). Meanwhile, "the rancher's share of every retail dollar spent on beef has fallen from 63¢ to 46¢" over the past 20 years (p. 138).

Corporate concentration in the beef industry is extreme: 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 for slaughter. McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the U.S. and now buys from just five suppliers, down from 175 suppliers in 1968.

Schlosser also finds praise for smaller, more ethical producers. He mentions Dale Lasater, who owns a ranch in Colorado where cattle roam free on land that has not used "pesticides, herbicides, poisons, or commercial fertilizers" for over half a century (p. 255). Grass-fed cattle "may be less likely to spread E. coli 0157:H7" (p. 257), and 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 also praises Conway's Red Top hamburger stands in Colorado Springs, where hamburger patties are "formed every day by hand, using fresh, not frozen, ground beef" (p. 258), meat comes from a local independent packer that avoids growth hormones, buns come from a Pueblo bakery, and two hundred pounds of potatoes are peeled fresh every morning. Cooks earn $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 replied simply: "We want to have healthy employees."

Schlosser calls on Congress to "immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote foods high in fat and sugar" (p. 262), drawing a parallel to the ban on cigarette advertising enacted 30 years earlier. Such a ban would "discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening." He also argues that Congress should create a single food safety agency with sufficient authority to protect public health, noting that 200,000 or so fast food restaurants "are not subject to any oversight by federal health authorities." Currently, a dozen federal agencies share responsibility for food safety, and "twenty-eight congressional committees oversee them," creating confusion, enforcement gaps, and absurdities (p. 263). For example, the USDA can conduct microbial tests on slaughtered cattle but cannot test live cattle to prevent infected animals from entering the slaughterhouse in the first place.

Frozen pizza is regulated by the FDA — but if the pizza has meat on it, the USDA enters the regulatory picture. Eggs are regulated by the FDA, yet chickens are regulated by the USDA, and "a lack of cooperation between the two agencies has hampered efforts to reduce the levels of Salmonella in American eggs" (p. 264). Each year, more than half a million Americans contract Salmonella-related illnesses, and 300 die from it. By contrast, Salmonella has been "almost entirely eliminated from Swedish and Dutch eggs," offering a clear model of what effective regulation can achieve.

Summary of The Food Revolution by John Robbins

On worker safety, Schlosser is equally forceful. When one-third of meatpacking workers are injured every year, when the causes of those injuries are well known, and when the means to prevent them are available but not applied, "there is nothing accidental about the lacerations, amputations, cumulative traumas, and deaths in the meatpacking industry." A death in a meatpacking plant results in a $70,000 corporate fine — a figure that "does not strike fear in the hearts of agribusiness executives" earning "tens of billions of dollars" each year.

Despite all of this, Schlosser insists that the executives who run the fast food industry "are not bad men" — they are "businessmen" (p. 269). If consumers demand "free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers," the industry will provide them — "whatever sells at a profit." McDonald's has previously demonstrated a willingness to respond to consumer pressure: it stopped selling genetically engineered potatoes in 2000, and switched from polystyrene to paper containers in 1990. "They're outnumbered," Schlosser reminds readers — "there are almost three hundred million of you." A "boycott, a refusal to buy, can speak much louder than words."

Eric Schlosser is not the only investigative food writer to take on McDonald's. John Robbins, in The Food Revolution, has plenty to say about the fast food giant with the golden arches. McDonald's was nominated for a Business Ethics Award in 1999, which was denied by Business Ethics Magazine (BEM). In a letter made public by BEM and quoted by Robbins (p. 177), the magazine stated 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." BEM added that the "real error rate may be far more than 5%."

On page 178, Robbins points to the inhumane practices used by companies supplying chicken to McDonald's franchises. The USDA "requires at least 2 square feet of space per chicken," 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 includes a photograph of a building packed wall-to-wall with 30,000 chickens. On page 172, he discusses the inhumane conditions in which pigs are fattened for slaughter. Pigs are "highly social" animals that, in free-range environments, will travel up to 30 miles in a single day, "grazing, rooting and interacting with their environment." In today's pig factories, however, "pregnant sows are isolated and locked into individual narrow metal crates… barely larger than the pigs' bodies," unable to take a single step or turn around, confined on "un-bedded, cement floor crate[s] for months at a time." The industry calls this "full confinement." "Hundreds of millions of animals are forced to live in cages… barely bigger than they are," Robbins writes on page 175.

But Robbins does not only condemn animal cruelty — he also provides solid dietary advice for those wishing to reduce their cancer risk. On page 46, he notes that lung cancer "is the most common cancer worldwide," killing 150,000 Americans annually. For those who "frequently eat green, orange, and yellow vegetables," the risk of lung cancer is reduced by 20% to 60%. The vegetable offering "the strongest protective effect" against lung cancer is the carrot. People who also eat apples, bananas, and grapes regularly reduce their lung cancer risk by up to 40%.

On breast cancer (p. 44), the rate among Italian women who eat "a lot of animal products" is three times greater than for Italian women who do not. For women in Uruguay who eat meat "often," the risk of breast cancer is "4.2 times greater than women who don't eat meat." Affluent Japanese women who eat meat "daily" are 8.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer than poorer Japanese women "who rarely eat meat." Additionally, American women who are 45 or more pounds overweight face "double" the breast cancer risk of women who maintain a relatively normal weight.

Robbins also examines rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), the genetically engineered hormone injected into over a quarter of all cows at U.S. dairies. Sold under the brand name Posilac, rBGH causes milk from treated cows to contain two to ten times as much IGF-1 as milk from untreated cows. "Studies have shown the risk of prostate cancer for men over 60 with high levels of IGF-1 to be eight times greater than for men with low levels of IGF-1" (p. 335). The risk of breast cancer for pre-menopausal women with elevated IGF-1 levels is seven times greater than for women with low levels — another compelling reason for Robbins' argument that the correct diet can literally save lives.

The FDA has declined to require any labeling of rBGH-treated milk, claiming that such labeling "would unfairly stigmatize rBGH milk as unhealthy." Yet the bureaucrat at the FDA who made this decision — Michael R. Taylor — was an attorney who had previously represented Monsanto, and upon leaving the FDA was re-hired by the company. This kind of regulatory revolving door, Robbins implies, is a problem as large as — or larger than — the direct health dangers posed by genetically engineered foods.

Robbins also raises broader consciousness about animals and nature. 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 destined for slaughter. "20 million cats and dogs are killed each year at U.S. animal shelters because there are no homes for them." He also recounts the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, where thousands of doves released during the opening ceremony "flew into the Olympic flame… and were burned alive." The surviving birds had been "trucked in, crowded underground, and then propelled upward" — "terrified, confused, and disorganized… exhausted and panicked." "We are learning," Robbins writes, "to see what we didn't see before."

Among the things Robbins now sees clearly is the proliferation of genetically engineered food (GEF). "Tens of millions of people are eating Monsanto's Roundup Ready Soybeans" (p. 336). Those soybeans contain 29% less of the "brain nutrient choline" and 29% more trypsin — a potential allergen that interferes with protein digestion and causes slower growth in children — than non-GEF beans. Despite public opinion polls showing that "80 to 95% of the American people want genetically engineered food to be labeled," the FDA has taken no action to establish a labeling format. By the year 2000, "more than half of soybean and cotton crops and one-third of corn crops" in the U.S. were genetically engineered, yet not one company was labeling any "seeds, crops, or food products with information about their genetically engineered origins."