Chapter 4 Fast Food Nation

1-Page Summary i-Page Book Summary of Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal tells the story of how the United States—and, increasingly, the world—has become shaped and defined by the fast food industry. From its origins in the new suburbs of California in the 1950s, fast food has spread across every corner of the nation and profoundly altered the style American food is produced, sold, and consumed. The rise of fast nutrient has negatively impacted American life, through manipulative marketing aimed at children, exploitative labor practices, the destruction of American family farms, lax food safety standards, and a national epidemic of obesity. Below are some of the key themes and topics from Fast Food Nation.

Rise of Fast Food

Fast nutrient began in the early 1950s in Southern California, which experienced a massive population growth in the years following World War Two. This population growth also occurred at a time when rates of auto buying were ascension, causing the region to be heavily shaped past the auto. LA'due south low-density, detached-dwelling model of growth was ideally suited for the burgeoning fast food manufacture, as motorists could drive through for a quick meal equally they passed past the restaurants (conveniently located off the new freeways).

The McDonald's System

In the 1950s in San Bernardino, the McDonald brothers implemented a standardized system of nutrient preparation that increased speed, lowered prices, and additional sales. Food training was divided into separate jobs done by different workers, eliminating the need for skilled and expensive short-order cooks. This was the importation of assembly line principles into a commercial kitchen. The business model was a runaway success, enabling McDonald's to save labor costs and undercut their contest.

A businessman named Ray Kroc witnessed the success of the McDonald's arrangement and saw that it could be replicated on a national calibration. He partnered with the McDonald brothers and began opening new franchises across the country, eventually buying them out in 1961. He established the chain'southward core values—Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value—and understood the demand to create a wholesome, clean, All-American epitome for McDonald'due south. Critically, he understood that children would be the chain's near valuable customers and directed the bulk of its marketing at them.

Selling to Kids

Considering kids exert a strong influence over what adults purchase, marketers know that kids can be powerful surrogate salespeople for their products—and no one has internalized this lesson better than the fast nutrient industry. They aggressively market to children, through telly advertisements featuring brilliant and colorful mascots, on-site playgrounds, and cross-promotional campaigns with toy companies and film studios. The most famous example of the latter is the Happy Meal, within which McDonald's packages the hottest children's toys equally a "gratuitous" promotion. Major toy crazes like Pokemon cards, Beanie Babies, Tamogotchis, and Cabbage Patch Kids have all been boosted by synergistic fast food tie-ins.

Mayhap about insidiously, fast food chains accept even brokered deals with school districts, enabling them to promote their high-fat, high-saccharide products directly to children through jitney and hallway advertisements, endorsement deals, and even direct provision of school lunches.

Labor Exploitation

Past minimizing the level of human skill that goes into food preparation, fast food bondage have at their disposal a workforce that is cheap, piece of cake to replace, and easily controlled. And they are...

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Fast Food Nation Summary Prologue: We Are What Nosotros Consume

Most Americans have eaten fast nutrient at some time or another in their lives. As the accomplish of major fast food chains similar McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger Rex, and Taco Bell has extended across the planet, the aforementioned tin increasingly be said of most people around the world. As information technology has done so, fast food has come to stand as a hallmark of our culture and our time. Merely as we ponder the amphorae and marble ruins of the aboriginal Romans, so may future scholars written report the discarded Big Mac wrappers and gilded-arched fast nutrient restaurants of our culture.

For indeed, food is ane of the defining traits of a civilisation—it shows how we live, how our economy functions, how our political institutions operate, and what we value and prioritize as a society. Since its rise in the postwar United States, **fast food has worked its style deep into the fabric of America's social, economic, educational, and political...

Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 1: SoCal Origins

The fast food manufacture has its roots in the run a risk-taking, unconventional ideas of a handful of entrepreneurs. A combination of United states of america public policy choices and broader macroeconomic trends fostered an ideal business climate in Southern California for their success and laid the groundwork for an economic transformation of the region—one that would eventually become the epitome for the rest of the country. Taxpayer-funded irrigation projects and publicly subsidized highways were drawing people to California in droves, laying the groundwork for a mass consumer-driven retail economy (powered by the ease and convenience of the auto) that California would export to the other 49 states.

This population explosion was also driven by another stream of federal investment in Southern California—defence spending. During Earth War Ii and the years immediately following, the United states regime pumped nigh $xx billion into California, building airplane factories, steel mills, military machine bases, and naval ports. During the war years alone, federal spending accounted for approximately half of Southern Californians' personal income.

