Fast Food Nation: Chapters 5–7

He traveled the Idaho countryside, plugging the rudimentary machine into the nearest available light socket and sorting potatoes for farmers.

Depression-era scarcity gave way to a cornucopia of new foods on the shelves of new suburban su­permarkets.

“The french fry [was]...almost sacrosanct for me,” Ray Kroc wrote in his memoir, “its preparation a ritual to be followed religiously.”

Record harvests nationwide and a flood of cheap imports from Canada created an enormous glut of potatoes.

“The fallacy of composition” is a logical error—a mistaken belief that what seems good for an individual will still be good when others do the same thing.

Every increase in productivity, however, has driven more American farmers off the land. And it has left those who remain beholden to the companies that supply the inputs and the processors that buy the outputs.

Since the end of World War II, a vast industry has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable.

The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients.

The taste buds on our tongues can detect the presence of half a dozen or so basic tastes, including: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, astringent, and umami (a taste discovered by Japanese researchers, a rich and full sense of deliciousness triggered by amino acids in foods such as shellfish, mushrooms, potatoes, and seaweed).

Taste buds offer a relatively limited means of detection, however, compared to the human olfactory system, which can perceive thousands of different chemical aromas.

The act of drinking, sucking, or chewing a substance releases its volatile gases.

The flavors of childhood foods seem to leave an indelible mark, and adults often return to them, without always knowing why.

The quality that people seek most of all in a food, its flavor, is usually present in a quantity too infinitesimal to be measured by any traditional culinary terms such as ounces or teaspoons.

The 1960s were the heyday of artificial flavors.

The mouthfeel can be adjusted through the use of various fats, gums, starches, emulsifiers, and stabilizers.

During the fall, Lamb Weston added sugar to the fries; in the spring it leached sugar out of them; the goal was to maintain a uniform taste and appearance throughout the year.

He didn’t care what was politically correct and had little patience for urban environmentalists who vilified the cattle industry.

The FTC inquiry concluded that the five major meatpacking firms had secretly fixed prices for years, had colluded to divide up markets, and had shared livestock information to guarantee that ranchers received the lowest possible price for their cattle.

They do not want to wind up like chicken growers—who in recent years have be­come virtually powerless, trapped by debt and by onerous contracts written by the large processors.

Poultry consumption in the United States was growing, a trend with alarming implications for a fast food chain that only sold hamburgers.

The nation’s chicken meat had traditionally been provided by hens that were too old to lay eggs; after World War II a new poultry industry based in Delaware and Virginia lowered the cost of raising chicken, while medical research touted the health benefits of eating it.

Tyson now manufactures about half of the nation’s McNuggets and sells chicken to ninety of the one hundred largest restaurant chains. It is a vertically integrated company that breeds, slaughters, and processes chicken.

It leaves the capital expenditures and the financial risks of that task to thousands of “independent contractors.”

The median age of Colorado’s ranchers and farmers is about fifty-five, and roughly half of the state’s open land will change hands during the next two decades—a potential boon for real estate developers.

A number of Colorado land trusts are now working to help ranchers obtain conservation easements. In return for donating future development rights to one of these trusts, a rancher receives an immediate tax break and the prospect of lower inheritance taxes.

Others can’t stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with their sleep.

During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers.

The amount of waste left by the cattle that pass through Weld County is staggering. The two Monfort feedlots outside Greeley produce more excrement than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis—combined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair considered Chicago’s Packingtown to be “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.”

In The Jungle (1906) Upton Sinclair described a litany of horrors: severe back and shoulder injuries, lacerations, amputations, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and memorably, a workplace accident in which a man fell into a vat and got turned into lard.

Unionized butchers in New York were blocking the sale of IBP’s boxed beef, out of soli­darity with the striking workers and fear for their own jobs.

Ramirez is in his early sixties, but still looks fit enough to work in a packing plant, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, and strong hands. His smoothly shaved head adds to his formidable appearance.

They looked down at Mexicans, and so Ramirez was not allowed to use a knife or perform any skilled tasks. Supervisors gave him the lowest menial jobs in the plant.

A spot that had for generations been at the center of tumult and loud commotion now was desolate and quiet, except for an occasional car driving past to a nearby industrial park.

For more than a dec­ade, ConAgra executives allegedly spoke on the phone to, or met at motels with, their ostensible rivals to set catfish prices nationwide.

Vacations don’t accrue until the second year.

Far from being a liability, a high turnover rate in the meatpacking industry—as in the fast food industry—also helps maintain a workforce that is harder to unionize and much easier to control.

At times, the meatpacking firms have been especially brazen in assuming that public funds will cover their routine business costs.

From its inception, the company that started the revolution in meatpacking—by crushing labor unions and championing the ruthless efficiency of the market—has made ample use of government subsidies.

“Mexington”—as it is now called, affec­tionately by some, disparagingly by others—is an entirely new kind of American town, one that has been transfigured to meet the needs of a modern slaughterhouse.