Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation was published on April 26, 2001, as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spread across Great Britain, providing ghastly televised images of sheep and cattle burning in funeral pyres. At the same time, European governments were beginning to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cattle potentially infected with mad cow disease (BSE). These two calamities no doubt generated interest in the book and its critique of industrialized agriculture. Long after mad cow and foot-and-mouth receded from the news, however, Fast Food Nation continued to attract readers. Its success should not be attributed to my literary style, my storytelling ability, or the novelty of my arguments. Had the same book been published a decade ago, with the same words in the same order, it probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention. Not just in the United States, but throughout western Europe and Japan, people are beginning to question the massive, homogenizing systems that produce, distribute, and market their food. The unexpected popularity of Fast Food Nation, I believe, has a simple, yet profound, explanation. The times are changing.

Aside from a brief mention on page 202, Fast Food Nation did not address mad cow disease or its implications. When I started working on the book a few years ago, the threat of BSE in the United States seemed largely hypothetical. E. coli 0157:H7, on the other hand, was sickening tens of thousands of Americans every year. Those illnesses were often linked to the consumption of tainted ground beef, and the meatpacking industry’s refusal to deal effectively with the problem of fecal contamination seemed a good example of the weaknesses in America’s food safety system. The harms caused by E. coli 0157:H7 have not diminished since the publication of Fast Food Nation. But mad cow disease now poses an even greater potential threat to anyone who loves hamburgers — and to the companies that sell them. Among other things, this afterword provides a brief account of the risks that BSE may pose, the government efforts to reduce those risks, and the remarkable power that the major fast food chains wield over the meatpacking industry. Mad cow disease is important today, not just as a deadly foodborne illness, but also as a powerful symbol of all that is wrong about the industrialization of farm animals.

On March 29, 1996, the Food and Drug Administration announced that in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE in the United States, the agency would “expedite” new rules prohibiting the use of certain animal proteins in cattle feed. American consumer groups had been demanding tough feed restrictions for years and were planning to sue the FDA if it refused to take action. Nine days earlier, Stephen Dorrell, the British health minister, had surprised Parliament by acknowledging for the first time that mad cow disease might cross the species barrier and infect human beings — a possibility that his government had vehemently denied for years. Great Britain was soon engulfed in a mad cow panic. Ten young people had developed a previously unknown ailment, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), that literally destroyed their brains. The disease was tentatively linked to the consumption of tainted beef. Cattle that had eaten feed containing the remains of infected animals now seemed responsible for transmitting the pathogen to human beings. Some of the young people with vCJD, Science magazine noted, had been “keen consumers of beef burgers.” The McDonald’s Corporation promptly announced that it was suspending the purchase of British beef.

The FDA’s vow to act quickly soon encountered resistance from the American cattle, meatpacking, meat-processing, feed-manufacturing, and rendering industries. Animal protein was an inexpensive feed additive that promoted growth, and slaughterhouses produced huge volumes of waste that needed to go somewhere. At the time, American cattle were eating about 2 billion pounds of animal protein every year — mainly the remains of other cattle. About three-quarters of all American cattle were being fed animal protein, and dairy cattle were the most likely to eat it in significant amounts. They were also the most likely to wind up as fast food hamburgers one day.

The National Renderers Association, the American Feed Industry Association, the Fats & Protein Research Foundation, and the Animal Protein Producers Industry opposed an FDA ban. Spokesmen for the rendering industry asserted that the link between mad cow disease and human illness was “totally unsupported by any scientific evidence.” They said that a ban on feeding dead cattle to cattle would be “unfeasible, impractical, and unenforceable.” They thought any feed change should remain voluntary; strict new FDA regulations would bring little real benefit and cause great economic harm. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association opposed a total ban on animal proteins, suggesting instead that feed restrictions should be limited to certain organs known to transmit mad cow: brains, spinal cords, eyeballs. The American Meat Institute called for muscle meat to be exempted from any FDA ban, along with fats, blood, blood products, and intestinal material. The National Pork Producers Council said there was absolutely no harm in allowing cattle to continue eating dead pigs.

