Liberalism and Antiliberalism in Fast Food Nation

As promised, here are my thoughts about Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. It's been out for a few years now, obviously, but the data and arguments it presents aren't any less relevant, and it remains a great read--you can engage the book from the perspective of economics, sociology, agriculture, cultural history, or any number of other viewpoints. That's probably one of the reasons WIU chose FFN to build this year's "First Year Experience" around--every freshman was given a copy of the book, and there have been a variety of activities and seminars to give students and teachers an opportunity to talk about the book and its arguments further. I gave one of the first faculty presentations on the book, a couple of weeks back, so I figured I might as well recycle my comments into a post, especially considering that, on my reading, FFN exemplifies the need to think about how one frames the debate about consumption before (or at least while) engaging in it.

FFN is divided into two parts: "The American Way" and "Meat and Potatoes." The second section is appropriately named, since that is where Schlosser digs into the real mechanics of fast food production in America and around the world: the potato farms, the chemically designed tastes, the feedlots and slaughterhouses (and the appalling health and safety conditions within), the health hazards of modern meat production, and so forth. It is also in this section where Schlosser's attack on the "all-American meal" is clearest and most powerful. The details are often disturbing, sometimes disgusting, and always fascinating. He talks about how the meatpacking industry has systematically lied about the environmental damage wrought by its huge slaughterhouses; how it purposefully relies upon the most vulnerable of all labor pools, illegal immigrants (and digs up an incredible exchange from a federal investigation into slaughterhouse practices, in which the head counsel for one of the largest meatpacking conglomerates openly admits that they want conditions to be primitive enough that they have a lot of turnover in the plants, because short-term employees don't receive health insurance, to say nothing of vacation time); and just how dangerous certain jobs in the meatpacking industry today really are. And, of course, he is anything but reticent about the health costs of such huge, sloppy, risky, bloody, unregulated meta-production practices: there is, quite simply, an awful lot of shit in our meat. Schlosser's investigative work here echoes great exposes of the past, of course, like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; but he goes beyond them by examining the ins and outs of the labor struggles, corporate duplicity, real estate shenanigans and business monopolization which produces the food which then gets served to us with such regularity all across the globe. It's a great, scary, persuasive attack on a system that regularly eludes both presumed health and economic norms and explicit government standards.

Schlosser's conclusions, then, should not be surprising: there needs to be a stricter enforcement of labor laws, OSHA regulations, and the minimum wage (fast food chains, both along their production line and at the service end, routinely churn through workers with the aim of keeping job training costs to a minimum, all the while benefiting from government subsidies which reward them for taking "risks" on new workers); inspectors from the USDA and FDA need to be given sufficient centralized authority and manpower to demand investigations and keep their own records (current laws allow meatpacking plants to essentially set their own schedules for investigations); antitrust laws need to be turned against major agribusiness conglomerates (there are today, amazingly enough, only about 1000 potato farmers in all of Idaho, a relatively weak and disorganized group in the face of big fry companies that dominate the market); and so on. He takes, in short, what would be widely recognized as a liberal stance, or at least a liberal egalitarian or a positive liberal stance: that it is the responsibility of the government to work to create conditions wherein people choices and lives are empowered and improved. Through the regulation of worker safety and insurance, health standards and procedures, and labor and corporate relations, the industry can be made cleaner, safer, less economically exploitive and dangerous, and more secure--and it can be done, Schlosser persuasively argues, pointing to several instances in which McDonald's and other large fast food chains quickly and radically changed some of their basic practices when under popular pressure, at very little ultimate cost to the consumer. Reform liberalism at its best, you might say.

The problem with such a reading of FFN, however, is that it doesn't do justice to want Schlosser is attempting, with (unfortunately) much less success I think, to do in the first part of the book. In those chapters, he spends his time talking about the emergence of the fast food industry and the social and economic developments which made it possible (including the huge economic push to Southern California, the home of the first true fast food chains, provided by the military-industrial complex, and a wonderful and terrible story about how General Motors, with the assistance of other automobile companies and various oil interests, managed to secretly purchase and bankrupt trolley and rail companies across the country, thereby enabling the dominance of car travel in 20th-century America). He tries to get inside the heads of those who pioneered fast food, and those who work at it today. And again and again, he makes clear his deep dissatisfaction with our reigning commitment to speedy, homogenized, cheap service, no matter what its consequences to our lifestyle. Unfortunately, that dissatisfaction is not very easily articulated in the context of his reportage, because few of those he profiles feel it themselves. And so, Schlosser has to make that point for them, sometimes condescendingly. A highlight comes early in the book, as part of an interview with Carl Karcher, one of few surviving pioneers of fast food's early days:

