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9/what's in the meat

 

ON J U L Y 11, 1997, Lee Harding ordered soft chicken tacos at a Mexican restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado. Harding was twenty­two years old, a manager at Safeway. His wife Stacey was a man­ager at Wendy's. They were out to dinner on a Friday night. When the chicken tacos arrived, Harding thought there was something wrong with them. The meat seemed to have gone bad. The tacos tasted slimy and gross. An hour or so after leaving the restaurant, Harding began to experience severe abdominal cramps. It felt like something was eating away at his stomach. He was fit and healthy, stood six-foot-one, weighed two hundred pounds. He'd never felt pain this intense. The cramps got worse, and Harding lay in bed through the night, tightly curled into a ball. He developed bad diarrhea, then bloody diarrhea. He felt like he was dying, but was afraid to go to the hospital. If I'm going to die, he thought, I want to die at home.

The severe pain and diarrhea lasted through the weekend. On Mon­day evening Harding decided to seek medical attention; the cramps were getting better, but he was still passing a good deal of blood. He waited three hours in the emergency room at St. Mary-Corwin Hospi­tal in Pueblo, gave a stool sample, and then finally saw a doctor. It's probably just a "summer flu," the doctor said. Harding was sent home with a prescription for an antibiotic. Tuesday afternoon, he heard a knock at his front door. When Harding opened it, nobody was there. But he found a note on the door from the Pueblo City-County Health Department. It said that his stool sample had tested positive for Esche­richia coli 0157:H7, a virulent and potentially lethal foodborne pathogen.

The next morning Harding called Sandra Gallegos, a nurse with the Pueblo Health Department. She asked him to try and remember what

 

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foods he'd eaten during the previous five days. Harding mentioned the dinner at the Mexican restaurant and the foul taste of the chicken tacos. He was sure that was where he had gotten food poisoning. Gallegos- disagreed. E. coli 0157:H7 was rarely found in chicken. She asked if Harding had consumed any ground beef lately. Harding re­called having eaten a hamburger a couple of days before visiting the Mexican restaurant. But he doubted that the hamburger could have made him ill. Both his wife and his wife's sister had eaten the same burgers, during a backyard barbecue, and neither had become sick. He and his wife had also eaten burgers from the same box the week before the barbecue without getting sick. They were frozen hamburgers he'd bought at Safeway. He remembered because it was the first time he'd ever bought frozen hamburgers. Gallegos asked if there were any left. Harding said there just might be, checked the freezer, and found the package. It was a red, white, and blue box that said "Hudson Beef Patties."

A Pueblo health official went to Harding's house, took the remain­ing hamburgers, and sent one to a USDA laboratory for analysis. State health officials had noticed a spike in the number of people suffering from E. coli 0157:H7 infections. At the time Colorado was one of only six states with the capability to perform DNA tests on samples of E. coli 0157:H7. The DNA tests showed that at least ten people had been sickened by the same strain of the bug. Investigators were searching for a common link between scattered cases reported in Pueblo, Brigh­ton, Loveland, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs. On July 28, the USDA lab notified Gallegos that Lee Harding's hamburger was contaminated with the same strain of E. coli 0157:H7. Here was the common link:

The lot number on Harding's package said that the frozen patties had been manufactured on June 5 at the Hudson Foods plant in Co­lumbus, Nebraska. The plant seemed an unlikely source for an out­break of food poisoning. Only two years old, it had been built primar­ily to supply hamburgers for the Burger King chain. It used state-of­the-art equipment and appeared to be spotlessly clean. But something had gone wrong. A modern factory designed for the mass production of food had instead become a vector for the spread of a deadly disease. The package of hamburger patties in Lee Harding's freezer and astute investigative work by Colorado health officials soon led to the largest recall of food in the nation's history. Roughly 35 million pounds of ground beef produced at the Columbus plant was voluntarily recalled

 

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by Hudson Foods in August of 1997. Although public health of­ficials did a fine job of tra ing the outbreak to its source, the recall proved less successful. By the time it was announced, about 25 million pounds of the ground beef had already been eaten.

 

an ideal system for new pathogens

 

EVE R Y DAY IN THE United States, roughly 200,000 people are sick­ened by a foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to authorities or properly diagnosed. The widespread outbreaks that are detected and identified represent a small fraction of the number that actually occurs. And there is strong evidence not only that the inci­dence of food-related illness has risen in the past few decades, but also that the lasting health consequences of such illnesses are far more seri­ous than was previously believed. The acute phase of a food poison­ing - the initial few days of diarrhea and gastrointestinal upset­in many cases may simply be the most obvious manifestation of an infectious disease. Recent studies have found that many foodborne pathogens can precipitate long-term ailments, such as heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, neurological problems, autoimmune dis­

orders, and kidney damage.

Although the rise in foodborne illnesses has been caused by many complex factors, much of the increase can be attributed to recent

changes in how American food is produced. Robert V. Tauxe, head of the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch at the CDC, believes that entirely new kinds of outbreaks are now occurring. A generation ago, the typical outbreak of food poisoning involved a church supper, a family picnic, a wedding reception. Improper food handling or stor­age would cause a small group of people in one local area to get sick. Such traditional outbreaks still take place. But the nation's industrial­ized and centralized system of food processing has created a whole new sort of outbreak, one that can potentially sicken millions of peo­ple. Today a cluster of illnesses in one small town may stem from bad potato salad at a school barbecue - or it may be the first sign of an outbreak that extends statewide, nationwide, or even overseas.

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III

 

Much like the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) responsible for causing AIDS, the E. coli 0157:H7 bacterium is a newly emerged pathogen whose spread has been facilitated by recent social and tech­nological changes. E. coli 0157:H7 was first isolated in 1982; HIV was discovered the following year. People who are infected with EIV can appear healthy for years, while cattle infected with E. coli 0157:H7 show few signs of illness. Although cases of AIDS date back at least to the late 1950s, the disease did not reach epidemic proportions in the United States until increased air travel and sexual promiscuity helped transmit the virus far and wide. E. coli 0157:H7 was most likely re­sponsible for some human illnesses thirty or forty years ago. But the rise of huge feedlots, slaughterhouses, and hamburger grinders seems to have provided the means for this pathogen to become widely dis­persed in the nation's food supply. American meat production has never before been so centralized: thirteen large packinghouses now slaughter most of the beef consumed in the United States. The meat­packing system that arose to supply the nation's fast food chains - an industry molded to serve their needs, to provide massive amounts of uniform ground beef so that all of McDonald's hamburgers would taste the same - has proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease.

Although E. coli 0157:H7 has received a good deal of public atten­tion, over the past two decades scientists have discovered more than a dozen other new foodborne pathogens, including Campylobacter

jejuni, Cryptosporidium parvum, Cyclospora cayetanensis, Listeria mono­cytogenes, and Norwalk-like viruses. The CDC estimates that more than three-quarters of the food-related illnesses and deaths in the United States are caused by infectious agents that have not yet been identified. While medical researchers have gained important insights into the links between modern food processing and the spread of dangerous diseases, the nation's leading agribusiness firms have res­olutely opposed any further regulation of their food safety practices. For years the large meatpacking companies have managed to avoid the sort of liability routinely imposed on the manufacturers of most con­sumer products. Today the U.S. government can demand the nation­wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves. The unusual power of the large meatpacking firms has been sustained by their close ties and sizable

 

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III

 

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donations to Republican members of Congress. It has also been made possible by a widespread lack of awareness about how many Ameri­cans suffer from food poisoning every year and how these illnesses ac­tually spread.

The newly recognized foodborne pathogens tend to be carried and shed by apparently healthy animals. Food tainted by these organisms has most likely come in contact with an infected animal's stomach contents or manure, during slaughter or subsequent processing. A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30 percent were contaminated with Staphylo­coccus aureus, and 53.3 percent were contaminated with Clostridium perfringens. All of these pathogens can make people sick; food poison­ing caused by Listeria generally requires hospitalization and proves fa­tal in about one out of every five cases. In the USDA study 78.6 per­cent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poison­ing is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aer­obic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

 

the national dish

 

IN 'r H E EAR L Y Y E'A R s of the twentieth century, hamburgers had a bad reputation. According to the historian David Gerard Hogan, the hamburger was considered "a food for the poor;' tainted and un­safe to eat. Restaurants rarely served hamburgers; they were sold at lunch carts parked near factories, at circuses, carnivals, and state fairs. Ground beef, it was widely believed, was made from old, putrid meat heavily laced with chemical preservatives. "The hamburger habit is just about as safe;' one food critic warned, "as getting your meat out of a garbage can:' White Castle, the nation's first hamburger chain, worked hard in the 1920s to dispel the hamburger's tawdry image. As Hogan notes in his history of the chain, Selling 'Em by the Sack (1997), the founders of White Castle placed their grills in direct view of cus­tomers, claimed that fresh ground beef was delivered twice a day, chose a name with connotations of purity, and even sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota in which a medical student lived for thirteen weeks on "nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water."

The success of White Castle in the East and the Midwest helped to popularize hamburgers and to remove much of their social stigma. The chain did not attract a broad range of people, however. Most of White Castle's customers were urban, working class, and male. During the 1950s, the rise of drive-ins and fast food restaurants in southern California helped turn the once lowly hamburger into America's na­tional dish. Ray Kroc's decision to promote McDonald's as a restau­rant chain for families had a profound impact on the nation's eating habits. Hamburgers seemed an ideal food for small children -'- conve­nient, inexpensive, hand-held, and easy to chew.

Before World War II, pork had been the most popular meat in the

United States. Rising incomes, falling cattle prices, the growth of the fast food industry, and the mass appeal of the hamburger later pushed American consumption of beef higher than that of pork. By the early 1990s, beef production was responsible for almost half of the employ­ment in American agriculture, and the annual revenues generated by beef were higher than those of any other agricultural commodity in the United States. The average American ate three hamburgers a week. More than two-thirds of those hamburgers were bought at fast food restaurants. And children between the ages of seven and thirteen ate more hamburgers than anyone else.

In January of 1993, doctors at a hospital in Seattle, Wash gton, no­

ticed that an unusual number of children were being admitted with bloody diarrhea. Some were suffering from hemolytic uremic syn­drome, a previously rare disorder that causes kidney damage. Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to undercooked hamburgers served at local Jack in the Box restaurants. Tests of the hamburger patties disclosed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Companies, Ine., in Arca­dia, California. Nevertheless, more than seven hundred people in at least four states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, more than two hundred people were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children. One of the first to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at a San Diego Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother's arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old.

The Jack in the Box outbreak received a great deal of attention from the media, alerting the public to the dangers of E. coli 0157:H7. The Jack in the Box chain almost went out of business amid all the bad publicity. But this was not the first outbreak of E. coli 0157:H71inked to fast food hamburgers. In 1982 dozens of children were sickened by contaminated hamburgers sold at McDonald's restaurants in Oregon and Michigan. McDonald's quietly cooperated with investigators from the CDC, providing ground beef samples that were tainted with E. coli 0157:H7 - samples that for the first time linked the pathogen to se­rious illnesses. In public, however, the McDonald's Corporation de­nied that its hamburgers had made anyone sick. A spokesman for the chain acknowledged only "the possibility of a statistical association between a small number of diarrhea cases in two small towns and our restaurants."

     In the eight years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, approximately half a million Americans, the majority of them children, have been made ill by E. coli 0157:H7. Thousands have been hospitalized, and hundreds have died.

 

a bug that kills children

 

E. coli 0157:H7 is a mutated version of a bacterium found abundantly in the human digestive system. Most E. coli bacteria help us digest food, synthesize vitamins, and guard against dangerous organisms. E. coli 0157:H7, on the other hand, can release a powerful toxin­called a "verotoxin" or a "Shiga toxin" - that attacks the lining of the intestine. Some people who are infected with E. coli 0157:H7 do not become ill. Others suffer mild diarrhea. In most cases, severe abdomi­nal cramps are followed by watery, then bloody, diarrhea that subsides within a week or so. Sometimes the diarrhea is accompanied by vom­iting and a low-grade fever.

In about 4 percent of reported E. coli 0157:H7 cases, the Shiga tox­ins enter the bloodstream, causing hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can lead to kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding, and the destruction of vital organs. The Shiga toxins can cause sei­zures, neurological damage, and strokes. About 5 percent of the chil­dren who develop HUS are killed by it. Those who survive are often left with permanent disabilities, such as blindness or brain damage.

Children under the age of five, the elderly, and people with im­paired immune systems are the most likely to suffer from illnesses caused by E. coli 0157:H7. The pathogen is now the leading cause of kidney failure among children in the United States. Nancy Donley, the president of Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP), an organization devoted to food safety, says it is hard to convey the suffering that E. coli 0157:H7 causes children. Her six-year-old son, Alex, was infected with the bug in July of 1993 after eating a tainted hamburger. His ill­ness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains. It progressed to diarrhea that filled a hospital toilet with blood. Doctors frantically tried to save Alex's life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure, inserting tubes in his chest to keep him breathing, as the Shiga toxins destroyed internal organs. "I would have done any­thing to save my son's life;' Donley says. "I would have run in front of a bus to save Alex." Instead, she stood and watched helplessly as he called out for her, terrified and in pain. He became ill on a Tuesday night, the night after his mother's birthday, and was dead by Sunday afternoon. Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and demen­

tia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquefied. "The'sheer brutality of his death was horrifying;' Donley says.

As Lee Harding learned, adults in perfect health can be s ricken by the pathogen, too. Six months after seemingly recovering Trom his bout of E. coli 0157:H7 food poisoning, Harding began to urinate blood. He was diagnosed as having a kidney infection, one that he be­lieves was facilitated by residual tissue damage from the Shiga toxins. Although the infection soon passed, Harding still experiences occa­sional pain three years after eating a Hudson Beef hamburger. Never­theless, he considers himself lucky.

Antibiotics have proven ineffective in treating illnesses caused by E.

coli 0157:H7. Indeed the use of antibiotics may make such illnesses worse by killing off the pathogen and prompting a sudden release of its Shiga toxins. At the moment, little can be done for people with life­threatening E. coli 0157:H7 infections, aside from giving them fluids, blood transfusions, and dialysis.