Consumer groups and public health officials wanted strict controls on what livestock could be fed. The Consumers Union demanded a total ban on the feeding of “all mammal remains to all food animals.” Such a ban was now being imposed in Great Britain; scientists there had demonstrated in 1990 that pigs could be infected, through injection, with a variant of mad cow disease. Moreover, a British ban on the feeding of ruminants (goats, sheep, cattle, elk, deer) to other ruminants had not been entirely successful at halting the spread of BSE. Prohibited material intended for poultry and hogs had, one way or another, still wound up being fed to cattle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that, at a bare minimum, the feeding of ruminants to ruminants had to be outlawed in order to prevent an outbreak of BSE.

On August 4, 1997, almost a year and a half after the FDA promised a speedy response to the threat of mad cow, new animal-feed restrictions took effect. “The United States has no BSE,” the agency declared, “and the final rule provides the necessary feed controls… should BSE occur here.” The FDA described its new ban as “mammalian-to-ruminant, with exceptions.’ Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs and cats could no longer be fed to cattle. Rendering plants and feed mills would have to prevent these banned ingredients from mingling with feedstuffs that cattle were still allowed to eat: dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants, regardless of what kind of meat those leftovers contained. Extensive records had to be kept on the disposition of various animal proteins, and feeds that were now prohibited for cattle had to be clearly labeled as such. There were no new restrictions, however, on what could be fed to poultry, hogs, zoo animals, or pets. Indeed, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, the National Food Processors Association, and the Pet Food Institute successfully lobbied against any new labeling requirement for pet foods. These industry groups rightly worried that the FDA’s proposed warning label — “Do not feed to ruminants” — might alarm consumers about what their pets were actually being fed.

The dire predictions of the meat, feed, and rendering industries — their claims that new FDA rules would create havoc and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars — proved unfounded. Cattle remains that had previously been fed to cattle were instead fed to pets, hogs, and poultry. Aside from slightly higher transportation costs, the new feed restrictions had a negligible economic effect. One rendering industry supplier told Meat Marketing & Technology magazine that the whole rule-making process had proven to be “a remarkable example of cooperation between the industry and the FDA.” That cooperation, another rendering executive said, had “protected the beef industry and the rendering industry” without creating “a mood in the country that recycled protein ingredients would be harmful.” The trade journal noted that some of the wording of the new FDA rules had been taken “verbatim” from the rendering industry’s own recommendations.

In the United States, mad cow gradually receded from the headlines — until January, 2001. For more than a decade, countries in the European Union had assured the public that BSE had not been detected in their cattle. Which was true, because relatively few of their cattle had been tested for the disease. Once widespread testing began in Europe, the actual scale of the mad cow epidemic started to become clear. Switzerland was the first to begin routine testing; the number of BSE cases there soon doubled. Then Denmark began testing and discovered its first infected animal, followed by new cases in Spain and Germany. After widespread testing began in France, the number of BSE cases there increased fivefold. On January 1, 2001, the European Union launched a program that required BSE testing for all cattle older than 30 months. Intended to calm fears of mad cow, the EU program had the opposite effect, as more and more infected cattle were discovered. On January 15, the first case of BSE was found in Italy. The infected animal was discovered at a slaughterhouse near Modena that supplied ground beef to McDonald’s restaurants in a number of European countries.

The fear of mad cow disease caused beef sales in the EU to plummet by as much as 50 percent, and news from the United States was hardly reassuring to consumers there. A federal investigation of American feed mills and rendering plants found that many companies had not been taking the threat of mad cow — or the FDA’s new feed regulations — very seriously. More than one-quarter of the firms handling “prohibited” feed neglected to add a label warning that it should never be given to cattle. One-fifth of the firms handling both prohibited feeds and feeds approved for cattle had no system in place to prevent commingling or cross-contamination. And about one out of every ten rendering firms was completely unaware that the FDA had passed feed restrictions to prevent the spread of mad cow. In Colorado, more than one-quarter of the cattle-feed producers had somehow never heard about the new rules.

