Journalist criticizes fast-food industry
From Eric Schlosser’s point of view, the success of the industrial food system is dependent on people’s ignorance of how it truly operates.
Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of ‘Fast Food Nation,’ spoke Tuesday to a nearly full house in Hendricks Chapel as the first speaker for the 2011 spring semester University Lectures series. Schlosser spent most of his presentation discussing the truth behind America’s ‘fast-food mentality’ and the environmental and social impacts the fast-food industry has made on America in the past 60 years.
‘It’s no exaggeration to say that the food we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000,’ Schlosser said.
Schlosser originally published ‘Fast Food Nation’ in three parts in Rolling Stone Magazine in 1998, said Eileen Schell, director and chair of the writing program at SU. The book, published in 2001, was on The New York Times’ bestseller list for two years and has been translated into 20 languages.
As an investigative journalist, Schlosser has investigated topics including the New York Police Department Bomb Squad, California migrant farm workers and marijuana growers. ‘Command and Control,’ Schlosser’s next piece, deals with nuclear proliferation, Schell said.
In his lecture, Schlosser pointed to the recent controversy about unlabeled cloned animals used in the production of food, as well as the Blackwater-guarded Monsanto Seed Company, which produces genetically modified foods, as examples of what is wrong with today’s food industry.
McDonald’s, whose goal to have ‘thousands of identical restaurants where food would taste exactly the same everywhere,’ has spurned the creation of chemical companies and huge ‘agribusiness’ companies throughout the United States, he said.
The fast-food industry, Schlosser said, is not for people. The industry is the United States’ largest employer of minimum-wage workers and has been the biggest opponent of increases in minimum wage in the past 40 years, he said.
As a major force in an antiunion industry, McDonald’s will close down restaurants where unions form instead of attempting to reconcile with them, Schlosser said.
Schlosser, a conservative in regard to the food industry, said sustainable food practices must include labor policies that ensure living wages and a safe workplace to employees, regardless of where they are on the worker hierarchy. A typical family of four in Syracuse lives on three-fifths of the annual tuition for SU, he said.
‘A third of the people who live in Syracuse live below the poverty line, and the proportion of people in Syracuse on food stamps is even higher,’ he said. ‘And if you’re at university here, by definition, you’re at the top of society.’
Schlosser cited food-borne illnesses, antibiotic resistant ‘superbugs’ and obesity as a few of the health effects of the fast-food industry.
The centralization and industrialization of factory farms are ideal for taking dangerous pathogens and spreading them, he said. The ‘perfect vector for spreading disease’ is the modern hamburger, which typically has pieces of meat from thousands of cattle from up to five countries, he said.
The modern organic movement, which began in England about 60 years ago and filtered to the United States during the counterculture movement in the 1960s, is a necessary and possible solution to the crisis of the fast-food industry, Schlosser said. Schlosser told the audience the problem of the food industry in America is a series of easily solved problems.
‘If you want to try to change things, you don’t have to be a saint,’ Schlosser said. ‘You just have to become conscious. You can’t live in denial. If everybody is conscious, it’s amazing, absolutely amazing, the change that can happen.’
Published on March 1, 2011 at 12:00 pm