Efforts to eradicate E. coli 0157:H7 have been complicated by the fact that it is an extraordinarily hearty microbe that is easy to trans­mit. E. coli 0157:H7 is resistant to acid, salt, and chlorine. It can live in fresh water or seawater. It can live on kitchen countertops for days and in moist environments for weeks. It can withstand freezing. It can sur­vive heat up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. To be infected by most food­borne pathogens, such as Salmonella, you have to consume a fairly large dose - at least a million organisms. An infection with E. coli 0157:H7 can be caused by as'few as five orgariisms. A tiny uncooked particle of hamburger meat can contain enough of the pathogen to kill you.

The heartiness and minute infectious dose of E. coli 0157:H7 al­low the pathogen to be spread in many ways. People have been in­fected by drinking contaminated water, by swimming in a contami­nated lake, by playing at a contaminated water park, by crawling on a contaminated carpet. The most common cause of foodborne out­breaks has been the consumption of undercooked ground beef. But E. coli 0157:H7 outbreaks have also been caused by contaminated bean sprouts, salad greens, cantaloupe, salami, raw milk, and unpasteurized apple cider. All of those foods most likely had come in contact with cattle manure, though the pathogen may also be spread by the feces of deer, dogs, horses, and flies.

Person-to-person transmission has been responsible for a signifi­cant proportion of E. coli 0157:H7 illnesses. Roughly 10 percent of the people sickened during the Jack in the Box outbreak did not eat a contaminated burger, but were infected by someone who did. E. coli O.157:H7 is shed in the stool, and people infected with the bug, even those showing no outward sign of illness, can easily spread it through poor hygiene. Person-to-person transmission is most likely to occur among family members, at day care centers, and at senior citizen homes. On average, an infected person remains contagious for about two weeks, though in some cases E. coli 0157:H7 has been found in stool samples two to four months after an initial illness.

Some herds of American cattle may have been infected with E. coli 0157:H7 decades ago. But the recent changes in how cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed have created an ideal means for the patho­gen to spread. The problem begins in to day's vast feedlots. A govern­ment health official, who prefers not to be named, compared the sani­tary conditions in a modern feedlot to those in a crowded European city during the Middle Ages, when people dumped their chamber pots out the window, raw sewage ran in the streets, and epidemics raged.

The cattle now packed into feedlots get little exercise and live amid pools of manure. "You shouldn't eat dirty food and dirty water:' the official told me. "But we still think we can give animals dirty food and dirty water." Feedlots have become an extremely efficient mechanism for "recirculating the manure:' which is unfortunate, since E. coli 0157:H7 can replicate in cattle troughs and survive in manure for up to ninety days.

Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often con­tributes to the spread of disease. The rise in grain prices has encour­aged the feeding of less expensive materials to cattle, especially sub­stances with a high protein content that accelerate growth. About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes - the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle - until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as "mad cow disease." Neverthe­less, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle. Americans who spent more than six months in the United

Kingdom during the 1980s are now forbidden to donate blood, iJ;1 or­der to prevent the spread of BSE's human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But cattle blood is still put into the feed given to American cattle. Steven P. Bjerklie, a former editor of the trade journal Meat & Poultry, is appalled by what goes into cattle feed these days. "God­damn it, these cattle are ruminants," Bjerklie says. "They're designed to eat grass and, maybe, grain. I mean, they have four stomachs for a reason - to eat products that have a high cellulose content. They are not designed to eat other animals."       \

The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle. A study pub­lished a few years ago in Preventive Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. According to Dr. Neal D. Bernard, who heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, chicken manure may contain dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, parasites such as tapeworms and Giardia lamblia, antibiotic residues, arsenic, and heavy metals.

The pathogens from infected cattle are spread not only in feedlots, but also at slaughterhouses and hamburger grinders. The slaughter­house tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of an an­imal's hide and the removal of its digestive system. The hides are now pulled off by machine; if a hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of dirt and manure may fall from it onto the meat. Stomachs and in­testines are still pulled out of cattle by hand; if the job is not per­formed carefully, the contents of the digestive system may spill every­where. The increased speed of to day's production lines makes the task much more difficult. A single worker at a "gut table" may eviscerate sixty cattle an hour. Performing the job properly takes a fair amount of skill. A former IBP "gutter" told me that it took him six months to learn how to pull out the stomach and tie off the intestines without spillage. At best, he could gut two hundred consecutive cattle without spilling anything. Inexperienced gutters spill manure far more often. At the IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, the hourly spillage rate at the gut table has run as high as 20 percent, with stomach con­tents splattering one out of five carcasses.

The consequences of a single error are quickly multiplied as hun­dreds of carcasses quickly move down the line. Knives are supposed to be cleaned and disinfected every few minutes, something that workers in a hurry tend to forget. A contaminated knife spreads germs to eve­rything it touches. The overworked, often illiterate workers in the na­tion's slaughterhouses do not always understand the importance of good hygiene. They sometimes forget that this meat will eventually be eaten. They drop meat on the floor and then place it right back on the conveyer belt. They cook bite-sized pieces of meat in their sterilizers, as snacks, thereby rendering the sterilizers ineffective. They are di­rectly exposed to a wide variety of pathogens in the meat, become in­fected, and inadvertently spread disease.

A recent USDA study found that during the winter about 1 percent of the cattle at feedlots carry E. coli 0157:H7 in their gut. The propor­tion rises to as much as 50 percent during the summer. Even if you as­sume that only 1 percent are infected, that means three or four cattle bearing the microbe are eviscerated at a large slaughterhouse every hour. The odds of widespread contamination are raised exponentially when the meat is processed into ground beef. A generation ago,  local butchers and wholesalers made hamburger meat out of leftover scraps. Ground beef was distributed locally, and was often made from cattle slaughtered locally. Today large slaughterhouses and grinders dominate the nationwide production of ground beef. A modern pro­cessing plant can produce 800,000 pounds of hamburger a day, meat that will be shipped throughout the United States. A single animal in­fected with E. coli 0157:H7 can contaminate 32,000 pounds of that ground beef.

To make matters worse, the animals used to make about one-quar­ter of the nation's ground beef - worn-out dairy cattle - are the an­imals most likely to be diseased and riddled with antibiotic residues. The stresses of industrial milk production make them even more un­healthy than cattle in a large feedlot. Dairy cattle can live as long as forty years, but are often slaughtered at the age of four, when their milk output starts to decline. McDonald's relies heavily on dairy cattle for its hamburger supplies, since the animals are relatively inexpen­sive, yield low-fat meat, and enable the chain to boast that all its beef is raised in the United States. The days when hamburger meat was ground in the back of a butcher shop, out of scraps from one or two sides of beef, are long gone. Like the multiple sex partners that helped spread the AIDS epidemic, the huge admixture of animals in most American ground beef plants has played a crucial role in spreading E. coli 0157:H7. A single fast food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle.

 

all we care to pay

 

"THIS IS NO FAIRY STORY and no joke;' Upton Sinclair wrote in 1906; "the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one - there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit." Sinclair described a long list of practices in the meatpacking industry that threatened the health of consumers: the routine slaughter of diseased animals, the use of chemicals such as borax and glycerine to disguise the smell of spoiled beef, the deliberate mislabeling of canned meat, the tendency of work­ers to urinate and defecate on the kill floor. After reading The Jungle President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation

 

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of Sinclair's charges. When it confirmed the accuracy of the book, Roosevelt called for legislation requiring mandatory federal inspec­tion of all meat sold through interstate commerce, accurate labeling and dating of canned meat products, and a fee-based regulatory sys­tem that made meatpackers pay the cost of cleaning up their own in­dustry.

The powerful magnates of the Beef Trust responded by vilifying Roosevelt and Upton Sinclair, dismissing their accusations, and launching a public relations campaign to persuade the American peo­ple that nothing was wrong. "Meat and food products, generally speaking;' J. Ogden Armour claimed in a Saturday Evening Post article, "are handled as carefully and circumspectly in large packing houses as they are in the average home kitchen." Testifying before Con­gress, Thomas Wilson, an executive at Morris & Company, said that blame for the occasional sanitary lapse lay not with the policies of in­dustry executives, but with the greed and laziness of slaughterhouse workers. "Men are men;' Wilson contended, "and it is pretty hard to control some of them." After an angry legislative battle, Congress nar­rowly passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, a watered-down ver­sion of Roosevelt's proposals that made taxpayers pay for the new reg­ulations.

The meatpacking industry's response to The Jungle established a pattern that would be repeated throughout the twentieth century, whenever health concerns were raised about the nation's beef. The industry has repeatedly denied that problems exist, impugned the motives of its critics, fought vehemently against federal oversight, sought to avoid any responsibility for outbreaks of food poisoning, and worked hard to shift the costs of food safety efforts onto the gen­eral public. The industry's strategy has been driven by a profound an­tipathy to any government regulation that might lower profits. "There is no limit to the expense that might be put upon us;' the Beef Trust's Wilson said in 1906, arguing against a federal inspection plan that would have cost meatpackers less than a dime per head of cattle. "[ Our] contention is that in all reasonableness and fairness we are paying all we care to pay."

During the 1980s, as the risks of widespread contamination in­creased, the meatpacking industry blocked the use of microbial testing in the federal meat inspection program. A panel appointed by the Na­tional Academy of Sciences warned in 1985 that the nation's meat in­spection program was hopelessly outdated, still relying on visual and olfactory clues to find disease while dangerous pathogens slipped past undetected. Three years later, another National Academy of Sciences panel warned that the nation's public health infrastructure was in seri­ous disarray, limiting its ability to track or prevent the spread of newly emerging pathogens. Without additional funding for public health measures, outbreaks and epidemics of new diseases were virtually in­evitable. "Who knows what crisis will be next?" said the chairman of the panel.

Nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush administrations cut spending on public health measures and staffed the u.s. Department of Agri­culture with officials far more interested in government deregulation than in food safety. The USDA became largely indistinguishable from the industries it was meant to police. President Reagan's first secretary of agriculture was in the hog business. His second was the president of the American Meat Institute (formerly known as the American Meat Packers Association). And his choice to run the USDA's Food Mar­keting and Inspection Service was a vice president of the National Cattleman's Association. President Bush later appointed the president of the National Cattleman's Association to the job.

Two months after the threat of deadly new outbreaks was outlined by the National Academy of Sciences, the USDA launched the Stream­lined Inspection System for Cattle (SIS-C). The program was designed to reduce the presence of federal inspectors in the nation's slaughter-­houses, allowing company employees to assume most of the food safety tasks. According to the Reagan administration, the Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle would help the USDA shrink its budget and deploy its manpower more efficiently. Freed from the hassles of continuous federal inspection, SIS-C also enabled meatpacking com­panies to increase their line speeds. Despite the fact that IBP and Mor­rell had just a year earlier been caught falsifying safety records and keeping two sets of injury logs, the meatpacking industry was given the authority to inspect its own meat. SIS-C was launched in 1988 as a pilot program at five major slaughterhouses that supplied about one­fifth of the beef consumed in the United States. The USDA hoped that within a decade the new-system would extend nationwide and that the number of federal meat inspectors would be cut by half.

A 1992 USDA study of the Streamlined Inspection System for Cat­tle concluded that beef produced under the program was no dirtier than beef produced at slaughterhouses fully staffed by federal inspec­tors. But the accuracy of that study was thrown into doubt by the reve­lation that meatpacking firms had sometimes been told in advance when USDA investigators would be arriving at SIS-C slaughterhouses. The Monfort beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, was one of the original

participants in the program. According to federal inspectors there, the

meat produced under the Streamlined Inspection System "had never been filthier." At SIS-C slaughterhouses, visibly diseased animals­cattle infected with measles and tapeworms, covered with abscesses ...:­were being slaughtered. Poorly trained company inspectors were al­lowing the shipment of beef contaminated with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, urine, and vomit.

The Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle was discontinued in 1993, following the Jack in the Box outbreak. Cutbacks in federal in­

spection seemed difficult to justify, when hundreds of children had

been made seriously ill by tainted hamburgers. Although the precise source of E. coli 0157:H7 contamination was never identified, some of the beef used by Jack in the Box came from an SIS-C plant - a

Monfort slaughterhouse. The meatpacking industry's immediate reac­tion to the outbreak was an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere. As children continued to be hospitalized after eating Jack in the Box hamburgers, J. Patrick Boyle, the head of the American Meat Institute said, "This recent outbreak sheds light on a nationwide problem: in­consistent information about proper cooking temperatures for ham­

burger:' The meat industry's allies at the USDA also seemed remark­ably laissez-faire, noting that the contaminated hamburger patties had

not violated any federal standards. According to Dr. Russell Cross, head of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, "The presence of bacteria in raw meat, including E. coli 0157:H7, although undesir­able, is unavoidable, and not cause for condemnation of the product." Members of the newly elected Clinton administration disagreed. Dr. Cross, a Bush appointee, resigned. On September 29, 1993, his re­

placement, Michael R. Taylor, announced that E. coli 0157:H7 would

henceforth be considered an illegal adulterant, that no ground beef contaminated with it could be sold, and that the USDA would begin random microbial testing to remove it from the nation's food supply. The American Meat Institute immediately filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent the USDA from testing any ground beef for E. coli 0157:H7. Judge James R. Rowlin, a conservative and a cattleman, dis­missed the meatpacking industry's arguments and allowed the testing to proceed.

a matter of will

 

WHILE THE MEAT PACKING INDUSTRY sought to block imple­mentation of a science-based inspection system, the owner of the Jack in the Box chain, Foodmaker, Inc., struggled to recover from the bad publicity surrounding the outbreak. Robert Nugent, the president of Foodmaker, had waited a week before acknowledging that Jack in the Box bore some responsibility for the illnesses. His first instinct had been to blame the chain's ground beef supplier and Washington State health officials. He claimed that Jack in the Box had never received a thorough explanation of why hamburgers needed to be fully cooked. Nugent soon recruited Jody Powell, President Jimmy Carter's former press secretary, to help improve the company's image and hired David M. Theno, a prominent food scientist, to prevent future outbreaks.