The federal government’s apparent inability to keep prohibited feed away from cattle prompted the McDonald’s Corporation to take action. The company’s sales in Europe had already fallen by 10 percent, and American publicity about mad cow was raising doubts about the wisdom of eating any hamburgers, let alone Big Macs. Officials from the FDA and the USDA, as well as representatives from the leading meatpacking and rendering companies, were quietly invited to discuss the feed issue at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. On March 13, the McDonald’s Corporation announced that its ground beef suppliers would be required to supply documentation showing that FDA feed rules were being strictly followed — or McDonald’s would no longer buy their beef.

IBP, Excel, and ConAgra immediately agreed to follow McDonald’s directive, vowing that no cattle would be purchased without proper certification. Every rancher and feedlot would have to supply signed affidavits promising that banned feeds had never been given to their cattle. The American Meat Institute, which routinely fought against any mandatory food-safety measures proposed by the federal government, made no complaint about these new rules. “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect,” said an AMI spokeswoman. What the FDA had failed to achieve — after nearly five years of industry consultation and halfhearted regulation — the McDonald’s Corporation accomplished in a matter of weeks. “Because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart,” a McDonald’s spokesman explained, “we can use that leadership to provide more focus and more order throughout the beef system.”

wrong wrong wrong

FOR THIS PAPERBACK EDITION Penguin has included quotations from some favorable reviews of Fast Food Nation. In the interest of balance, I’d like to quote a few contrary opinions. “McGarbage,” wrote a correspondent for the National Review Online. “Schlosser wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word ‘dunce.”’ I was described, moreover, as a “health fascist,” and “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” and a “hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state.” The book was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal not by one of the paper’s fine investigative journalists, but by a right-wing member of its editorial staff. Among other things, she accused me of producing a “hodgepodge of impressions, statistics, anecdotes, and prejudices.” A spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute said that my evidence of worker safety problems in meatpacking plants was “anecdotal,” and that I had “vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair.” The restaurant industry did not like Fast Food Nation, either. “In addition to acting like the ‘food police’, and trying to coerce the American consumer never to eat fast food again,” the National Restaurant Association said, “[Schlosser] recklessly disparages an industry that has contributed tremendously to our nation.”

The McDonald’s Corporation also gave Fast Food Nation an unfavorable review. “The real McDonald’s bears no resemblance to anything described in [Schlosser’s] book,” said a company statement. “He’s wrong about our people, wrong about our jobs, and wrong about our food.” Contrary to what McDonald’s executives may believe, a sincere passion for accuracy led me to document every assertion in this book. Although Fast Food Nation has been strongly attacked, thus far its critics have failed to cite any errors in the text. Spokesmen for the meatpacking industry and the fast food industry have shied away from specifics, offering general denouncements of my work and leaving it at that. I am grateful to those readers who’ve taken the time to inform me about typos, misspellings, and other small mistakes. Mike Callicrate — an iconoclastic feedlot owner in Kansas who would make a fine copy editor — pointed out that I’d miscalculated some cattle manure statistics. The error has been corrected.

There is one criticism of Fast Food Nation that needs to be addressed. A number of people have said that I was too hard on the Republican Party, that an anti-Republican bias seems to pervade the book. Fast Food Nation has no hidden partisan agenda; the issues that it addresses transcend party politics. In retrospect, I could have been more critical of the Clinton administration’s ties to agribusiness. Had I devoted more space to the poultry industry, for example, I would have examined the close links between Bill Clinton and the Tyson family. The FDA’s failure to investigate the health risks of biotech foods and its lackadaisical effort to keep cattle remains out of cattle feed also occurred during the Clinton years.

Nevertheless, it is a sad but undeniable fact that for the past two decades the right wing of the Republican Party has worked closely with the fast food industry and the meatpacking industry to oppose food safety laws, worker safety laws, and increases in the minimum wage. One of President George W. Bush’s first acts in office was to rescind a new ergonomics standard, backed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), that would have protected millions of workers from cumulative trauma injuries. The National Restaurant Association and the American Meat Institute applauded Bush’s move. The newly appointed chairman of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which oversees all legislation pertaining to OSHA, is Representative Charles Norwood, a Republican from Georgia. During the 1990s Norwood sponsored legislation that would have prevented OSHA from inspecting unsafe workplaces or fining negligent employers. He has publicly suggested that some workers may actually be getting their repetitive stress injuries from skiing and playing too much tennis, not from their jobs.