If the old cities of the East Coast were shaped by the...

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Fast Food Nation Summary Affiliate 2: Marketing to Kids

The McDonald brothers may have started the visitor and given information technology its famous name, but their vision for information technology was relatively limited. They were content being regionally successful restaurant entrepreneurs, making approximately $100,000 per year (past no means a modest sum in the mid-1950s). They did non see the global potential of what they had created—that vision was Ray Kroc's.

Kroc was an unlikely individual to emerge as ane of the leading figures in a new and rising industry that was largely driven past youth culture. When he showtime visited the McDonald'southward Self-Service Eating house in 1954, he was already in his fifties, with a largely unremarkable career as a travelling salesman behind him.

Seeing the potential of the McDonald's organization and how information technology could exist replicated on a national (and somewhen global) scale, Kroc seized the opportunity. He bought from the McDonald brothers the correct to franchise McDonald'due south nationwide. Taken at face value, this deal was appealing to the brothers—they could stay at home and count their coin while Kroc travelled across the land promoting the make and taking most of the risks. But Kroc would decide the ultimate direction and shape of...

Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 3: McJobs

The fast food industry has standardized, commodified, and homogenized the skillset of the state'south labor forcefulness. Going back to the early days of the McDonald brothers' "Speedee Service" arrangement, fast food has employed a depression-skill, low-wage system of labor that keeps costs—and therefore, consumer prices—to a minimum. By minimizing the level of human skill that goes into nutrient preparation, fast food leaders have at their disposal a workforce that is cheap, easy to supervene upon, and easily controlled.

And they are ever finding new ways to continue their employees from gaining any leverage in the workplace. Automatic condiment dispensers, robotic sensors at drive-throughs, digitized timers for cooking french chips, and other technological innovations ensure that McDonald's and other fast food giants become maximum efficiency out of their employees, with paychecks equally low equally possible.

Commodified Production, Commodified Workforce

Anyone who'southward been inside a fast food restaurant can't help simply notice that the workers backside the counter are disproportionately young—often teenagers.

(Shortform annotation: According to _[The...

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Shortform Exercise: Challenging the Chains

Call up about how fast nutrient'due south practices might accept impacted your life.

Accept you ever felt exploited by an employer? If and so, describe the situation in a few sentences.

Fast Food Nation Summary Affiliate 4: The Ascension of Big Agribusiness

Considering fast food was so successful, its labor practices have been exported throughout the nutrient service industry and up the supply chain to farmers, ranchers, and meatpackers. And then much food in America is no longer a product of artisanal craftsmanship, created by a skilled cook—it is a manufactured, mass-produced commodity.

In this chapter, we're going further upwards the supply chain. We're going to explore how the economics of the fast food industry have reshaped American agronomics, examine where your fries actually come up from, and why they taste the manner they do.

J.R. Simplot

It's hard to tell the story of fast nutrient's meteoric success without telling the story of the french fry. And it's difficult to practise that without telling the story of John Richard Simplot, America's irish potato king.

Born in 1909, his family moved to Idaho before long after he was born to establish a farm (made possible thanks to government-funded irrigation projects and gratis public land). Leaving the family unit's homestead at fifteen, he went into the potato industry. His business concern grew throughout the 1920s and 1930s equally he forged relationships with bolt brokers and farmers all over the country. By 1941, he was the largest...

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Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 5: In the Slaughter-house

In the concluding chapter, we examined how cattle ranchers are exploited past the demands of the fast food giants and the major meatpackers. In this chapter, we'll explore how workers (and animals) inside those meatpacking facilities are similarly harmed by the inhumane system of nutrient product that fast food has wrought.

Meatpacking, once a heavily unionized, high-skill, and well-paying profession, has been transformed into a dangerous and low-paying task performed by some of the most vulnerable and easily exploited members of American society.

The IBP Revolution

Modern American meatpacking got its start with a man named Warren Montfort. Montfort realized that in that location were major advantages to feeding cattle grain instead of grass (which had been the standard up to that signal)—the meat was fattier and more tender and could be eaten within days after slaughter. On top of that, New Deal-era agronomical subsidies fabricated grain an inexpensive food for livestock. He became a major figure in the cattle-feeding industry. In 1960, he decided to go into the slaughtering business, opening a minor slaughterhouse in the town of Greeley, Colorado. At this fourth dimension, these were still high-paying...