"I looked out the window and asked how he felt driving through Anaheim today, with its fast food restaurants, subdivisions, and strip malls. 'Well, to be frank about it,' he said, 'I couldn't be happier.' Thinking that he'd misunderstood the question, I rephrased it, asking if he ever missed the old Anaheim, the ranches and citrus groves.
"'No,' he answered. 'I believe in Progress.'
"Carl grew up on a farm without running water or electricity. He'd escaped a hard rural life. The view outside his office window was not disturbing to him, I realized. It was a mark of success."

That Schlosser is disturbed by all that he sees--the obsession with growth and profit, lowering costs and increasing speed, reducing everything to its most simple, reliable and repeatable common denominator--is quite apparent; it comes through all the time in the text, particularly in the first part of the book. He profiles a Little Caesar's Pizza franchise owner in Pueblo, CO, and recognizes him as a pretty hard-working, decent, and caring fellow; yet when this restaurant owner chooses to do something nice for his employees, Schlosser can't help but be appalled at what he does: buy them all tickets to a "Success Seminar" where they get exposed to celebrities touting this or that nostrum for personal wealth and fulfillment, an event which Schlosser thoroughly ridicules, except for the moment following a powerful address by Christopher Reeve, at which point he writes that "[e]everybody in the arena, not matter how greedy or eager for promotion...know deep in their hearts that what Reeve has just said is true...[t]heir latest schemes, their plans to market and subdivide and franchise their way up, whatever the cost...vanish in an instant. Men and women up and down the aisles wipe away tears, touched...by a sudden awareness of something hollow about their own lives, something gnawing and unfulfilled." And then, predictably, this moment of awareness is followed by a crass pitch from a New Age dietician.

His point is clear: the spirit of growth is morally bankrupt and intellectually worthless; the ability to parlay every choice into an opportunity, the central promise of the hyped-up, globalized, speedy service American way of life, isn't worth it. Schlosser lays his cards on the table at the end of his Afterword, when he writes: "Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable--and humble. It should know its limits....This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel. This don't have to be the way they are." It's a powerful ending. The problem is, it's not really a liberal one. On the contrary, all that talk of regionality, authenticity, limits, humility, compassion, and common sense, sounds like the sort of think a conservative like Edmund Burke might say (and probably would, were he alive today and being shuttled through some soulless American suburb on a quest to find a Burger King).

Of course, plenty of liberals do talk like that, about how "the people" (Americans, the middle class, whatever) have foolishly bought into an overconsumptive way of life that divorces them from simpler, more authentic pleasures, and which along the way is making them less healthy and less happy. Strictly speaking, however, when someone starts actually attacking our whole culture of consumption and growth and speed as Schlosser does, they are not longer engaging in liberalism reformism: this is no longer about using the government or education to improve the quality of extent choices (making for cleaner slaughterhouses, purer meat, less exploitive restaurants, etc.) and thus increasing, in a positive way, the liberty of persons; no, this is about actually judging, and perhaps limiting, the sort of choices people can make. A good liberal egalitarian wants McDonald's to operate in a more equitable and enlightened manner, but only an antiliberal actually thinks we would be better off without the sort of "liberties" (namely, being able to eat a cheap meal pretty much anytime that will taste the same pretty much anywhere in the world) which McDonald's makes possible. Perhaps it isn't strictly conservative, or communitarian, or socialist--but it definitely moves in that direction. (Perhaps if Schlosser had leavened his book with ideas drawn from real critics of liberalism, thinkers like Christopher Lasch, Roger Scruton, or Immanuel Wallerstein, then we'd know if we was more populist, traditionalist, Marxist, or what.)