One of the Bush administration’s first food-safety decisions was to stop testing the National School Lunch Program’s ground beef for Salmonella. The meatpacking industry’s lobbyists were delighted; they had worked hard to end the testing, which the industry considered expensive, inconvenient, and unnecessary. But consumer groups were outraged. In the ten months that the USDA had been testing ground beef intended for schoolchildren, roughly 5 million pounds were rejected because of Salmonella contamination. The decision to halt the tests generated a fair amount of bad publicity. Three days after it was announced, Secretary of Agriculture Ann M. Veneman said that she’d never authorized the new policy, reversed course, and promised that the school-lunch program’s Salmonella testing would continue.

Ideally, food safety would be a non-partisan issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, Labour or Conservative, Social Democrat or Christian Democrat — you still have to eat. In recent years the Democrats have been far more willing than the Republicans to support tough food-safety legislation in the United States. But that was not always the case. It was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who had the nerve to condemn dangerous concentrations of economic power, battle the meatpacking industry, and win passage of the nation’s first food-safety law. Should that sort of spirit guide the Republican Party once again, there will be fewer reasons for criticizing its policies.

Of the many reactions to Fast Food Nation, the most surprising were the international events partly set in motion by Chapter 5, “Why the Fries Taste Good.” A couple of months after the book’s publication, Hitesh Shah, a software designer in Los Angeles, contacted McDonald’s to find out if their french fries really did contain animal products. He was a regular customer at McDonald’s, a vegetarian, and a devout Jain. His religion, Jainism, prohibits not just eating animal products but also wearing them. Jainist monks cover their noses and mouths with cloth to avoid inhaling any insects. Hitesh Shah was upset by the e-mail that McDonald’s Home Office Customer Satisfaction Department sent him on March 28. “For flavor enhancement, McDonald’s french fry suppliers use a minuscule amount of beef flavoring as an ingredient in the raw product,” it said. “…(W)e are sorry if this has caused any confusion.” McDonald’s fries did in fact contain some beef; that’s why they taste so good. Shah forwarded the e-mail to Viji Sundaram, a reporter at India-West, a California weekly with a large Hindu readership. Cows are considered sacred animals by Hindus and cannot legally be slaughtered in India. Sundaram briefly conducted her own investigation, confirmed the pertinent details of my french fry chapter and of Hitesh Shah’s e-mail, then wrote an article for India-West (“Where’s the Beef? It’s in Your French Fries”) that outraged Hindus and vegetarians worldwide.

After reading the India-West article, Harish Bharti, a Seattle attorney, filed a class-action lawsuit against the McDonald’s Corporation, alleging that the chain had deliberately misled vegetarians about the true content of its fries, causing great emotional damage and endangering the souls of Hindu consumers. “Eating a cow for a Hindu,” Bharti later explained, “would be like eating your own mother.” When news of the lawsuit reached India, a crowd of five hundred Hindu nationalists marched to a McDonald’s in a suburb of Bombay and ransacked the restaurant. At another McDonald’s in Bombay, an angry crowd smeared cow dung on a statue of Ronald McDonald. In New Delhi, activists from the nationalist Shiv Sena party staged a demonstration in front of McDonald’s Indian headquarters. “We came to warn them to shut down the restaurants,” a Shiv Sena leader said, calling upon the McDonald’s Corporation to leave India immediately. The timing of the protests was unfortunate for the company. McDonald’s was planning to triple the number of restaurants in India over the next few years and had just opened the nation’s first drive-through, near the Taj Mahal.

“If you visit McDonald’s anywhere in the world, the great taste of our world famous French Fries and Big Mac is the same,” a company Web site declared. “At McDonald’s we have a saying, ‘One Taste Worldwide.’” Given such pronouncements, the outrage among Hindus in India seemed justified. The dispute over beef in the fries soon revealed, however, that McDonald’s was in fact using different ingredients in different countries. McDonald’s India assured customers and protesters that its fries were never cooked in oil containing animal products, a fact that Bombay health authorities later confirmed through chemical analysis. Nor was beef added to the fries at McDonald’s in Great Britain, a country with a sizeable Hindu population. The company was quietly adjusting its french fry recipe to suit varying cultural preferences and taboos. In Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Australia, McDonald’s still made fries the macho, old-fashioned way, cooking them in beef tallow.