Shortform Do: Reevaluating Your Value Meal

Think more deeply about what goes into your fast nutrient meal.

Why exercise you think the major fast food chains take such a powerful economic grip over the nation'southward food producers?

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Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 6: The Jungle, Redux

In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, which shocked the censor (and turned the breadbasket) of the nation by exposing audiences to the dangerous and unsanitary conditions in America's slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. Scenes that depicted tubercular hogs being led to slaughter and workers being maimed and killed on the task (so packed into sausages) revolted and outraged readers at the dawn of the 20th century. The novel inspired the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, which was tasked with ensuring nationwide food-safe standards.

If Upton Sinclair were alive today, he would exist aghast at atmospheric condition in today's meatpacking industry and marvel at how little has changed. The meat you encounter at your local supermarket (or in your Big Mac) gives little hint of the gruesome and dangerous process backside how information technology got in that location.

Walking Through Blood

Truly disturbing scenes look those who visit a slaughterhouse—or the workers who toil in them. Decapitated cattle carcasses. Organs yanked out of expressionless animals with bare hands. Talocrural joint-deep pools of blood. Workers severing the carotid arteries of dead cows. All of this is just office of the scenery on a typical...

Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 7: Contamination Nation

Beyond its exploitative labor practices at every level of the supply chain, fast nutrient has also proven an platonic vector for the spread of foodborne pathogens into America's food system. Because of the fast food manufacture'south demands for highly centralized production and enormous scale, tainted meat (especially the ground beef used in hamburgers) candy at one meatpacking establish tin cause a nationwide epidemic of food poisoning—with tragic and deadly consequences.

Going Viral

Outbreaks of E. coli, a virulent pathogen primarily establish in beef, have become far more common since the ascension of fast food. I 1997 outbreak was traced to a single plant in Nebraska that had been built to supply basis beef to Burger King, resulting in the nationwide recall of 35 1000000 pounds of meat (25 million of which had already been eaten). Most of the other major foodborne pathogens like Salmonella, Listeria, and Clostridium are acquired by animal carrion making it into the meat we consume.

Foodborne pathogens cause more than than merely an upset stomach. They can lead to heart disease, neurological disorders, kidney damage, and even expiry. And they're becoming more mutual and more widespread...

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Fast Food Nation Summary Chapter 8: Fast Food Earth

Fast food began in Southern California as a quintessentially American product, boosted by U.s. postwar prosperity and powered by the nation's growing rates of automobile ownership, highway structure, and suburban sprawl. From these roots, the industry expanded to take over the rest of the land. Merely it hasn't stopped there: fast food is at present available in almost every country on the planet. Through this global conquest, it has reshaped how the unabridged globe eats and lives.

Autumn of the Atomic number 26 Pall, Rising of the Gilded Arches

The collapse of the Soviet Union, kickoff with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending in the final dissolution of the superpower state in 1991, was a dramatic moment in world history. All across Fundamental and Eastern Europe, people took to the streets, refused to obey the orders of Soviet police and armed services officers, overthrew puppet Communist governments, and participated in free autonomous elections for the showtime time ever. Trivial did they know that the fall of the Soviet empire would betoken the rise of another: that of fast food.

**But months after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, McDonald's announced that information technology planned to open a location in...

Shortform Exercise: Fighting Fast Food

Think through how the world can button back against the fast nutrient chains.

Do you think fast food bondage should exist held responsible for the violations committed by the meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses that supply them? Explicate why or why not.

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Fast Food Nation Summary Epilogue: How to Fight Dorsum

It seems similar fast food is an unstoppable force as information technology reshapes communities and cultures, forces workers into exploitative relationships, contributes to global health bug, and despoils the surroundings. Still, there are concrete steps that workers, activists, and elected officials can take to bring the manufacture to heel.

Congress should ban companies that sell loftier-fat and loftier-sugar products from using the public airwaves to annunciate to children.
The regime should eliminate tax breaks and public subsidies for fast food chains that exploit their workers through loftier turnover, while teaching them minimal chore skills.
States and the federal government should pass legislation that makes it easier for fast nutrient workers to organize labor unions. This would provide a real...

Shortform Exercise: Terminal Takeaways

Explore the main ideas in Fast Food Nation.

Do you swallow fast nutrient? If and then, will reading this summary change that? Explain why or why not in a few sentences.

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