Theno had previously helped Foster Farms, a family-owned poultry processor in California, eliminate most of the Salmonella from its birds. He was a strong advocate of Hazard Analysis and Critical Con­trol Points (HACCP) programs, embracing a food safety philosophy that the National Academy of Sciences had promoted for years. The essence of a HACCP program is prevention; it attempts to combine scientific analysis with common sense. The most vulnerable steps in a

food production system are identified and then monitored. Stacks and stacks of records are kept in order to follow what went where. Theno quickly realized after arriving at Jack in the Box that the chain relied upon the safety standards of its suppliers - instead of imposing its own. He created the first HACCP plan in the fast food industry, a "farm-to-fork" policy that scrutinized threats to food safety at every level of production and distribution. Assuring Jack in the Box custom­ers that their food was safe not only seemed the right thing to do, it seemed essential for the chain's survival. In the years since the Jack in the Box outbreak, David Theno has emerged as a fast food maverick, applauded by consumer groups and considered "the Antichrist;' he says, by many in the meatpacking industry.

Theno insisted that every Jack in the Box manager attend a food safety course, that every refrigerated delivery truck have a record­keeping thermometer mounted inside it, that every kitchen grill be calibrated to ensure an adequate cooking temperature, and that every grill person use tongs to handle hamburger patties instead of bare hands. An almost fanatical devotion to microbial testing, however, be­

 

WHAT'S IN THE MEAT

 

 209

 

came the key to Theno's food safety program. He discovered that the levels of contamination varied enormously in ground beef supplied by different meatpacking companies. Some slaughterhouses did a fine

job; others were adequate; and a few were appalling. The companies

that manufactured hamburger patties for Jack in the Box were re­

quired to test their beef every fifteen minutes for a wide range of

dangerous microbes, including E. coli O157:H7. Slaughterhouses that continued to ship bad meat were eliminated as suppliers.

Jack in the Box now buys all of its ground beef from two compa­nies: SSI, a subsidiary of the J. R. Simplot Company, and Texas-Ameri­can, a subsidiary of the family-owned American Food Service Corpo­ration. Theno gave me a tour of the Texas-American plant in Fort Worth that makes hamburger patties for Jack in the Box. We were ac­companied by the plant manager, Tim Biela. Much of Biela's work in­volved testing things repeatedly and maintaining records of the tests. "You can't manage what you don't measure;' he said more than once. His records contain not only the date and time when a case of ham­burger patties was produced, but also which employees worked that shift, which slaughterhouse provided that beef, and which feedlots sent cattle to the slaughterhouse that day. The hamburger patty plant looked new and clean. I saw huge vats of beef scraps - some shipped all the way from Australia - stacked high in a cooler. The beef was dumped from the vats into shiny stainless steel machines. It was ground into fine particles by giant augers, mixed into exact propor­tions of lean meat and fat, stamped into patties, perforated, frozen, passed through metal detectors and then sealed in plastic wrap. The frozen hamburger patties that came out of the machines looked like little pink waffles.

David Theno would like the meatpacking industry to adopt a sys­tem of "performance-based grading." Slaughterhouses that produced consistently clean meat would received a grade A. Plants that per­formed moderately well would receive a grade B, and so on. Microbial testing would determine the grades, and the marketplace would re­ward companies that ranked highest. Plants that earned only a C or a D would have to do better - or stick to making dog food.

Some people in the fast food industry resent the idea that Jack in the Box, which was involved in such a large outbreak of food poison­ing, has assumed the mantle of leadership on the issue of food safety. Theno's support for tough food safety legislation in California made him unpopular with the state's restaurant association. The meatpack­ing industry is not fond of him, either. Theno says that the industry's long-standing resistance to microbial testing is a form of denial. "If you don't know about a problem," he explained, "then you don't have to deal with it." He thinks that the problem of E. coli 0157:H7 con­tamination in ground beef can be solved. He has an optimistic faith in the power of science and reason. "If you put in a score-keeping system and profile these meatpacking companies," Theno says, "you can fix this problem. You can actually fix this problem in six months. . . This is a matter of will, not technology." Despite the meatpacking indus­try's claims, the solution need not be enormously expensive. The en­tire Jack in the Box food safety program raises the cost of the chain's ground beef by about one penny per pound.

 

A great deal of effort was spent denying the federal government any authority to recall contaminated meat or impose civil fines on firms that knowingly ship contaminated products. Under current law, the USDA cannot demand a recall. It can only consult with a company that has shipped bad meat and suggest that it withdraw the meat from interstate commerce. In extreme cases, the USDA can remove its in­spectors from a slaughterhouse or processing plant, for all intents and purposes shutting down the facility. That step is rarely taken, however - and can be challenged by a meatpacker in federal court. In most cases, the USDA conducts negotiations with a meatpacking company over the timing and the scale of a proposed recall. The company has a strong economic interest in withdrawing as little meat as possible from the market (especially if the meat is difficult to trace) and in lim­iting publicity about the recall. And every day the USDA and the com­pany spend discussing the subject is one more day in which Ameri­cans risk eating contaminated meat.

The Hudson Foods outbreak revealed many of the flaws in the cur­rent USDA policies on recall. Officials at Hudson Foods were in­formed late in July of 1997 that its frozen hamburger patties had in­fected Lee Harding with E. coli 0157:H7. Because Harding had saved the box, Hudson Foods knew the exact lot number and production code of the tainted meat. The company made no effort to warn the public or to recall the frozen patties for another three weeks, until the USDA found a second box of Hudson Foods patties contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. On August 12 the company announced that it was voluntarily recalling 20,000 pounds of ground beef, an amount determined through negotiations with the USDA. The recall seemed surprisingly small, considering that the Hudson Foods plant in Co­lumbus, Nebraska, could produce as much as 400,000 pounds of ground beef in a single shift - and that tainted patties had been man­ufactured, according to the product codes on their boxes, on at least three separate days in June. As food safety advocates and reporters be­gan to question the size of the recall, it started to expand, reaching 40,000 pounds on August 13, 1.5 million pounds on August IS, and 25 million pounds on August 21. The recall eventually extended to 35 million pounds of ground beef, most of which had already been eaten.

The USDA had not only been forced to negotiate the Hudson Foods recall, it had to rely on company officials for information about how much meat needed to be recalled. Two of those officials suggested that

 

a lack of recall

 

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S EFFORTS to implement a tough, science-based food inspection system received an enormous setback when the Republican Party gained control of Congress in No­vember of 1994. Both the meatpacking industry and the fast food in­

dustry have been major financial supporters of the Republican Party's

right wing. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, stressing government deregulation and opposition to an in­creased minimum wage, fit perfectly with the legislative agenda of the

large meatpackers and fast food chains. A study of campaign contri­

butions between 1987 and 1996, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, found that Gingrich received more money from the restau­rant industry than any other congressman. Among the top twenty-five House recipients of restaurant industry funds, only four were Demo­crats. The meatpacking industry also directed most of its campaign

contributions to conservative Republicans, providing strong support

in the Senate to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Orrin Hatch of Utah. Between 1987 and 1996, Phil

Gramm, a Republican from Texas, received more money from the

meatpacking industry than any other U.S. senator. Gramm is a mem­

ber of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and his wife, Wendy Lee, sits

on the board of IBP.

The meatpacking industry's allies in Congress worked hard in the

1990s to thwart modernization of the nation's meat inspection system.

 (...)

just a few small lots of ground beef might have been contaminated. In

reality, Hudson Foods had for months been using "rework" - ground beef left over from the previous day of production - as part of its

routine processing supply. It had shipped hamburger meat potentially

contaminated with the same strain of E. coli 0157:H7 from at least

May of 1997 until the third week of August, when the companyvolun­

tarily agreed to shut the plant. Brent Wolke, the manager of the Hud­

son Foods plant in Columbus, and Michael Gregory, the company di­

rector of customer relations and quality control, were indicted in

December of 1998. Federal prosecutors claimed that the pair had de­

liberately misled USDA inspectors and had falsified company docu­

ments to minimize the scale of the recall. Both men were later found innocent.

Once a company has decided voluntarily to pull contaminated meat

from the market, it is under no legal obligation to inform the public

- or even state health officials - that a recall is taking place. During

the Jack in the Box outbreak, health officials in Nevada did not learn

from the company that contaminated hamburger patties had been

shipped there; they got the news when people noticed trucks pulling

up to Jack in the Box restaurants in Las Vegas and removing the meat.

Once the investigators realized that tainted ground beef had reached

Nevada, a number of cases of severe food poisoning that might other­

wise have been wrongly diagnosed were linked to E. coli 0157:H7. In

1994, Wendy's tried to recall about 250,000 pounds of ground beef

without officially notifying state health officials, the USDA, or the

public. The meat had been shipped to Wendy's restaurants in Illinois,

Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. When news of the re­

call leaked, Wendy's issued a press release claiming that only 8,000

pounds was being withdrawn, because it "had not been fully tested."

The press release failed to mention that some ground beef from the

same lot had indeed been tested - and had tested positive for E. coli

0157:H7.

A subsequent investigation by Cox News Service reporters Elliot

Jaspin and Scott Montgomery found that the USDA does not inform

the public when contaminated meat is recalled from fast food restau­

rants. "We live in a very litigious society," Jacque Knight, a USDA

spokesman explained; if every meat recall was publicly announced,

companies would face problems from "everybody with a stomach­

ache." Between 1996 and 1999, the USDA didn't tell the public about

more than one-third of the Class I recalls, cases in which consumers faced a serious and potentially lethal threat. The USDA now informs the public about every Class I recall, but will not reveal exactly where contaminated meat is being sold (unless it is being distributed under a brand name at a retail store). State health officials have attacked .the USDA policy, arguing that it makes outbreaks much more difficult to

. trace and puts victims of food poisoning at much greater risk. Some­one infected with E. coli 0157:H7, unsure about what has caused his or her symptoms and unaware of a local outbreak, may take over-the­counter medications that make the illness much worse.

Both the USDA and the meatpacking industry argue that details about where a company has distributed its meat must not be revealed in order to protect the firm's "trade secrets:' In February of 1999, when IBP recalled 10,000 pounds of ground beef laced with small pieces of glass, the company would disclose only that the meat had been shipped to stores in Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Nei­ther IBP, nor the USDA, would provide the names of those stores. "It's very frustrating for us;' an Indiana health official told a reporter, ex­plaining why the beef containing broken glass could not easily be re­moved from supermarket shelves. "If they don't give [the informa­tion] to us, there's not much we can do."

In addition to letting meatpacking executives determine when to recall ground beef, how much needs to be recalled, and who should be told about it, for years the USDA allowed these companies to help write the agency's own press releases about the recalls. After the Hud­son Foods outbreak, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman ended the policy of submitting USDA recall announcements to meatpacking companies for prior approval. Two years later, however, USDA officials proposed that the agency stop issuing any press releases about meat recalls, leaving that task entirely to the meatpacking industry. That proposal was never adopted. In January of 2000, the USDA decided to announce every meat recall with an official press release; the recalls are also noted on the agency's Web site. The new policy, however, has not made it any easier to learn where contaminated meat has been sold. "Press releases will not identify the specific recipients of prod­uct;' the USDA directive says, "unless the supplier chooses to release the information to the public."

A recent IBP press release, announcing the recall of more than a quarter of a million pounds of ground beef possibly tainted with E.coli 0157:H7, suggests that the industry's needs and those of consum­ers are not always the same. "In an abundance of caution, IBP is con­ducting this voluntary recall;' the release said on June 23, 2000, imply­ing that the move had been prompted mainly by a spirit of corpprate generosity and good will. Hamburger meat potentially contaminated with the lethal pathogen had been shipped to wholesalers, distribu­tors, and grocery stores in twenty-five states. At times, the press release reads more like an advertisement for IBP than an urgent health warn­ing. It devotes more space to a description of the company's food safety program - with its "Triple Clean" slaughterhouse system and its "approved and accredited laboratories" - than to the details of how IBP managed to distribute nationwide enough suspect meat to make at least a million life-threatening hamburgers. Nowhere does the press release mention, for example, that the E. coli 0157:H7 in IBP's ground beef was first detected not by one of the firm's own accredited laboratories, not by employees at the Geneseo, Illinois, IBP plant where the meat was produced, not by USDA inspectors - but by in­vestigators from the Arkansas Department of Health, who found the pathogen in a package of IBP ground beef at Tiger Harry's restaurant in El Dorado, Arkansas. Thirty-six people who'd recently eaten at Ti­ger Harry's had been sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Despite the discov­ery of tainted ground beef in the restaurant freezer, the Arkansas De­partment of Health could not conclusively link IBP meat to the El Dorado E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak. "There have been no illnesses asso­ciated with this product;' the company's press release brashly asserted. IBP's voluntary recall was issued about six weeks after. the ground beef's production date. By then, almost all of the questionable meat had been eaten.

In the aftermath of the Jack in the Box outbreak, the Clinton ad­ministration backed legislation to provide the USDA with the author­ity to demand meat recalls and impose civil fines on meatpackers. Republicans in Congress failed to enact not only that bill, but also similar legislation introduced in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. The in­ability of the USDA to seek monetary damages from the meatpack­ing industry is highly unusual, given the federal government's power to use fines as a means of regulatory enforcement in the airline, auto­mobile, mining, steel, and toy industries. "We can fine circuses for mistreating elephants," Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman com­

plained in 1997, "but we can't fine companies that violate food-safety standards." .

 

SURROUNDED BY PARENTS WHOSE children had died after eat­

ing hamburgers tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, President Clinton an­

nounced in July of 1996 that the USDA would finally adopt a science­based meat inspection system. Under the new regulations, every

slaughterhouse and processing plant in the United States would by the

end of the decade have to implement a government -approved HACCP

plan and submit meat to the USDA for microbial testing. Clinton's an­

nouncement depicted the changes as the most sweeping reform of the

federal government's food safety policies since the days of Theodore

Roosevelt. The USDA plan, however, had been significantly watered

down during negotiations with the meatpacking industry and Repub­

lican members of Congress. The new system would shift many food

safety tasks to company employees. The records compiled by those

employees - unlike the reports traditionally written by federal in­spectors - would not be available to the public through the Freedom

of Information Act. And meatpacking plants would not be required to test for E. coli 0157 :H7, a pathogen whose discovery might lead to im­mediate condemnation of their meat. Instead, they could test for other ba2t ria as a broad measure of fecal contamination levels; the results of those tests would not have to be revealed to the government; and

meat containing whatever organisms the tests found could still be sold

to the public.