In the United States, the McDonald’s Corporation took the highly unusual step of issuing an apology. “We regret if customers felt that the information provided [about the fries] was not complete enough to meet their needs,” the company said. “If there was confusion, we apologize.” The statement did not satisfy Harish Bharti or the other attorneys who’d filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of America’s 1 million Hindus and 15 million vegetarians. Bharti argued that “confusion” was the wrong word; McDonald’s had been lying to Hindus and vegetarians for years, telling them it used “100 percent vegetable oil” when it didn’t. Bharti refused to drop the lawsuit, hoping to punish McDonald’s for its insensitivity toward religious minorities and to teach it a lesson that other American companies would not ignore. “We apologize for any confusion,” a McDonald’s spokesman responded, “but again, we have never made any vegetarian claims about our french fries — never.”

Not long afterward, Bharti received a letter from a woman in Florida. The letter had been written on May 5, 1993, by a manager at McDonald’s Customer Satisfaction Department. The letter was a response to the woman’s inquiry. It said: “Thank you for contacting us regarding McDonald’s menu selections for vegetarians. We appreciate your thoughts, and hope the following information will interest you… we presently serve several items that vegetarians can enjoy at McDonald’s — garden salads, french fries and hash browns (cooked in 100 percent vegetable oil)…”

decline and fall

THE YEAR 2000 may some day be regarded as a milestone for the fast food industry. It may be remembered as the year that the leading chains began to unravel. According to NPD Foodworld, a market research firm, during 2000 the fast food industry did not gain any new customers in the United States. The stagnant sales preceded the headlines about mad cow disease and extended throughout most of the industry. Fewer people visited not only hamburger chains, but also pizza and Mexican food chains. Business did not improve in the first half of 2001. McDonald’s profits fell in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Customer traffic fell at Burger King restaurants worldwide. Burger King’s new french fries proved a marketing disaster and were scrapped, at a cost of more than $70 million. And its parent company, Diageo PLC, had to spend millions to keep some large Burger King franchisees afloat, while searching for ways to unload the chain.

Taco Bell — a brand that in many ways perfected the art of selling inexpensive, mass-produced, highly industrialized foods — has lately encountered some financial difficulties. In 1989 Taco Bell introduced a “K minus” program. The K stood for “kitchens”, which the chain strove to eliminate from its restaurants. Precooking the beef and the beans at central locations allowed Taco Bell to offer low prices, with most of the core menu items selling for less than a dollar. The strategy was a success during the 1990s, but eventually backfired, as Taco Bell gained a reputation for cheap, bland food. Sales at its company-owned restaurants fell by 9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2000, causing financial problems for as many as a thousand Taco Bell franchisees. Tricon Global Restaurants, the chain’s parent company, had to set aside millions of dollars to help struggling franchisees, and PepsiCo Inc. sent them early “soda-rebate” checks worth additional millions to keep them in the business of selling Pepsi. A major recall of taco shells — sold under the Taco Bell name only at supermarkets and containing genetically engineered corn not approved for human consumption — no doubt also hurt the brand.

Taco Bell’s problems, however, extend far beyond passing fears of tainted tacos. “We are not doing a great job in terms of quality, in terms of speed, in terms of cleanliness in the store,” Emil Brolick, the chain’s new president, confessed. The speed at which Taco Bell’s financial health deteriorated, with relatively minor sales declines threatening widespread restaurant closures, shows how vulnerable the world’s largest fast food chains have become. A 2 percent decline in sales is enough to send their stock prices spiralling downward.

