Fast Food Nation: Chapter 10–Afterword

Plauen languished under Communist rule. It lost one-third of its prewar population.

The fast food chains have become totems of Western economic development. They are often the first multinationals to arrive when a country has opened its markets, serving as the avant-garde of American franchising.

The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide.

“A McDonald’s restaurant is just the window of a much larger system comprising an extensive food-chain, running right up to the farms,” one of the company’s Indian partners told a foreign journalist.

The United States and Germany fought against each other twice in the twentieth century, but the enmity between them has often seemed less visceral than other national rivalries.

Moreover, during the past century both American culture and German culture have shown an unusually strong passion for science, technology, engineering, empiricism, social order, and efficiency.

One German McDonald’s, however, stands out from the rest. It sits on a nondescript street in a new shopping complex not far from Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis.

After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald’s was distributing thousands of leaflets among tourists in the camp’s parking lot, the company halted the practice.

Like an epiphany, it revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order.

Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authentic, a place unlike any other.

It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manufacture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope.

He had never sought the dissolution of the Soviet Union and never renounced his fundamental commitment to Marxism-Leninism. He still believed in the class struggle and “scientific socialism.”

“And the merry clowns, the Big Mac signs, the colourful, unique decorations and ideal cleanliness,” Gorbachev wrote in the foreword of To Russia with Fries, a memoir by a McDonald’s executive, “all of this complements the hamburgers whose great popularity is well deserved.”

He reportedly earned $160,000 for his appearance in the sixty-second spot, money earmarked for his nonprofit foundation.

In simple terms: when people eat more and move less, they get fat. In the United States, people have become increasingly sedentary—driving to work instead of walking, performing little manual labor, driving to do errands, watching television, playing video games, and using a computer instead of exercising.

Over the past forty years in the United States, per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks has more than quadrupled.

Heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and breast cancer, the principal “diseases of affluence,” have been linked to diets low in fiber and high in animal fats.

In 1986 the group decided to target McDonald’s, later explaining that the company “epitomises everything we despise: a junk culture, the deadly banality of capitalism.”

Some of the text was factual and straightforward; some of it was pure agitprop. Along the top of the leaflet ran a series of golden arches punctuated by slogans like “McDollars, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder, McProfits, McGarbage.”

And then in September of 1990 McDonald’s sued five members of the group for libel, claiming that every statement in the leaflet was false.

Under American law, an accuser must prove that the allegations at the heart of a libel case are not only false and defamatory, but also have been recklessly, negligently, or deliberately spread.

McDonald’s had used subterfuge not only to find out who’d distributed the leaflets, but also to learn how Morris and Steel planned to defend themselves in court.

Indeed, officers belonging to Special Branch, an elite British unit that tracks “subversives” and organized crime figures, had helped McDonald’s spy on Steel and Morris for years.

One of its spies admitted in court that a gift of baby clothes had been a ruse to find out where Morris lived.

The place feels like everything McDonald’s is not—lively, unruly, deeply idiosyncratic, and organized according to a highly complex scheme that only one human being could possibly understand.

Across the street stood an abandoned building once occupied by a branch of the East German army; a few blocks away the houses were dilapidated and covered in graffiti, looking as though the Wall had never fallen.

Now forty-nine years old, he is the leading impresario in Plauen’s thriving country-western scene, booking local bands (like the Midnight Ramblers and C.C. Raider) at his club.

The bulls that crowd around him seem almost sweet, acting more like a bunch of Ferdinands than like fierce symbols of machismo.

In the 1999 Colorado Springs mayoral race, Mary Lou Makepeace—a single mother with a fine surname for consensus-building—was elected to a second term, soundly defeating a right-wing candidate backed by Focus on the Family.

During the past two decades, rhetoric about the “free market” has cloaked changes in the nation’s economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice.

If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.

If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.

There is nothing inexorable about the use of such technology. Its value cannot be judged without considering its purpose and likely effects.

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.

But the absence of unions can permit corporations to behave like continuing criminal enterprises, to violate labor laws with impunity.

Without the countervailing force of labor unions, companies will increasingly seek out and exploit the most vulnerable members of society.

“A 50 percent drop in meat and poultry industry injury rates in a single year would be implausible,” the report noted, “but reaching back six years creates an impressive but fictitious improvement in plant safety.”

The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor, and obese has no historical precedent. The wealthy used to be corpulent, while the poor starved.

If they were alive today, like Upton Sinclair they would be amazed by the monopolies and monopsonies that now dominate the American economy, by the corruption of government officials, and by the wide disparities in wealth.

I’ve been called a communist and a socialist, a “dunce,” a “health fascist,” an “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” a “hectoring nanny of the nanny state,” and much stronger epithets.