Many federal meat inspectors opposed the Clinton administration's new system, arguing that it greatly diminished their authority to de­

tect and remove contaminated meat. Today the USDA's Food Safety

and Inspection Service is demoralized and understaffed. In 1978, be­

fore the first known outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7, the USDA had 12,000 meat inspectors; now it has about 7,500. The federal inspectors I interviewed felt under enormous pressure from their USDA superi­ors not to slow down the line speeds at slaughterhouses. "A lot of us

are feeling beaten down;' one inspector told me. Job openings at the service are going unfilled for months. Federal inspectors warn that the

new HACCP plans are only as good as the people running them ­

and that in the wrong hands HACCP stands for Have a Cup of Cof­fee and Pray. The Hudson Foods plant in Columbus, Nebraska, was operating under a HACCP plan in 1997 when it shipped 35 million pounds of potentially tainted meat.

 

our friend the atom

 

 

216

 

"We give no serious validity to company-generated records;' a long­time federal inspector told me. "There's a lot of falsification going on." His view was confirmed by other inspectors, and by former meatpack­ing workers who were in charge of quality control. According to Judy, a former "QC" at one of IBP's largest slaughterhouses, the HACCP plan at her plant was terrific on paper but much less impressive in real life: senior management cared much more about production than food safety. The quality control department was severely understaffed. A single QC had to keep an eye on two production lines simulta­neously. "I had to check the sterilizer temperature, I had to check the Cryovac temperature, I had to look at packaging, I had to note the vats - did they have foreign objects in them or not? - I had to keep an eye on workers, so they wouldn't cheat;' Judy said. "I was over­whelmed with work, it was just impossible to keep up with it all." She routinely falsified her checklist, as did the other QCs. The HACCP plan would have been "fantastic" if three people had been employed doing her job. There was no way that one person could get all the tasks on the list properly done.

Though the meatpacking industry has fought almost every federal effort to mandate food safety, it has also invested millions of dollars in new equipment to halt the spread of dangerous pathogens. IBP, for ex­ample, has installed expensive steam pasteurization cabinets at all of its beef slaughterhouses. Sides of beef enter the new contraption, which blow-dries them, bathes them in 220-degree steam for eight seconds, and then sprays them with cold water. When used properly, steam pasteurization cabinets can kill off most of the E. coli 0157:H7 and reduce the amount of bacteria on the meat's surface by as much as 90 percent. But an IBP internal corporate memo from 1997 suggests that the company's large investment in such technologies has been motivated less by a genuine concern for the health and well-being of American consumers than by other considerations.

"We have been informed that carcasses in your plant are occasion­ally being delayed for extended periods of time on the USDA out­rail for final disposition (up to 6 hours);' the IBP memo began. It was sent by the company's vice president for quality control and food safety to the plant manager at the Lexington, Nebraska, slaughter­house. It warned that the longer a carcass remains on the outrail, the harder it is to clean. With every passing minute, bacteria grows more firmly attached and difficult to kill. "This delayed carcass deposition;'

 

the memo emphasized, "is of concern and is cause for extraordinary

actions regarding such affected carcasses." When carcasses sat for half

an hour on the outrail, supervisors were instructed to find the cause

for the delay. When carcasses sat for an hour, supervisors were told to

spray the meat with a special acid wash. Carcasses that sat for longer

than two hours, that were at highest risk for bacterial contamination, were not to be destroyed, or sent to rendering, or set aside for process­

ing into precooked meats. "Such carcasses;' IBP's top food safety exec­

utive advised, "are to be designated for outside (non-IBP) carcass sale:' The dirtiest meat was to be shipped out and sold for public con­sumption - but not with an IBP label on it.

Instead of focusing on the primary causes of meat contamination

- the feed being given to cattle, the overcrowding at feedlots, the

poor sanitation at slaughterhouses, excessive line speeds, poorly

trained workers, the lack of stringent government oversight - the

meatpacking industry and the USDA are now advocating an exotic

technological solution to the problem of foodborne pathogens. They

want to irradiate the nation's meat. Irradiation is a form of bacte­

rial birth control, pioneered in the 1960s by the U.S. Army and by

NASA. When microorganisms are zapped with low levels of gamma

rays or x-rays, they are not killed, but their DNA is disrupted, and they

cannot reproduce. Irradiation has been used for years on some im­

ported spices and domestic poultry. Most irradiating facilities have

concrete walls that are six feet thick, employing cobalt 60 or cesium

137 (a waste product from nuclear weapons plants and nuclear power

plants) to create highly charged, radioactive beams. A new technique,

developed by the Titan Corporation, uses conventional electricity and

an electronic accelerator instead of radioactive isotopes. Titan devised

its SureBeam irradiation technology during the 1980s, while conduct­

ing research for the Star Wars antimissile program.

The American Medical Association and the World Health Organi­

zation have declared that irradiated foods are safe to eat. Widespread

introduction of the process has thus far been impeded, however, by a

reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to

radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat

must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the interna­

tionally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council- whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the

 218

 

labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking in­

dustry is also working hard to get rid of the word "irradiation," much

preferring the phrase "cold pasteurization."

One slaughterhouse engineer that I interviewed - who has helped

to invent some of the most sophisticated food safety equipment now

being used - told me that from a purely scientific point of view, irra­

diation may be safe and effective. But he is concerned about the intro­

duction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology

into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking

workforce. "These are not the type of people you want working on

that level of equipment:' he says. He also worries that the widespread

use of irradiation might encourage meatpackers "to speed up the kill

floor and spray shit everywhere." Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of

Meat & Poultry, opposes irradiation on similar grounds. He thinks it

will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamen­

tal and necessary changes in their production methods, allowing un­

sanitary practices to continue. "I don't want to be served irradiated fe­ces along with my meat:' Bjerklie says.

 

what kids eat

 

FOR YEARS SOME OF the most questionable ground beef in the United States was purchased by the USDA - and then distributed to

school cafeterias throughout the country. Throughout the 1980s and

1990s, the USDA chose meat suppliers for its National School Lunch

Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional

food safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the

most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also the most

likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristle left behind by

Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones). A 1983 investigation by NBC News said

that the Cattle King Packing Company - at the time, the USDA's

largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to

Wendy's - routinely processed cattle that were already dead before

arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of

hamburger meat. Cattle King's facilities were infested with rats and

cockroaches. Rudy "Butch" Stanko, the owner of the company, was later tried and convicted for selling tainted meat to the federal govern­

 

WHAT'S IN THE MEAT

 

 219

 

ment. He had been convicted just two years earlier on similar charges. That earlier felony conviction had not prevented him from supply­ing one-quarter of the ground beef served in the USDA school lunch program.

More recently, an eleven-year-old boy became seriously ill in April of 1998 after eating a hamburger at his elementary school in Daniels­ville, Georgia. Tests of the ground beef, which had been processed by the Bauer Meat Company, confirmed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Bauer Meat's processing plant in Ocala, Florida, was so filthy that on August 12, 1998, the USDA withdrew its inspectors, a highly unusual move. Frank Bauer, the company's owner, committed suicide the next day. The USDA later declared Bauer's meat products "unfit for human consumption," ordering that roughly 6 million pounds be detained. Nearly a third of the meat had already been shipped to school dis­tricts in North Carolina and Georgia, U.S. military bases, and prisons. Around the same time, a dozen children in Finley, Washington, were sickened by E. coli 0157:H7. Eleven of them had eaten undercooked beef tacos at their school cafeteria; the twelfth, a two-year-old, was most likely infected by one of the other children. The company that had supplied the USDA with the taco meat - Northern States Beef, a subsidiary of ConAgra - had in the previous eighteen months been cited for 171 "critical" food safety violations at its facilities. A critical violation is one likely to cause serious contamination and to harm consumers. Northern States Beef was also linked to a 1994 outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 in Nebraska that sickened eighteen people. Neverthe­less, the USDA continued to do business with the ConAgra subsidiary, buying about 20 million pounds of its meat for use in American schools.

In the summer and fall of 1999, a ground beef plant in Dallas, Texas, owned by Supreme Beef Processors failed a series of USDA tests for Salmonella. The tests showed that as much as 47 percent of the company's ground beef contained Salmonella - a proportion five times higher than what USDA regulations allow. Every year in the United States food tainted with Salmonella causes about 1.4 mil­lion illnesses and 500 deaths. Moreover, high levels of Salmonella in ground beef indicate high levels of fecal contamination. Despite the alarming test results, the USDA continued to purchase thousands of tons of meat from Supreme Beef for distribution in schools. Indeed, Supreme Beef Processors was one of the nation's largest suppliers to the school meals program, annually providing as much as 45 percent

220

 

of its ground beef. On November 30, 1999, the USDA finally took ac­

tion, suspending purchases from Supreme Beef and removing inspec­

tors from the company's plant, effectively shutting it down.

Supreme Beef responded the next day by suing the USDA in federal

court, claiming that Salmonella was a natural organism, not an adul­

terant. With backing from the National Meat Association, Supreme

Beef challenged the legality of the USDA's science-based testing system and contended that the government had no right to remove inspectors

from the plant. A. Joe Fish, a federal judge in Texas, heard Supreme

Beef's arguments and immediately ordered USDA inspectors back

into the plant, pending final resolution of the lawsuit. The plant shut­

down - the first ever attempted under the USDA's new science-based

system -lasted less than one day. A few weeks later, USDA inspec­

tors detected E. coli 0157:H7 in a sample of meat from the Supreme

Beef plant, and the company voluntarily recalled 180,000 pounds of

ground beef that had been shipped to eight states. Nevertheless, just

six weeks after that recall, the USDA resumed its purchases from Su­preme Beef, once again allowing the company to supply ground beef

                                                                                     for the nation's schools.     p

On May 25, 2000, Judge Fish issued a decision in the Supreme Beef

case, ruling that the presence of high levels of Salmonella in the plant's

ground beef was not proof that conditions there were "unsanitary." Fish endorsed one of Supreme Beef's central arguments: a ground

beef processor should not be held responsible for the bacterial levels of meat that could easily have been tainted with Salmonella at a

slaughterhouse. The ruling cast doubt on the USDA's ability to with­

draw inspectors from a plant where tests revealed excessive levels of

fecal contamination. Although Supreme Beef portrayed itself in the

case as an innocent victim of forces beyond its control, much of the

beef used at the plant had come from its own slaughterhouse in La­

donia, Texas. That slaughterhouse had repeatedly failed USDA tests

for Salmonella.

Not long after the ruling, Supreme Beef failed another Salmonella

test. The USDA moved to terminate its contract with the company

and announced tough new rules for processors hoping to supply

ground beef to the school lunch program. The rules sought to impose

the same sort of food safety requirements that fast food chains de­

mand from their suppliers. Beginning with the 2000-2001 school year,

ground beef intended for distribution to schools would be tested for

pathogens; meat that failed the tests would be rejected; and "downers"

 

1WHAT'S IN THE MEAT

 

221

 

- cattle too old or too sick to walk into a slaughterhouse - could no longer be processed into the ground beef that the USDA buys for chil­dren. The meatpacking industry immediately opposed the new rules.

 

your kitchen sink

 

DURING THE 1990s, the federal government (which is supposed to ensure food safety) applied standards to the meat it purchased for schools that were much less stringent than the standards applied by the fast food industry (which is responsible for much of the current threat to food safety). Having played a central role in the creation of a meatpacking system that can spread bacterial contamination far and wide, the fast food chains are now able to avoid many of the worst consequences. Much like Jack in the Box, the leading chains have in re-.

cent years forced their suppliers to conduct frequent tests for E. coli 0157:H7 and other pathogens. More importantly, the enormous buy­ing power of the fast food giants has given them access to some of the cleanest ground beef. The meatpacking industry is now willing to per­form the sort of rigorous testing for fast food chains that it refuses to do for the general public.

Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry an ex­tremely dangerous microbe, infectious at an extremely low dose. The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiolo­gist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toi­let seat. According to Gerba, "You'd be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink."

Although the fast food chains have belatedly made food safety a pri­ority, their production and distribution systems remain vulnerable to newly emerging foodborne pathogens. A virus that carries the gene to produce Shiga toxins is now infecting previously harmless strains of E. coli. Dr. David Acheson, an associate professor of medicine at Tufts University Medical School, believes the spread of that virus is being

encouraged by the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cattle feed. In . addition to E. coli 0157:H7, approximately sixty to one hundred other mutant E. coli organisms now produce Shiga toxins. Perhaps a third of

 

them cause illnesses in human beings. Among the most dangerous are E. coli 0103,0111,026,0121, and 0145. The standard tests being used to find E. coli 0157:H7 do not detect the presence of these other bugs. The CDC now estimates that roughly 37,000 Americans suffer food poisoning each year from non-0157 strains of E. coli, about 1,000 people are hospitalized, and about 25 die.

No matter how well executed the HACCP plan, no matter how highly automated the grills, no matter how many bursts of gamma ra­diation are fired at the meat, the safety of the food at any restau­rant ultimately depends upon the workers in its kitchen. Dr. Patricia Griffin, one of the CDC's leading experts on E. coli 0157:H7, believes that food safety classes should be mandatory for fast food workers. "We place our lives in their hands;' she says, "in the same way we en­trust our lives to the training of airline pilots." Griffin worries that a low-paid, unskilled workforce composed of teenagers and recent im­migrants may not always be familiar with proper food handling pro­cedures.