The glory days of the major chains seem to be over. Smaller, regional restaurant companies are the ones now enjoying rapid growth in the United States, as many larger ones lose customers. Although the McDonald’s Corporation continues to hunt for promising new American locations (a McDonald’s recently opened at the Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston), the chain’s problems increasingly resemble those of the British Empire a century ago. For imperial Britain, rapid expansion overseas was a sign not of economic strength, but of underlying weaknesses at home. An empire that looked impressive and invincible on the map later proved to be remarkably fragile, shrinking much faster than it had grown. During the 1990s McDonald’s opened restaurants overseas at a furious pace, distracting attention from the fact that it was gaining few new customers in the United States. The mad cow epidemic in Europe, combined with economic downturns in Asia and Latin America, have created doubts on Wall Street about McDonald’s imperial strategy. It costs a great deal of money to open new restaurants on distant continents. The McDonald’s Corporation remains profitable, but now intends to grow by doubling its sales within the United States over the next decade. That goal may be unrealistic. A recent survey of American consumers found enormous dissatisfaction with McDonald’s. Among the two hundred national organizations examined in the study, McDonald’s ranked just a couple of places from the bottom.

Ever since the débâcle of the McLibel trial, the McDonald’s Corporation has tried to improve its public image and at times behave in a more socially responsible manner. During the spring of 2001 it began to offer discounts on health insurance and other benefits to employees at company-owned restaurants in the United States, which comprise about one-seventh of the chain. During the summer of 2001 it disclosed the basic ingredients of its natural flavors (and, perhaps in deference to Hindus, has taken the beef extract out of its McNuggets). In addition to forcing compliance with the FDA’s feed regulations, McDonald’s has required that its meatpacking suppliers handle and slaughter animals more humanely. For years, excessive line speeds and improper stunning have led to cattle and hogs being dismembered while fully conscious. McDonald’s new policy on humane slaughter did not arise in a vacuum. Animal rights groups, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, were staging protests at McDonald’s, asking the company to seek changes from its suppliers. Whatever the true motive, McDonald’s acted decisively and hired Temple Grandin — one of the nation’s foremost experts on animal welfare and proper livestock handling — to devise an auditing system for the slaughterhouses that provide the chain’s beef and pork. According to Grandin, McDonald’s threat to stop purchasing meat from companies that mistreat animals changed many of the industry’s practices within a year. Although McDonald’s auditors are employed by the same companies that manufacture its hamburger patties, Grandin says they seem genuinely committed to the new policy, making unannounced visits to slaughterhouses and observing whether animals are properly handled and stunned. When advocated by animal rights groups, such an inspection program had gone nowhere; demanded by McDonald’s, it received the enthusiastic support of the meatpacking industry and the American Meat Institute.

Having shown a strong commitment to the ethical treatment of animals, the McDonald’s Corporation should now demonstrate the same level of concern for the ethical treatment of the human beings who work in the nation’s slaughterhouses. After the publication of Fast Food Nation, the photographer Eugene Richards and I visited meatpacking communities in Texas for Mother Jones magazine. We were appalled by what we found: conditions even worse than those in Nebraska or Colorado, conditions that bring to mind the worst abuses of the nineteenth-century Beef Trust. In Texas, the big meatpacking companies don’t have to manipulate the workers’ compensation system — they don’t even have to participate in it. Texas is the only state in the union that allows a company to leave the workers’ comp system and set up its own process for dealing with workplace injuries. Taking advantage of that unique opportunity, IBP has established a remarkable system there. When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP’s Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once they sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment — for life. Under the program’s terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot. The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that companies operating outside the workers’ comp system can fire workers simply because they’re injured.

Today an IBP worker who gets hurt on the job in Texas faces a cruel dilemma: sign the waiver, perhaps receive medical attention, and remain beholden, forever, to IBP. Or refuse to sign, risk losing your job, receive no help with your medical bills, file a lawsuit, and hope to win a big judgement against the company years from now. Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker’s signature. When Lonita Leal’s right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand, as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.

The recent purchase of IBP by Tyson Foods has created the world’s biggest and most powerful meatpacking firm, with the largest market share in beef and poultry, the second-largest in pork. The Tyson/IBP merger fulfills every independent rancher’s worst nightmare about being reduced to the status of a poultry grower — and portend even faster line speeds at meatpacking plants. In order to complete the purchase, Tyson Foods had to assume $1.7 billion in debt. As a result, the new meatpacking colossus will likely be under great pressure to ship as much meat as possible out the door.