This is most obvious when Schlosser talks about advertising. Like a great many self-described liberals, he thinks (and I agree with him) that great damage is being done to the diets, health, and material expectations of children by the incessant and often misleading advertising which fast food chains engage in, especially insofar as tie-ins to popular culture goes. (Schlosser takes several tired but still pertinent shots at Walt Disney, and how his empire both anticipated and enabled the fast food mentality.) His solution is to demand that all television advertisements aimed at children that promote food high in fat and sugar be immediately banned. And, of course, this solution puts him square in the middle of that uncomfortable intra-liberal debate over just how legitimate it is for the government to control the "speech" of advertisers--who are, after all, simply making known and encouraging a particular choice. I don't want to argue that point out here--my position, to anyone who has read this far, is probably obvious, and the opposite position, which refuses to grant any greater persuasive power (and thus acknowledge any greater need for regulation) to the market than to ordinary political speech, is pretty well laid out by my friend Nick on his new blog here. I just want to observe that if you truly believe that our ability to make choices is being warped in unhealthy and environmentally unsustainable ways by economic conditions and powerful interests, then you must not believe that individual choice is all that inviolable in the first place. Which probably means that you think choice is of limited valuable unless people are in a condition to make the right (cultural and social) choices. Schlosser's investigative work, and his clear if implicit conviction that much that is wrong with the fast food industry goes back to our having been placed on a conveyer belt that has conditioned us to expect regular delivers of ever more food, ever more cheaply and ever more reliably, shows him to be thinking about fast food in structural and moral terms. And those are terms which demand a critique of liberalism, not a repair of it.

In practice, of course, such liberalism and antiliberalism are somewhat reconcilable. Schlosser speaks admiringly about a few fast food chains that don't play by these rules, and thus break out of the culture he condemns (and, not coincidentally, therefore serve high quality, good tasting food). These places--Conway's Red Top restaurants of Colorado Springs, or the In-and-Out Burger chain in California and Nevada--are owned by families, not corporations; they reject the franchise model; they pay their employees a good wage with benefits (and thus keep employees for a long time); they buy and make their food fresh (no prefabricated syrup for the shakes, no microwaves for the burgers, no pre-pealed, cut, and frozen potatoes for the fries); and--perhaps most tellingly--they are highly idiosyncratic, with their respective companies replete with old family mottos and scriptural injunctions. That's a populism that can't be called into existence by more or better government regulations. But at the same time, one can easily imagine a reformist, regulative response to the fast food industry which was aimed explicitly at preserving and extending such local ownership and variety. A good example which was brought up during my presentation was Germany's approach to beer: the country has tight regulations in place, refusing to allow any drink that is made with more than a few key ingredients, or prepared in a manner that doesn't involve a significant amount of hands-on work, to be labeled "pure beer." (Until 1987, the restrictions were even stronger; such drinks could rarely be sold anywhere in West Germany.) One could, of course, point to the actual history of the Reinheitsgebot and snicker at how it originally was more about Bavarian protectionism than Deutsch authenticity, but that doesn't change it's practical effect today: it has helped create a beer culture that insists that there are some things that really ought to be left as they are, not speeded up, or watered down, or shipped everywhere hither and yon. A regulation which is premised upon a purity and health requirement has helped shape much more than the range of (liberal) choices available to consumers; it has helped conserve and socialize an authentic, limited, local set of consumptive practices, practices not at all dissimilar to those Schlosser is plainly hoping for. (Another example of such a compromise are some policies which my own family's has benefited from; a topic for yet another post on these interrelated themes.)

So perhaps, in the end, FFN is one of those many works that wish, whether in an informed or a merely naive or unconscious way, to make use of liberal state to reform conditions so that at least partially non-liberal, localist forms of life might be preserved. Of course, this leaves unasked the question of whether such is even coherent: can liberal empowerment do anything more than just generate, intentionally or otherwise, ever more liberal bureaucracies and expectations? A hard theoretical question, and not one Schlosser is in a position to help us with. But if nothing else, he does a superb in helping us deal with the question of whether we should eat at McDonald's, and thus endorse the exploitations of powerful agribusinesses, the abusive labor practices of meatpacking firms, the terrible health standards of the meat they serve us, the disruptive economic impact of chain proliferation, not to mention exposing ourselves to E Coli, mad-cow disease, and any number of other hamburger-born pathogens that arise from this country's depraved and foul meat-production procedures. Can you guess what his answer is? I knew you could.