Dr. Griffin has good reason to worry. A 1997 undercover investiga­tion by KCBS- TV in Los Angeles videotaped local restaurant workers sneezing into their hands while preparing food, licking salad dress­ing off their fingers, picking their noses, and flicking their cigarettes into meals about to be served. In May of 2000, three teenage employ­ees at a Burger King in Scottsville, New York, were arrested for putting spit, urine, and cleaning products such as Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and Comet with Bleach into the food. They had allegedly tampered with the Burger King food for eight months, and it was served to thousands of customers, until a fellow employee informed the management.

The teenage fast food workers I met in Colorado Springs, Colorado,

told me other horror stories. The safety of the food seemed to be de­termined more by the personality of the manager on duty than by the written policies of the chain. Many workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they'd made it themselves. A Taco Bell em­ployee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby's employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald's restaurant in Colorado I Springs independently provided details about a cockroach infesta- i tion in the milk-shake machine and about armies of mice that uri.

nated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.

16 Alobal realization

 

WHENEVER I TOLD SOMEONE in Berlin that I was planning to visit Plauen, I got the same reaction. It didn't matter whom I told - someone old or young, hip or square, gay, straight, raised in West Germany, raised in the East - there'd always be a laugh, followed by a look of slight amazement. "Plauen?" they'd say. "Why would you ever want to go to Plauen?" The way the name was spoken, the long, drawn-out emphasis on the second sylla­ble, implied that the whole idea was vaguely ridiculous. Located half­way between Munich and Berlin, in a part of Saxony known as the Vogtland, Plauen is a small provincial city surrounded by forests and rolling hills. To Berliners, whose city is the present capital of Germany and perhaps the future capital of Europe, Plauen is a sleepy backwater that sat for decades on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Berliners re­gard the place in much the same way that New Yorkers view Muncie, Indiana. But I found Plauen fascinating. The countryside around it is lush and green. Some of the old buildings have real charm. The people are open, friendly, unpretentious - and yet somehow cursed.

For decades Plauen has been on the margins of history, far removed from the centers of power; nevertheless, events there have oddly fore­shadowed the rise and fall of great social movements. One after an­other, the leading ideologies of modern Europe - industrialism, fas­cism, communism, consumerism - have passed through Plauen and left their mark. None has completely triumphed or been completely erased. Bits and pieces of these worldviews still coexist uneasily, crop­ping up in unexpected places, from the graffiti on the wall of an apart­ment building to the tone of an offhand remark. There is nothing set­tled yet, nothing that can be assumed. All sorts of things, good and bad, are still possible. In the heart of the Vogtland, without much no­

 

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tice from the rest of the world, the little city of Plauen has been alter­nately punished, rewarded, devastated, and transformed by the great unifying systems of the twentieth century, by each new effort to gov­ern all of mankind with a single set of rules. Plauen has been a bat­tlefield for these competing ideologies, with their proudly displayed and archetypal symbols: the smokestack, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the golden arches.

For centuries, Plauen was a small market town where Vogtland farmers came to buy and sell goods. And then, at the end of the nine­teenth century, a local weaving tradition gave birth to a vibrant textile industry. Between 1890 and 1914, the city's population roughly tri­pled, reaching 118,000 on the eve of World War 1. Its new textile mills specialized in lace and in embroidered fabrics, exporting most of their output to the United States. The doilies on dinner tables throughout the American Midwest came from Piau en, as well as the intricate lace­work that set the tone of many upper-middle-class Victorian homes. Black-and-white postcards from Plauen before the Great War show lovely Art Nouveau and Neo-Romantic buildings that evoke the streets of Paris, elegant cafes and parks, electric streetcars, zeppelins in the air.

Life in Piau en became less idyllic after Germany's defeat. When the Victorian world and its values collapsed, so did the market for lace. Many of Plauen's textile mills closed, and thousands of people were thrown out of work. The social unrest that later engulfed the rest of Germany came early to Plauen. In the 1920s Plauen had the most mil­lionaires per capita in Germany - and the most suicides. It also had the highest unemployment rate. Amid the misery, extremism thrived. Piau en was the first city outside of Bavaria to organize its own chapter of the Nazi party. In May of 1923, the Hitler Youth movement was launched in Plauen, and the following year, the little city became the Nazi headquarters for Saxony. Long before the Nazi reign of ter­ror began elsewhere, union leaders and leftists were murdered in Plauen. Hitler visited the city on several occasions, receiving an en­thusiastic welcome. Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels visited too, and Plauenbecame a sentimental favorite of the Nazi leader­ship. On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, a crowd ea­gerly destroyed Plauen's only synagogue, a strikingly modern building designed by Bauhaus architect Fritz Landauer. Not long afterward, Plauen officially became ]ilden-frei (Jew-free).

For most of World War II, Piau en remained strangely quiet and

 

peaceful, an oasis of ordinary life. It provided safe haven to thou­

sands of German refugees fleeing bombed-out cities. All sorts of ru­mors tried to explain why Plauen was being spared, while other towns in Saxony were being destroyed. On September 19, 1944, American

bombers appeared over the city for the first time. Instead of rushing into shelters, people stood in the streets, amazed, watching bombs fall

on the railway station and on a factory that built tanks for the German

army. A few months later, Plauen appeared alongside Dresden on an

Allied bombing list.

Plauen was largely deserted on April 10, 1945, when hundreds of

British Lancaster bombers appeared over the city. Its inhabitants no

longer felt mysteriously protected; they knew that Dresden had re- .

cently been fire-bombed into oblivion. During a single raid the Royal

Air Force dropped 2,000 tons of high explosives on Plauen. Four days

later, the U.S. Army occupied what was left of the town. The birth­

place of the Hitler Youth, the most Nazified city in Saxony, gained an­

other distinction only weeks before the war ended. More bombs were

dropped on Plauen, per square mile, than on any other city in east­

ern Germany - roughly three times as many as were dropped on

Dresden. Although the carnage was far worse in Dresden, a larger pro­

portion of Plauen's buildings was destroyed. At the end of the war,

about 75 percent of Piau en lay in ruins.

When the Allies divided their spheres of influence in Germany, Plauen's misfortune continued. The U.S. Army pulled out of the city, and the Soviet army rolled in. Plauen became part of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), but just barely. The new border with West Germany was only nine miles away. Plauen languished un­der Communist rule. It lost one-third of its prewar population. Sitting in a remote corner of the GDR, it received little attention or invest­ment from the Communist party leadership in East Berlin. Much of Plauen was never rebuilt; parking lots and empty lots occupied land where ornate buildings had once stood. One of the few successful fac­tories, a synthetic wool plant, blanketed Plauen in some of East Ger­

many's worst air pollution. According to historian John Connelly, the

polluted air helped give the city an "unusually low quality of life, even

for GDR standards."

On October 7,1989, the first mass demonstration against East Ger­

many's Communist rulers took place in Plauen. Small, scattered pro­

tests also occurred that day in Magdeberg, East Berlin, and other cities. The size of Piau en's demonstration set it apart. More than one-quarter of the city's population suddenly took to the streets. The level of un­rest greatly surprised local government officials. The Stasi (East Ger­many's secret police) had expected about four hundred people to ap­pear in the town center that day, the fortieth anniversary of the GDR's founding. Instead, about twenty thousand people began to gather, de­spite dark skies and a steady drizzle. The demonstration had no lead­ership, no organizers, no formal plan of action. It grew spontaneously, spreading through word of mouth. .

The protesters in other East German cities were mainly college stu­dents and members of the intelligentsia; in Plauen they were factory workers and ordinary citizens. Some of the demonstration's most fer­vent supporters were long-haired, working-class fans of American heavy metal music, known in Piau en as die Heavies, who rode their motorcycles through town distributing antigovernment pamphlets. As the crowd grew, people began to chant Mikhail Gorbachev's nick­name - "Gorby! Gorby!" - cheering the Soviet leader's policies of glasnost and perestroika, demanding similar reforms in East Germany, defiantly yelling "Stasi go home!" One large panner bore the words of the German poet Friedrich von Schiller. "We want freedom," it said, "like the freedom enjoyed by our forefathers."

Police officers and Stasi agents tried to break up the demonstration, arresting dozens of people, firing water cannons at the crowd, flying helicopters low over the rooftops of Plauen. But the protesters refused to disperse. They marched to the town hall and called for the mayor to come outside and address their demands. Thomas Kiittle , the super­intendent of Plauen's Lutheran church, volunteered to act as a media­tor. Inside the town hall, he found Plauen's high-ranking officials cow­ering in fear. None would emerge to face the crowd. The equation of power had fundamentally changed that day. A mighty totalitarian sys­tem of rule, erected over the course of four decades, propped up by tanks and guns and thousands of Stasi informers, was crumbling be­fore his eyes, as its rulers nervously chain-smoked in the safety of their offices. The mayor finally agreed to address the crowd, but a Stasi of­ficial prevented him from leaving the building. And so Kiittler stood on the steps of the town hall with a megaphone, urging the soldiers not to fire their weapons and telling the demonstrators that their point had been made, now it was time to go home. As bells atop the Lutheran church rang, the crowd began to disperse.

A month later, the Berlin Wall fell. And a few months after that ex­traordinary event, marking the end of the Cold War, the McDonald's

 

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Corporation announced plans to open its first restaurant in East Ger­many. The news provoked a last gasp of collectivism from Ernst Doerfler, a prominent member of the doomed East German parlia­ment, who called for an official ban on "McDonald's and similar ab­normal garbage-makers." McDonald's, however, would not be de­terred; Burger King had already opened a mobile hamburger cart in Dresden. During the summer of 1990, construction quickly began on the first McDonald's in East Germany. It would occupy an abandoned lot in the center of Plauen, a block away from the steps of the town hall. The McDonald's would be the first new building erected in Plauen since the coming of a new Germany.

 

uncle rncdonald

 

AS THE FA S T F 0 0 D industry has grown more competitive in the United States, the major chains have looked to overseas markets for their future growth. The McDonald's Corporation recently used a new phrase to describe its hopes for foreign conquest: "global realization." A decade ago, McDonald's had about three thousand restaurants out­side the United States; today it has about seventeen thousand restau­rants in more than 120 foreign countries. It currently opens about five new restaurants every day, and at least four of them are overseas. Within the next decade, Jack Greenberg, the company's chief execu­tive, hopes to double the number of McDonald's. The chain earns the majority of its profits outside the United States, as does KFC. McDon­ald's now ranks as the most widely recognized brand in the world, more familiar than Coca-Cola. The values, tastes, and industrial prac­tices of the American fast food industry are being exported to every corner of the globe, helping to create a homogenized international culture that sociologist Benjamin R. Barber has labeled "McWorld."

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. Fifteen years ago, when McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Turkey, no other foreign franchisor did business there. Turkey now has hundreds of franchise outlets, includipg 7-Eleven, Nutra Slim, Re/Max Real Estate, Mail Boxes Etc., and Ziebart Tidy Car. Support for the growth of franchising has even become part of Ameri­can foreign policy. The U.S. State Department now publishes detailed

 

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III

 

studies of overseas franchise opportunities and runs a Gold Key Pro­gram at many of its embassies to help American franchisors find over­seas partners.

The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald's represents "Americana and the prom­ise of modernization." Thousands of people waited patiently for hours to eat at the city's first McDonald's in 1992. Two years later, when a McDonald's opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive­through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain, earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Brazil, McDon­ald's has become the nation's largest private employer. The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide. Classes at McDonald's Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illi­nois, are taught in more than two dozen languages. Few places on earth seem too distant or too remote for the golden arches. In 1986, the Tahiti Tourism Promotion Board ran an ad campaign featuring pristine beaches and the slogan "Sorry, No McDonald's." A decade later, one opened in Papeete, the Tahitian capital, bringing hamburg­ers and fries to a spot thousands of miles, across the Pacific, from the nearest cattle ranches or p,otato fields.

As the fast food chains have moved overseas, they have been accom­panied by their major suppliers. In order to diminish fears of Ameri­can imperialism, the chains gy to purchase as much food as possible in the countries where they operate. Instead of importing food, they import entire systems of agricultural production. Seven years before McDonald's opened its first restaurant in India, the company began to establish a supply network there, teaching Indian farmers how to grow iceburg lettuce with seeds specially developed for the nation's climate. "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.

In 1987, ConAgra took over Australia Meat Holdings, the larg­est beef company in the country that exports more beef than any other in the world. Over the past decade, Cargill and IBP have gained control of the beef industry in Canada. Cargill has established large­scale poultry operations in China and Thailand. Tyson Foods is plan­ning to build chicken-processing plants in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. ConAgra's Lamb Weston division now manufactures

 

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frozen french fries in Holland, India, and Turkey. McCain, the world's biggest french fry producer, operates fifty processing plants scattered across four continents. In order to supply McDonald's, J. R. Simplot began to grow Russet Burbank potatoes in China, opening that na­tion's first french fry factory in 1993. A few years ago Simplot bought eleven processing plants in Australia, aiming to increase sales in the East Asian market. He also purchased a 3-million-acre ranch in Aus­tralia, where he hopes to run cattle, raise vegetables, and grow po­tatoes. "It's a great little country;' Simplot says, "and there's nobody in it.".

As in the United States, the fast food companies have targeted their foreign advertising and promotion at a group of consumers with the fewest attachments to tradition: young children. "Kids are the same regarding the issues that affect the all-important stages of their devel­opment;' a top executive at the Gepetto Group told the audience at a recent KidPower conference, "and they apply to any kid in Berlin, Beijing, or Brooklyn." The KidPowe  conference, attended by market­ing executives from Burger King and Nickelodeon, among others, was held at the Disneyland outside of Paris. In Australia, where the num­ber of fast food restaurants roughly tripled during the 1990s, a survey found that half of the nation's nine- and ten-year-olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat. At a primary school in Beijing, Yunxiang Yan found that all of the children recognized an im­age of Ronald McDonald. The children told Yan they liked "Uncle Mc­Donald" because he was "funny, gentle, kind, and. . . he understood children's hearts." Coca-Cola is now the favorite drink among Chinese children, and McDonald's serves their favorite food. Simply eating at a McDonald's in Beijing seems to elevate a person's social status. The idea that you are what you eat has been enthusiastically promoted for years by Den Fujita, the eccentric billionaire who brought McDonald's to Japan three decades ago. "If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years;' Fujita once promised his countrymen, "we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will be blonde."