Over the past year, the McDonald’s Corporation has proven, beyond any doubt, that it can force its meatpacking suppliers to make fundamental changes quickly. If McDonald’s insisted that the large meatpackers improve working conditions and reduce injury levels, these companies would do so. The cost of slowing down their production lines would be insignificant compared to the cost of losing their biggest customer. If McDonald’s can send auditors into slaughterhouses to monitor the ethical treatment of cattle, it can certainly do the same for poor immigrant workers. As to the company’s ability to influence this sort of behavior, I agree wholeheartedly with the American Meat Institute: “If McDonald’s is requiring something of their suppliers, it has a pretty profound effect.” Unlike compliance with the FDA’s feed rules, which required an elaborate new system of paperwork and affidavits, it wouldn’t take weeks to make America’s slaughterhouses safer. If McDonald’s were to demand that the line speeds be slowed down, preventing untold misery and harm, it could be accomplished in an instant.

dog eat dog

AS OF THIS WRITING, about a hundred people have died from vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease. Although every one of those deaths was tragic and unnecessary, they must be viewed in a larger perspective. Roughly the same number of people die every day in the United States from automobile accidents — and yet we do not live in fear of cars. At the moment there is no cure for vCJD, and it is impossible to predict how many people will get the disease by eating tainted meat. A great deal of scientific uncertainty still surrounds various attributes of the pathogen, such as the degree of infectivity among humans and the size of an infectious dose. About 800,000 cattle with mad cow disease were unwittingly eaten by people in Great Britain. One crucial determinant of the eventual death toll is the average incubation period for vCJD. That statistic is currently unknown. If it takes about ten years for most infected people to develop the disease, then we are now in the middle of the epidemic, and perhaps a thousand or so will die. If the average incubation period is twenty, thirty, or forty years — as the latest science suggests — then the epidemic is just beginning, and hundreds of thousands may die. Time will tell.

Regardless of whether mad cow causes a small outbreak among humans or a deadly modern plague, it will haunt the beef industry for years, much as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl changed attitudes toward nuclear power. The spread of BSE in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures and led to some absurdities. The British decision to keep some of the most infective cattle parts (brains, spleens, spinal materials, thymus glands, and intestines) out of the human food supply was prompted not by health or agricultural officials, but by a leading manufacturer of pet foods. Worried by mounting evidence that mad cow disease might have the ability to cross species barriers, Pedigree Master Foods decided to keep cattle offal out of its products and told the Ministry of Agriculture that it was a good idea to do the same with food intended for human consumption. Meanwhile, British children were being served some of the nation’s cheapest meats — hamburgers, sausages, and mince pies full of potentially contaminated offal — because the 1980 Education Act had eliminated government subsidies for nutritious school meals.

A great many British pets were eating safer food than the British people, until November of 1989, when the government banned the sale of cattle offal and its use in the manufacture of ground beef. Seven months later, the worst fears of Pedigree Master Foods were confirmed; a Siamese cat named Max died in Bristol from a feline variant of BSE, after eating contaminated cat food. The death of “Mad Max,” as the tabloids dubbed him, proved that mad cow could indeed cross the species barrier. Nevertheless, the British government denied for six more years that the disease posed any risk to human beings.

Governments throughout Europe ignored the interests of consumers while protecting those of agribusiness. A recent report by the French senate found that from 1988 to 2000 the agriculture ministry in that country minimized the danger of mad cow and “constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures.” Health officials were repeatedly ignored in order to block decisions that “might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry.” Great Britain banned the feeding of ruminants to ruminants in 1988, but continued to export animal feed potentially contaminated with BSE for another eight years — shipping about 150 million pounds of the stuff to dozens of countries and thereby turning a local outbreak of mad cow into one with worldwide ramifications. Other countries in the European Union imported the cheap British feed and then exported it to North Africa and the Middle East.

