Eric Schlosser Lecture

The lecture given by Eric Schlosser was very informative, covering the truth about fast food. Fast food was born in Southern California with the McDonald's brothers. They wanted workers who didn't have to be skilled or trained so that they were easily replaceable. After Ray Crock tried McDonald's he soon became the founder of the McDonald's corporation. His values were based on uniformity, conformity, and cheapness. He opened up McDonald's all over the place, including one right across the street from the McDonald's brothers' original location, putting them completely out of business. His morals went something like this: "If a non-conformist was drowning, Id go over and put a hose in their mouth." This guy's big on conformity. He wanted uniform food bought by big distributors. McDonald's went from 171 local supplies to 4 big companies for their beef distribution.

McDonald's soon became the largest fast food employer for minimum wage jobs. The job description attached to working at McDonald's is low pay, high turnover, no benefits, no training... or as Webster's likes to call it: a "McJob." McDonald's took meat-packing jobs from being a great, high-paying, well-respected job, to a low wage, low benefit job given to illegal immigrants. This had a huge impact on American workers, as well as on livestock.

Schlosser covered the health risks of fast foods, including breast and prostate cancers (which may come from the hormones injected in to animals ("you are what what you eat eats")). Antibiotics are creating superbugs. The feedlots contribute to more water pollution than many big cities combined. Fish have deformed sexual organs because the runoff contains hormones. Meat in our stores come from cloned, patented animals that don't have to be labeled. Obesity rates have increased with the increase of fast food availability. Two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight. A "Big Gulp" at McDonald's contains 50 tsp. of sugar... wow!

So why do we keep eating fast food? False and misguiding advertising! McDonald's is the largest distributor of toys. And why wouldn't your kids want to eat dinner at a place that has the towns biggest jungle gym? McDonald's targets them young... as young as 8 and 9 months old! This is the age where we first begin developing our eating habits.

These fast food monsters get away with all of this, including selling contaminated food, because you don't get sick until a few days later. By then it's impossible to directly link it back to fast food.

Schlosser dubs himself a "conservative" because ultimately he wants a food system that will conserve and preserve the land. Now this sounds more like it...