The impact of fast food is readily apparent in Germany, which has become one of McDonald's most profitable overseas markets. Ger­many is not only the largest country in Europe, but also the most Americanized. Although the four Allied powers occupied it after World War II, the Americans exerted the greatest lasting influence, perhaps because their nationalism was so inclusive, and their nation so distant. Children in West German schools were required to study

English, facilitating the spread of American pop culture. Young people

who sought to distance themselves from the wartime behavior of their parents found escape in American movies, music, and novels. "For a child growing up in the turmoil of [postwar] Berlin. . . the Americans

were angels," Christa Maerker, a Berlin filmmaker, wrote in an essay

on postwar Germany's infatuation with the United States. "Anything

from them was bigger and more wonderful than anything that pre­

ceded it."

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. The recent takeover of prominent American corporations - such as Chrysler, Random House, and RCA Records - by German companies provoked none of

the public anger that was unleashed when Japanese firms bought

much less significant American assets in the 1980s. Despite America's

long-standing "special relationship" with Great Britain, the underly­

ing cultural ties between the United States and Germany, though less

obvious, are equally strong. Americans with German ancestors far

outnumber those with English ancestors. 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. The electronic paper-towel dispenser

that I saw in a Munich men's room is the spiritual kin of the gas-pow­

ered ketchup dispensers at the McDonald's in Colorado Springs.

The traditional German restaurant - serving schnitzel, bratwurst,

knackwurst, sauerbraten, and large quantities of beer - is rapidly dis­

appearing in Germany. Such establishments now account for less than one-third of the German foodservice market. Their high labor costs

have for the most part been responsible for their demise, along with

the declining popularity of schnitzel. McDonald's Deutschland, Inc., is

by far the biggest restaurant company in Germany today, more than

twice as large as the nearest competitor. It opened the first German McDonald's in 1971; at the beginning of the 1990s it had four hun­dred restaurants, and now it has more than a thousand. The com­

pany's main dish happens to be named after Hamburg, a German city

where ground-beef steaks were popular in the early nineteenth cen­

tury. The hamburger was born when Americans added the bun. Mc­Donald's Deutschland uses German potatoes for its fries and Bavarian

dairy cows for its burgers. It sends Ronald McDonald into hospitals

 

and schools. It puts new McDonald's restaurants in gas stations, rail­way stations, and airports. It battles labor unions and - according to Siegfried Pater, author of Zum Beispiel McDonald's - has repeatedly fired union sympathizers. The success of McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and T.G.I. Fridays in Germany has helped spark a franchising boom. Since 1992, the number of franchised outlets there has doubled, and about five thousand more are being added every year. In August of 1999, McDonald's Deutschland announced that it would be putting restau­rants in Germany's new Wal-Mart stores. "The partnership scheme will undoubtedly be a success;' a German financial analyst told Lon­don's Evening Standard. "The kiddie factor alone - children urging their parents to shop at Wal-Mart because they have a McDonald's in­side the store - could generate an upsurge in customers."

The golden arches have become so commonplace in Germany that they seem almost invisible. You don't notice them unless you're look­ing for them, or feeling hungry. 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. The stores were built on fields where Dachau's inmates once did forced labor. Although the architecture of the shop­ping complex looks German and futuristic, the haphazard placement of the buildings on the land seems distinctively American. They would not seem out of place near an off- ramp of 1-25 in Colorado. Across the street from the McDonald's there's a discount supermarket. An auto parts store stands a few hundred yards from the other buildings, sepa­rated by fields that have not yet vanished beneath concrete. In 1997, protests were staged against the 9pening of a McDonald's so close to a concentration camp where gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazis were imprisoned, where Luftwaffe scientists performed medical experiments on inmates and roughly 30,000 peo­ple died. The McDonald's Corporation denied that it was trying to profit from the Holocaust and said the restaurant was at least a mile from the camp. After the curator of the Dachau Museum complained that McDonald's was distributing thousands ofleaflets among tourists in the camp's parking lot, the company halted the practice. "Welcome to Dachau;' said the leaflets, "and welcome to McDonald's."

The McDonald's at Dachau is one-third of a mile from the en­trance to the concentration camp. The day I went there, the restaurant was staging a "Western Big Mac" promotion. It was decorated in a Wild West theme, with paper place mats featuring a wanted poster of

 

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"Butch Essidie." The restaurant was full of mothers and small chil­dren. Teenagers dressed in Nikes, Levis, and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts sat in groups and smoked cigarettes. Turkish immigrants worked in the kitchen, seventies disco music played, and the red paper cups on everyone's tray said "Always Coca-Cola." This McDonald's was in Dachau, but it could have been anywhere - anywhere in the United States, anywhere in the world. Millions of other people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same food from the same menu, food that tasted everywhere the same.

 

at the circus

 

THE MOST SURREAL EXPERIENCE that I had during three years of research into fast food took place not at the top-secret air force base that got its Domino's pizzas delivered, not at the flavor factory off the New Jersey Turnpike, not at the Dachau McDonald's. It occurred on March I, 1999, at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Like an epiphany, it revealed the strange power of fast food in the new world order. The Mirage - with its five-story volcano, its shark tank, dolphin tank, in­door rain forest, Lagoon Saloon, DKNY boutique, and Secret Garden

of Siegfried & Roy - is a fine place for the surreal. Even its name sug­

gests the triumph of illusion over reality, a promise that you won't be­lieve your eyes. On that day in March, as usual, Las Vegas was full of spectacles and name acts. George Carlin was at Bally's, and David Cassidy was at the MGM Grand, starring in EFX, a show billed as a high-tech journey through space and time. The History of Sex was at the Golden Nugget, The Number One Fool Contest was at the Com­edy Stop, Joacquin Ayala (Mexico's most famous magician) was at Harrah's, the Radio City Rockettes were at the Flamingo Hilton, "the Dream King" (Elvis impersonator Trent Carlini) was at the Board­walk. And Mikhail Gorbachev (former president of the Supreme So­viet of the USSR, winner of the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner of Labor, and the Nobel Peace Prize) was at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage, giving the keynote speech before a fast food convention.

The convention and its setting were an ideal match. In many ways

Las Vegas is the fulfillment of social and economic trends now sweep­ing from the American West to the farthest reaches of the globe. Las

Vegas is the fastest-growing major city in the United States - an en­tirely man-made creation, a city that lives for the present, that has lit­

 

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tle connection to its surrounding landscape, that cares little about its own past. Nothing in Las Vegas is built to last, hotels are routinely de­molished as soon as they seem out of fashion, and the city limits seem as arbitrary as its location, with plastic bags and garbage littering the open land where the lawns end, the desert not far from the Strip. .

Las Vegas began as an overnight camp for travelers going to Califor­nia on the Old Spanish Trail. It later became a ranching town, notable in the early 1940s mainly for its rodeo, its Wild West tourist attrac­tions, and a nightclub called the Apache Bar. The population was about 8,000. The subsequent growth of Las Vegas was made possible by the federal government, which spent billions of dollars to erect the Hoover Dam and build military bases near the city. The dam supplied water and electricity, while the bases provided the early casinos with customers. When authorities in southern California cracked down on illegal gambling after World War II, the gamblers headed for Nevada. As in Colorado Springs, the real boom in Las Vegas began toward the end of the 1970s. Over the past twenty years the population of Las Vegas has nearly tripled.

Today there are few remaining traces of the city's cowboy past. In­deed, the global equation has been reversed. While the rest of the world builds Wal-Marts, Arby's, Taco Bells, and other outposts of Americana, Las Vegas has spent the past decade recreating the rest of the world. The fast food joints along the Strip seem insignificant com­pared to the new monuments towering over them: recreations of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx, enormous build­ings that evoke Venice, Paris, New York, Tuscany, medieval England, ancient Egypt and Rome, the Middle East, the South Seas. Las Vegas is now so contrived and artificial that it has become something authen­tic, a place unlike any other. The same forces that are homogenizing other cities have made Las Vegas even more unique.

At the heart of Las Vegas is technology: machinery that cools the air, erupts the volcano, and powers the shimmering lights. Most im­portant of all is the machinery that makes money for the casinos. While Las Vegas portrays itself as a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial town where anyone can come and strike it rich, life there is more tightly regulated, controlled, and monitored by hidden cameras than just about anywhere else in the United States. The city's principal in­dustry is legally protected against the workings of the free market, and operates according to strict rules laid down by the state. The Nevada Gaming' Control Board determines not only who can own a casino,

 

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but who can enter one. In a town built on gambling, where fortunes were once earned with a roll of the dice, it is remarkable how little is now left to chance. Until the late 1960s, about three-quarters of a typi­cal casino's profits came from table games, from poker, blackjack, bac­carat, roulette. During the last twenty-five years table games, which are supervised by dealers and offer gamblers the best odds, have been displaced by slot machines. Today about two-thirds of a typical ca­sino's profits now come from slots and video poker - machines that are precisely calibrated to take your money. They guarantee the casino a profit rate of as much as 20 percent - four times what a roulette wheel will bring.

The latest slot machines are electronically connected to a central

computer, allowing the casino to track the size of every bet and its outcome. The music, flashing lights, and sound effects emitted by these slots help disguise the fact that a small processor inside them is

deciding with mathematical certainty how long you will play before

you lose. It is the ultimate consumer technology, designed to manu­facture not a tangible product, but something much more elusive: a brief sense of hope. That is what Las Vegas really sells, the most bril­liant illusion of all, a loss that feels like winning.

Mikhail Gorbachev was in town to speak at the Twenty-sixth An­nual Chain Operators Exchange, a convention sponsored by the Inter­national Foodservice Manufacturers Association. Executives from the

major fast food companies had gathered to discuss, among other things, the latest labor-saving machinery and the prospects of some­

day employing a workforce that needed "zero training." Represen­

tatives from the industry's leading suppliers - ConAgra, Monfort, Simplot, and others - had come to sell their latest products. The Grand Ballroom at the Mirage was filled with hundreds of middle­aged white men in expensive business suits. They sat at long tables be­

neath crystal chandeliers, drinking coffee, greeting old friends, waiting

for the morning program to begin. A few of them were obviously

struggling to recover from whatever they'd done in Las Vegas the night

before.

On the surface, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed an odd choice to ad­

dress a group so resolutely opposed to labor unions, minimum wages,

and workplace safety rules. "Those who hope we shall move away

from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed," Gorbachev had written in Perestroika (1987), at the height of his power. He had never sought the dissolution of the Soviet Union and never renounced his

 

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fundamental commitment to Marxism-Leninism. He still believed in the class struggle and "scientific socialism." But the fall of the Berlin Wall had thrown Gorbachev out of power and left him in a precarious financial condition. He was beloved abroad, yet despised in his own land. During Russia's 1996 presidential election he received just 1 per­cent of the vote. The following year he expressed great praise for America's leading fast food chain. "And the merry clowns, the Big

Mac signs, the colourful, unique decorations and ideal cleanliness," Gorbachev wrote in the foreword of To Russia with Pries, a memoir by a McDonald's executive, "all of this complements the hamburgers whose great popularity is well deserved."

In December of 1997, Gorbachev appeared in a Pizza Hut commer­cial, following in the footsteps of Cindy Crawford and Ivana Trump. A group of patrons at a Moscow Pizza Hut thanked him in the ad for bringing the fast food chain to Russia and then shouted "Hail to Gorbachev!" In response Gorbachev saluted them by raising a slice of pizza. He reportedly earned $160,000 for his appearance in the sixty­second spot, money earmarked for his nonprofit foundation. A year later Pizza Hut announced that it was pulling out of Russia as the country's economy collapsed, and Gorbachev told a German reporter that "all my money is gone." For his hour-long speech at the Mirage, Gorbachev was promised a fee of $150,000 and the use of a private jet.

The Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange officially opened with a video presentation of the national anthem. As the song boomed from speakers throughout the Grand Ballroom, two huge screens above the stage displayed a series of patriotic images: the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, amber waves of grain. In one of the morning's first speeches, an executive hailed the restaurant in­dustry's record profits the previous year, adding without irony, "As if things weren't good enough-, consumers also dropped all pretense of wanting healthy food." An ongoing industry survey had found that public concerns about salt, fat, and food additives were at their lowest level since 1982, when the survey began - one more bit of news to justify the industry's "current state of bliss." Another executive, a self­described "sensory evaluation specialist," emphasized the importance of pleasant smells. He noted that Las Vegas resorts were now experi­menting with "signature scents" in their casinos, hoping the subtle aromas would subconsciously make people gamble more money.

Robert Nugent, the head of Jack in the Box and honorary chair­man of the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange, broke

 

the cheery mood with an ominous, unsettling speech. He essentially accused critics of the fast food industry of being un-American. "A growing number of groups who represent narrow social and politi­cal interests," Nugent warned, "have set their sights on our industry in an effort to legislate behavioral change." Enjoying a great meal at a restaurant was "the very essence of freedom;' he declared, a ritual now being threatened by groups with an agenda that was "anti-meat, anti-alcohol, anti-caffeine, anti-fat, anti-chemical additives, anti­horseradish, anti-non-dairy creamer:' The media played a central role in helping these "activist fearmongers;' but the National Restaurant Association had recently launched a counterattack, working closely with journalists to dispel myths and gain better publicity. Nugent called upon the fast food executives to respond even more forcefully to their critics, people who today posed "a real danger to our industry­and more broadly to our way of life."

Not long afterward Mikhail Gorbachev appeared onstage and re­ceived a standing ovation. Here was the man who'd ended the Cold War, who'd brought political freedom to hundreds of millions, who'd opened vast new markets. At the age of sixty-nine Gorbachev looked remarkably unchanged from his appearance during the Reagan years. His hair was white, but he seemed vigorous and strong, still capable of running a mighty empire. He spoke quickly in Russian and then waited patiently for the translator to catch up. His delivery was full of energy and passion. "I like America;' Gorbachev said with a broad smile. "And I like American people." He wanted to give the audience a sense of what was happening in Russia today. Few people in the United States seemed to care much about events in Russia, a danger­ous state of affairs. He asked the crowd to learn about his country, to form partnerships and make investments there. "You must have a lot of money;' Gorbachev said. "Send it to Russia."

A few minutes into Gorbachev's speech, the audience began to lose interest. He had badly misjudged the crowd. His speech might have been a success at the Council on Foreign Relations or at the United Nations General Assembly, but at the Grand Ballroom of the Mirage it was a bomb. As Gorbachev explained why the United States must strongly support the policies of Yevgeny Primakov (the Russian prime minister who was fired not long afterward) row after row of eyes be­gan to glaze. He earnestly asked why there was "some kind of a dislike of Primakov that is widespread in this country;' unaware that few Americans knew who Yevgeny Primakov was and even fewer cared

 

about him, one way or the other. I counted at least half a dozen people seated near me in the Grand Ballroom who fell asleep during Gorba­chev's speech. The executive right beside me suddenly awoke in the middle of a long anecdote about how the Mongol invasion had af­fected the Russian character in the Middle Ages. The executive seemed startled and unaware of his surroundings, then glanced at the podium for a moment, felt reassured, and drifted back to sleep, his chin resting flat on his chest.

Gorbachev sounded like a politician from a distant era, from a time before sound bites. He was serious, long-winded, and sometimes dif­ficult to follow. His mere presence at the Mirage was far more impor­tant to this crowd than anything he said. The meaning hit me as I looked around at all the fast food executives, the sea of pinstriped suits and silk ties. In ancient Rome, the leaders of conquered nations were put on display at the Circus. The symbolism was unmistakable; the submission to Rome, complete. Gorbachev's appearance at the Mirage seemed an Americanized version of that custom, a public opportunity for the victors to gloat - though it would have been even more fitting if the fast food convention had been down the road at Caesars Palace.

As a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev never learned when to leave

the stage, a flaw that led to his humiliating defeat in the election of 1996. He made the same mistake in Las Vegas; people got up and left the Grand Ballroom while he was still speaking. "Margaret Thatcher was a lot better;' I heard one executive say to another as they headed for the door. Thatcher had addressed the previous year's Chain Opera­tors Exchange.

The day after Gorbachev's speech at the Mirage, Bob Dylan per­formed at the grand opening of the new Mandalay Bay casino. And billboards along the interstate announced that Peter Lowe's Success 1999 was coming to Las Vegas, with special appearances by Elizabeth Dole and General Colin Powell.

 

an empire of fat

 

FOR M 0 S T 0 F THE twentieth century, the Soviet Union stood as the greatest obstacle to the worldwide spread of American values and the American way of life. The collapse of Soviet Communism has led to an unprecedented "Americanization" of the world, expressed in the growing popularity of movies, CDs, music videos, television shows,

 

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and clothing from the United States. Unlike those commodities, fast food is the one form of American culture that foreign consumers liter­ally consume. By eating like Americans, people all over the world are beginning to look more like Americans, at least in one respect. The United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. More than half of all American adults and about one-quarter of all American children are now obese or overweight. Those proportions have soared during the last few decades, along with the consumption of fast food. The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s. The rate of obesity among American children is twice as high as it was in the late 1970s. According to James O. Hill, a prominent nutritionist at the University of Colorado, "We've got the fattest, least fit generation of kids ever."

The medic lliterature classifies a person as obese if he or she has a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher - a measurement that takes into account both weight and height. For example, a woman who is five-foot-five and weighs 132 pounds has a BMI of 22, which is con­sidered normal. If she gains eighteen pounds, her BMI rises to 25, and she's considered overweight. If she gains fifty pounds, her BMI reaches 30, and she's considered obese. Today about 44 million Ameri­can adults are obese. An additional 6 million are "super-obese"; they weigh about a hundred pounds more than they should. No other na­tion in history has gotten so fat so fast.

A recent study by half a dozen researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of American obesity was

. increasing in ev(!ry state and among both sexes, regardless of age, race, or educational level. In 1991, only four states had obesity rates of 15 percent or higher; today at least thirty-seven states do. "Rarely do chronic conditions such as obesity," the CDC scientists observed, "spread with the speed and dispersion characteristic of a communica­ble disease epidemic." Although the current rise in obesity has a num­ber of complex causes, genetics is not one of them. The American gene pool has not changed radically in the past few decades. What

has changed is the nation's way of eating and living. 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 in­

stead of exercising. Budget cuts have eliminated physical education

 

programs at many schools. And the growth of the fast food industry has made an abundance of high-fat, inexpensive meals widely avail­able.

As people eat more meals outside the home, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat. Commodity prices have fallen so low that the fast food industry has greatly increased its portion sizes, with­out reducing profits, in order to attract customers. The size of a burger has become one of its main selling points. Wendy's offers the Triple Decker; Burger King, the Great American; and Hardee's sells a ham­burger called the Monster. The Little Caesars slogan "Big! Big!" now applies not just to the industry's portions, but to its customers. Over the past forty years in the United States, per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks has more than quadrupled. During the late 1950s the typical soft drink order at a fast food restaurant contai ed about eight ounces of soda; today a "Child" order of Coke at McDon­ald's is twelve ounces. A "Large" Coke is thirty-two ounces - and about 310 calories. In 1972, McDonald's added Large French Fries to its menu; twenty years later, the chain added Super Size Fries, a serv­ing three times larger than what McDonald's offered a generation ago. Super Size Fries have 610 calories and 29 grams of fat. At Carl's Jr. res­taurants, an order of Criss Cut Fries and a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger boasts 73 grams of fat - more fat than ten of the chain's milk shakes.

A number of attempts to introduce healthy dishes (such as the Mc­Lean Deluxe, a hamburger partly composed of seaweed) have proven unsuccessful. A taste for fat developed in childhood is difficult to lose as an adult. At the moment, the fast food industry is heavily pro­moting menu items that contain bacon. "Consumers savor the flavor while operators embrace [the] profit margin;' Advertising Age noted. A decade ago, restaurants sold about 20 percent of the bacon consumed in the United States; now they sell about 70 percent. "Make It Bacon" is one of the new slogans at McDonald's. With the exception of Sub­way (which promotes healthier food), the major chains have appar­ently decided that it's much easier and much more profitable to in­crease the size and the fat content of their portions than to battle eating habits largely formed by years of their own mass marketing.

The cost of America's obesity epidemic extends far beyond emo­tional pain and low self-esteem. Obesity is now second only to smok­ing as a cause of mortality in the United States. The CDC estimates that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of being

 

overweight. The annual health care costs in the United States stem­ming from obesity now approach $240 billion; on top of that Ameri­cans spend more than $33 billion on various weight-loss schemes and diet products. Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility, and strokes. A 1999 study by the American Cancer Society found that overweight people had a much higher rate of premature death. Severely overweight people were four times more likely to die young than people of normal weight. Moderately overweight people were twice as likely to die young. "The message is we're too fat and it's

killing us:' said one of the study's principal authors. Young people

who are obese face not only long-term, but also immediate threats to their health. Severely obese American children, aged six to ten, are now dying from heart attacks caused by their weight.

The obesity epidemic that began in the United States during the late 1970s is now spreading to the rest of the world, with fast food as one of its vectors. Between 1984 and 1993, the number of fast food restau­rants in Great Britain roughly doubled - and so did the obesity rate among adults. The British now eat more fast food than any other na­tionality in Western Europe. They also have the highest obesity rate. Obesity is much less of a problem in Italy and Spain, where spending on fast food is relatively low. The relationship between a nation's fast food consumption and its rate of obesity has not been definitivelyes­tablished through any long-term, epidemiological study. The growing popularity of fast food is just one of many cultural changes that have been brought about by globalization. Nevertheless, it seems wherever America's fast food chains go, waistlines start expanding.

In China, the proportion of overweight teenagers has roughly tri­pled in the past decade. In Japan, eating hamburgers and french fries has not made people any blonder, though it has made them fatter. Overweight people were once a rarity in Japan. The nation's tradi­tional diet of rice, fish, vegetables, and soy products has been deemed one of the healthiest in the world. And yet the Japanese are rapidly abandoning that diet. Consumption of red meat has been rising in Ja­pan since the American occupation after World War II. The arrival of McDonald's in 1971 accelerated the shift in Japanese eating habits. During the 1980s, the sale of fast food in Japan more than doubled; the rate of obesity among children soon doubled, too. Today about one-third of all Japanese men in their thirties - members of the na­tion's first generation raised on Happy Meals and "Bi-gu Ma-kus" ­

 

are overweight. 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. Long common in the United States, these diseases are likely to become widespread in Japan as its fast food

generation ages. More than a decade ago a study of middle-aged Japa­

nese men who had settled in the United States found that their switch to a Western diet doubled their risk of heart disease and tripled their risk of stroke. For the men in the study, embracing an American way of life meant increasing the likelihood of a premature death.

Obesity is extremely difficult to cure. During thousands of years marked by food scarcity, human beings developed efficient physiolog­ical mechanisms to store energy as fat. Until recently, societies rarely enjoyed an overabundance of cheap food. As a result, our bodies are far more efficient at gaining weight than at losing it. Health officials have concluded that prevention, not treatment, offers the best hope of halting the worldwide obesity epidemic. European consumer groups

are pushing for a complete ban on all television advertising directed at

children. In 1991 Sweden banned all TV advertising directed at chil­dren under the age of twelve. Restrictions on ads during children's programming have been imposed in Greece, Norway, Denmark, Aus­tria, and the Netherlands. The eating habits of American kids are widely considered a good example of what other countries must avoid. American children now get about one-quarter of their total vegetable servings in the form of potato chips or french fries. A survey of children's advertising in the European Union (EU) found that 95

percent of the food ads there encouraged kids to eat foods high in

sugar, salt, and fat. The company running the most ads aimed at chil­

dren was McDonald's.

 

mclibel

 

"RESIST AMERICA BEGINNING with Cola:' said a banner at Beijing University in May of 1999. "Attack McDonald's, Storm KFC:' The U.S. Air Force had just bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugo­slavia, and anti-American demonstrations were erupting throughout China. At least a dozen McDonald's and four Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants were damaged by Chinese protesters. For some reason, no Pizza Huts were harmed. "Maybe they think it's Italian:' said a Pizza Hut spokesman in Shanghai.

A generation ago American embassies and oil companies were the

 

most likely targets of overseas demonstrations against "U.S. imperial­ism." Today fast food restaurants have assumed that symbolic role, with McDonald's a particular favorite. In 1995, a crowd of four hun­dred Danish anarchists looted a McDonald's in downtown Copen­hagen, made a bonfire of its furniture in the street, and burned the restaurant to the ground. In 1996, Indian farmers ransacked a Ken­tucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Bangalore, convinced that the chain threatened their traditional agricultural practices. In 1997, a McDon­ald's in the Colombian city of Cali was destroyed by a bomb. In 1998, bombs destroyed a McDonald's in St. Petersburg, Russia, two McDon­ald's in suburban Athens, a McDonald's in the heart of Rio de Janeiro,

and a Planet Hollywood in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1999, Belgian

vegetarians set fire to a Mcb>onald's in Antwerp, and a year later, May Day protesters tore the sign off a McDonald's in London's Trafalgar Square, destroyed the restaurant, and handed out free hamburgers to the crowd. Fearing more violence, McDonald's temporarily closed all fifty of its London restaurants.

In France, a French sheep farmer and political activist named Jose Bove led a group that demolished a McDonald's under construction in his hometown of Millau. Bove's defiant attitude, brief imprison­ment, and impassioned speeches against "lousy food" have made him a hero in France, praised by socialists and conservatives, invited to meetings with the president and the prime minister. He has written a French bestseller entitled The World Is Not for Sale - And Nor Am If In a society where food is a source of tremendous national pride, the McDonald's Corporation has become an easy target, for reasons that are not entirely symbolic. McDonald's is now the largest purchaser of agricultural commodities in France. Bove's message - that French­men should not become "servile slaves at the service of agribusiness" - has struck a chord. During July of 2000 an estimated thirty thou­sand demonstrators gathered in Millau when Jose Bove went on trial, some carrying signs that said "Non it McMerde."

The overseas critics of fast food are far more diverse than Amer­icas old Soviet bloc adversaries. Farmers, leftists, anarchists, national­ists, environmentalists, consumer advocates, educators, health offi­cials, labor unions, and defenders of animal rights have found com­mon ground in a campaign against the perceived Americanization of the world. Fast food has become a target because it is so ubiquitous and because it threatens a fundamental aspect of national identity: how, where, and what people choose to eat.

 

The longest-running and most systematic assault on fast food over­seas has been waged by a pair of British activists affiliated with Lon­don Greenpeace. The loosely organized group was formed in 1971 to

oppose French nuclear weapon tests in the South Seas. It later staged

demonstrations in support of animal rights and British trade unions.

It protested against nuclear power and the Falklands War. The group's

membership was a small, eclectic mix of pacifists, anarchists, vegetari­ans, and libertarians brought together by a commitment to non­

violent political action. They ran the organization without any formal

leadership, even refusing to join the International Greenpeace move­ment.

A typical meeting of London Greenpeace attracted anywhere from

three people to three dozen. 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." Members

of London Greenpeace began to distribute a six-page leaflet called "What's Wrong with McDonald's? Everything they don't want you to know." It accused the fast food chain of promoting Third World pov­erty, selling unhealthy food, exploiting workers and children, tortur­

ing animals, and destroying the Amazon rain forest, among other

things. 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." London Greenpeace distributed the leaflets for four years without attracting much attention. 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.

The libel laws in Great Britain are far more unfavorable to a defen­dant than those in the United States. 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 de­

liberately spread. Under British law, the burden of proof is on the de­

fendant. Allegations that may harm someone's reputation are pre­sumed to be false. Moreover, the defendant in a British court has to

use primary sources, such as firsthand witnesses and official docu­

ments, to prove the accuracy of a published statement. Secondary sources, including peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, are deemed inadmissible as evidence. And the defendant's intentions are irrelevant - a British libel case can be lost because of a truly innocent mistake.

 

 

The McDonald's Corporation had for years taken advantage of

British libel laws to silence its critics. During the 1980s alone, McDon­ald's threatened to sue at least fifty British publications and organiza­tions, including Channel 4, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Sun, student publications, a vegetarian society, and a Scottish youth theater group. The tactic worked, prompting retractions and apologies. The cost of losing a libel case, in both legal fees and damages, could be huge.

The London Greenpeace activists being sued by McDonald's had not written the leaflet in question; they had merely handed it to peo­ple. Nevertheless, their behavior could be ruled libelous. Fearing the potential monetary costs, three of the activists reluctantly appeared in court and apologized to McDonald's. The other two decided to fight.

Helen Steel was a twenty-five-year-old gardener, minibus driver, and bartender who'd been drawn to London Greenpeace by her devo­tion to vegetarianism and animal rights. Dave Morris was a thirty-six­year-old single father, a former postal worker interested in labor issues and the power of multinational corporations. The two friends seemed to stand little chance in court against the world's largest fast food chain. Steel had left school at seventeen, Morris at eighteen; and nei­ther could afford a lawyer. McDonald's, on the other hand, could af­ford armies of attorneys and had annual revenues at the time of about $18 billion. Morris and Steel were denied legal aid and forced to de­fend themselves in front of a judge, instead of a jury. But with some help from the secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, the pair turned the "McLibel case" into the longest trial in British his­tory and a public relations disaster for McDonald's.

The McDonald's Corporation had never expected the case to reach the courtroom. The burden on the defendants was enormous: Morris and Steel had to assemble witnesses and official documents to support the broad assertions in the leaflet. The pair proved to be indefatigable researchers, aided by the McLibel Support Campaign, an international network of activists. By the end of the trial, the court record included 40,000 pages of documents and witness statements, as well as 18,000 pages of transcripts.

McDonald's had made a huge tactical error by asserting that every­thing in the leaflet was libelous - not only the more extreme claims ("McDonald's and Burger King are. . . using lethal poisons to destroy vast areas of Central American rainforest"), but also the more innocu­ous ones ("a diet high in fat, sugar, animal products, and salt. . . is

 

linked with cancers of the breast and bowel, and heart disease"). The blunder allowed Steel and Morris to turn the tables, putting McDon­ald's on trial and forcing a public examination of the chain's labor,

marketing, environmental, nutrition, food safety, and animal welfare

policies. Some of the chain's top executives were forced to appear on

the stand and endure days of cross-examination by the pair of self­

taught attorneys. The British media seized upon the David-and­

Goliath aspects of the story and made the trial front-page news.

After years of legal wrangling, the McLibel trial formally began in March of 1994. It ended more than three years later, when Jus­

tice Rodger Bell submitted an 800-page Judgement. Morris and Steel

were found to have libeled McDonald's. The judge ruled that the two had failed to prove most of their allegations - but had in­

deed proved some. According to Justice Bell's decision, McDonald's did "exploit" children through its advertIsing, endanger the health of its regular customers, pay workers unreasonably low wages, and

bear responsibility for the cruelty inflicted upon animals by many of

its suppliers. Morris and Steel were fined £60,000. The two promptly

announced they would appeal the decision. "McDonald's don't de­serve a penny;' Helen Steel said, "and in any event we haven't got any money."

Evidence submitted during the McLibel trial disclosed much about the inner workings of the McDonald's Corporation. Many of its labor,

food safety, and advertising practices had already been publicly criti­

cized in the United States for years. Testimony in the London court­room, however, provided new revelations about the company's atti- .

tude toward civil liberties and freedom of speech. Morris and Steel were stunned to discover that McDonald's had infiltrated London

Greenpeace with informers, who regularly attended the group's meet­

ings and spied on its members.

The spying had begun in 1989 and did not end until 1991, nearly a

year after the libel suit had been filed. 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. The company had employed at least seven different undercover

agents. During some London Greenpeace meetings, about half the people in attendance were corporate spies. One spy broke into the

London Greenpeace office, took photographs, and stole documents. Another had a six-month affair with a member of London Green­peace while informing on his activities. McDonald's spies inadver­

 

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 248

 

tently spied on each other, unaware that the company was using at least two different detective agencies. They participated in demonstra­tions against McDonald's and gave out anti-McDonald's leaflets. .

During the trial, Sidney Nicholson - the McDonald's vice presi­dent who'd supervised the undercover operation, a former police of­ficer in South Africa and former superintendent in London's Metro­politan Police - admitted in court that McDonald's had used its law enforcement connections to obtain information on Steel and Morris from Scotland Yard. 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 the company's undercover agents later had a change of heart and testified on behalf of the McLibel defendants. "At no time did I believe they were dangerous people;' said Fran Tiller, following her conversion to vegetarianism. "I think they genuinely believed in the issues they were supporting:'

For Dave Morris, perhaps the most disturbing moment of the trial was hearing how McDonald's had obtained his home address. One of its spies admitted in court that a gift of baby clothes bad been a ruse to find out where Morris lived. Morris had unwittingly accepted the gift, believing it to be an act of friendship - and was disgusted to learn that his infant son had for months worn outfits supplied by McDon­ald's as part of its surveillance.            .

I visited Dave Morris one night in February of 1999, as he prepared for an appearance the next day before the Court of Appeal. Morris lives in a small flat above a carpet shop in North London. The apart­ment lacks central heating, the ceilings are sagging, and the place is crammed with books, boxes, files, transcripts, leaflets, and posters an­nouncing various demonstrations. 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. Morris spent about an hour with me, as his son finished homework upstairs. He spoke intensely about Mc­Donald's, but stressed that its arrogant behavior was just one manifes­tation of a much larger problem now confronting the world: the rise of powerful multinationals that shift capital across borders with few qualms, that feel no allegiance to any nation, no loyalty to any group of farmers, workers, or consumers.      .

The British journalist John Vidal, in his book on the McLibel trial,

 

GLOBAL REALIZATION

 

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noted some of the similarities between Dave Morris and Ray Kroc. As Morris offered an impassioned critique of globalization, the com­

parison made sense - both men true believers, charismatic, driven

by ideas outside the mainstream, albeit championing opposite view­

points. During the McLibel trial, Paul Preston, the president of Mc­

Donald's UK, had said, "Fitting into a finely working machine, that's

what McDonald's is about:' And here was Morris, in the living room of his North London flat, warmed by a gas heater in the fireplace, sur­

rounded by stacks of papers and files, caring nothing for money, de­

termined somehow to smash that machine.

On March 31, 1999, the three Court of Appeal justices overruled

parts of the original McLibel verdict, supporting the leaflet's asser­

tions that eating McDonald's food can cause heart disease and that

workers are treated badly. The court reduced the damages owed

by Steel and Morris to about £40,000. The McDonald's Corporation had previously announced that it had no intention of collecting the

money and would no longer try to stop London Greenpeace from dis­

tributing the leaflet (which by then had been translated into twenty­

seven languages). McDonald's was tired of the bad publicity and wanted this case to go away. But Morris and Steel were not yet through

with McDonald's. They appealed the Court of Appeal decision to the

British House of Lords and sued the police for spying on them. Scot­

land Yard settled the case out of court, apologizing to the pair and

paying them £10,000 in damages. When the House of Lords refused to

hear their case, Morris and Steel filed an appeal with the European

Court of Human Rights, challenging the validity not only of the ver­

dict, but also of the British libel laws. As of this writing, the McLibel

case is entering its twelfth year. After intimidating British critics for

years, the McDonald's Corporation picked on the wrong two people.

 

back at the ranch

 

WHEN THE FIRST McDonald's opened in East Germany, in Decem­

ber of 1990, the company was unsure how American food would be

received there. On opening day the McDonald's in Plauen served po­

tato dumplings, a Vogtland favorite, along with hamburgers and fries.

Today hundreds of McDonald's restaurants dot the landscape of east­

ern Germany. In town after town, statues of Lenin have come down

 

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GLOBAL REALIZATION

 

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and statues of Ronald McDonald have gone up. One of the largest is in

Bitterfeld, where a three-story-high, illuminated Ronald can be seen from the autobahn for miles.

During my first visit to PIau en, in October of 1998, McDonald's was the only business open in the central market square. It was Reunifica­tion Day, a national holiday, and everything else was closed, the small

shops selling used clothing and furniture, the pseudo-Irish pub on

one corner, the pizzeria on another. McDonald's was packed, over­

flowing not just with children and their parents, but with teenagers,

seniors, young couples, a cross-section of the town. The restaurant was brightly lit and spotlessly clean. Cheerful middle-aged women took orders behind the counter, worked in the kitchen, delivered food to tables, scrubbed the windows. Most of them had worked at this Mc­

Donald's for years. Some had been there since the day it opened.

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. That day McDonald's was the nicest, cleanest, brightest

place in all of Plauen. Children played with the Hot Wheels and Bar­

bies that came with their Happy Meals, and smiling workers poured

free refills of coffee. Outside the window, three bright red flags bearing

the golden arches fluttered in the wind.

Life after Communism has not been easy in Plauen. At first there was an outpouring of great optimism and excitement. As in other East German towns, people quickly used their new liberty to travel over­seas for the first time. They borrowed money to buy new cars. Accord­

ing to Thomas Kiittler, the hero of Plauen's 1989 uprising, thoughts

about Friedrich von Schiller and the freedom of their forefathers soon

gave way to a hunger for Western consumer goods. Kiittler is disap­

pointed by how fast the idealism of 1989 vanished, but feels little nos­talgia for the old East Germany. Under Communist rule in Plauen, a person could be arrested for watching television broadcasts from the

West or for listening to American rock 'n' roll. Today in Plauen you

can get dozens of channels on cable and even more via satellite. MTV

is popular there, and most of the songs on the radio are in English. Be­

coming part of the larger world, however, has had its costs. Plauen's economy has suffered as one after another, old and inefficient manu­facturing plants closed, throwing people out of work. Since the fall of

the Berlin Wall, Plauen has lost about 10 percent of its population, as

people move away in search of a better life. The town seems unable to

 

break free from its past. Every year a few unexploded bombs from World War II are still discovered and defused.                                                                                            

At the moment, Plauen's unemployment rate is about 20 percent ­twice the rate in Germany as a whole. You see men in their forties, a lost generation, too young to retire but too old to fit into the new scheme, staggering drunk in the middle of the day. The factory work­ers who bravely defied and brought down the old regime are the group who've fared worst, the group with the wrong skills and the least hope. Others have done quite well.

Manfred Voigt, the McDonald's franchisee in Plauen, is now a suc­cessful businessman who, with his wife, Brigitte, vacations in Florida every year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Manfred Voigt attributed his recent success to forces beyond his control. "It was dumb luck;' Voigt explained; "fate:' He and his wife had no money and could not understand why McDonald's had chosen them to own its first restaurant in East Germany, why the company had trained and financed them. One explanation, never really explored in the Wall Street Journal profile, might be that the Voigts were one of the most powerful couples in Plauen under the old regime. They headed the lo­cal branch of Konsum, the state-controlled foodservice monopoly. To­day the Voigts are one of Plauen's wealthiest couples; they own two other McDonald's in nearby towns. Throughout the former Eastern bloc, members .of the old Communist elite have had the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism. They had the right connections and many of the right skills. They now own some of the most lucrative franchises.

The high unemployment rate in Plauen has created social and political instability. What seems lacking is a stable middle ground. Roughly a third of the young people in eastern Germany now express support for various nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Right-wing ex­tremists have declared large parts of the east to be "foreigner-free" zones, where immigrants are not welcome. The roads leading into PIau en are decorated with signs posted by the Deutschland Volks Un­ion, a right-wing party. "Germany for the Germans;' the signs say. "Jobs for Germans, Not Foreigners:' Neo- Nazi skinheads have thus far not caused much trouble in Plauen, though a black person today needs real courage to walk the city's streets at night. The opposition to American fast food voiced by many environmentalists and left-wing groups does not seem to be shared by German groups on the far right. When I asked an employee at the McDonald's in Plauen if the restau­rant had ever been the target of neo- Nazis, she laughed and said there'd never been any threats of that kind. People in the area did not consider McDonald's to be "foreign."

Around the time that Plauen got its McDonald's in 1990, a new nightclub opened in a red brick building on the edge of town. "The Ranch" has an American flag and a Confederate flag hanging out front. Inside there's a long bar, and the walls are decorated with old­fashioned farm implements, saddles, bridles, and wagon wheels. Frieder Stephan, the owner of The Ranch, was inspired by photo­

. graphs of the American West, but gathered all the items on the walls from nearby farms. The place looks like a bar in Cripple Creek, circa 1895. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frieder Stephan was a disc jockey on an East German tourist ferry. He secretly listened to Creedance Clearwater, the Stones, and the Lovin' Spoonful. 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 city's country-western fans call themselves "Vogtland Cowboys," put on their western boots and ten­gallon hats at night, and hit the town, drinking at The Ranch or join­ing the Square Dance Club at a bar called the White Magpie. The Square Dance Club is sponsored by Thommy's Western Store on Friedrich Engels Avenue. Plauen now has a number of small western­wear shops like Thommy's that sell imported cowboy boots, cowboy posters, . fancy belt buckles, work shirts with snaps, and Wrangler jeans. While teenagers in Colorado Springs today could not care less about cowboys, kids in Plauen are sporting bolo ties and cowboy hats.

Every Wednesday night, people gather at The Ranch for line danc­ing. Members of Plauen's American Car Club pull up in their big Ford and Chevy trucks. Others come from miles away, dressed in their western best, ready to dance. Most of them are working class, and many are unemployed. Their ages range from seven years old to sev­enty. If somebody doesn't know how to line-dance, a young woman named Petra gives lessons. People wear their souvenir T-shirts from Utah. They smoke Marlboros and drink beer. They listen to Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash - and they dance, kicking up their boots, twirling their partners, waving their cowboy hats in the air. And for a few hours the spirit of the American West fills this funky bar deep in the heart of Saxony, in a town that has seen too much his­tory, and the old dream lives on, the dream of freedom without limits, self-reliance, and a wide-open frontier,