The recent outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan was most likely caused by infected feed from Europe. Japanese agricultural officials displayed remarkable incompetence in responding to the threat of BSE. Five years after the British government acknowledged the link between BSE and serious illness in human beings, Japanese farmers were still feeding meat-and-bonemeal to their cattle, without violating any law. When the Scientific Steering Commission of the European Commission warned in June of 2001 that such practices created a high risk of a BSE outbreak, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) strongly denied the risk and blocked publication of the EU report. Three months later, a Japanese cow tested positive for BSE. A senior MAFF official assured the public that the animal’s carcass had been “disposed of.” In fact, MAFF had inadvertently allowed the tainted meat to be rendered into animal feed.

Today nations with BSE must not only confront the prospect of slaughtering millions of potentially infected cattle, but must also figure out what to do with their remains. In Great Britain, about a billion pounds of rendered cattle sit at waste sites, vast mounds of fine brown powder, awaiting incineration. In Japan, plans are being made to blend rendered cattle with concrete — and use the mixture as a building material. In Denmark, a company is now erecting the world’s first power plant that generates electricity by burning cattle.

Thanks to the McDonald’s Corporation, the FDA’s animal feed restrictions are most likely being obeyed in the United States. But those prohibitions may not be strict enough to prevent the spread of BSE. The feeding of all animal proteins to all farm animals has been banned throughout the European Union. Such a ban was justified as a means of preventing hog and poultry feed from winding up in cattle troughs. The ban will also, however, halt the transmission of mad cow through new and unexpected means. John Collinge — a professor at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine and a prominent member of the British government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee — believes that BSE may easily cross the species barrier and survive undetected in animals that outwardly show no symptoms of the disease. If pigs or poultry were to be found silently carrying mad cow, the FDA’s feed restrictions would prove futile. The continued use of cattle blood in cattle feed seems especially unwise. “All cannibalistic recycling is potentially dangerous,” Collinge warns, “and I have said that repeatedly.”

The USDA, the FDA, and the American Meat Institute oppose any additional prohibition on what can be fed to livestock. They argue that new restrictions are unnecessary, because mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States. Their argument on behalf of continuing to feed animal proteins to livestock is a risky form of denial, an exercise in wishful thinking. By the time Great Britain discovered its first two cows with BSE, at least 60,000 other cattle there were already infected. The claim that mad cow disease has never been detected in the United States is accurate, as of this writing. The USDA, however, has not tried very hard to find it. “If you don’t look, you won’t find,” says Dr Perluigi Gambetti, a BSE expert who heads the National Prion Disease Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University. “Unless we test more, we will never know if we have it here.” Since 1990, approximately 375 million cattle have been slaughtered in the United States, and about 15,000 of them were tested for mad cow. Belgium, with a cattle herd roughly one-thirtieth the size of ours, plans to test 400,000 for mad cow disease every year.

The current FDA feed rules are primarily concerned with efficiency and utility, not public health. They allow cattle to be fed pigs, pigs to be fed cattle, cattle to be fed poultry, and poultry to be fed cattle. They allow dogs and cats to be fed dogs and cats. Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so. A Canadian company, Sanimal Inc., was putting 40,000 pounds of dead dogs and dead cats into its dog and cat food every week, until discontinuing the practice in June, 2001. “This food is healthy and good,” said the company’s vice president of procurement, responding to critics, “but some people don’t like to see meat meal that contains any pets.”

Perhaps the most effective action taken by the federal government to prevent the introduction of BSE to the United States — a 1989 ban on imports of livestock and feed from Great Britain — was the one action that threatened no economic harm to the American meat industry. The ban on imports, like any protectionist measure, helped American producers. But a strict FDA prohibition of all animal protein in animal feeds would reduce some of the profit that American agribusiness firms can derive from vertical integration. At the moment, the most common source of animal protein in poultry feed isn’t hogs or cattle. It’s poultry. Tyson Foods takes leftover chicken meat and skin and intestines from its poultry slaughterhouses, ships them to Tyson feed plants, adds them to chicken feed, and then provides the feed to Tyson growers, so that baby chicks can eat their ancestors. The Tyson feed mill in Buzzard Bluff, Arkansas, processes about 10 million pounds of chicken parts every week.

The mad cow epidemic has greatly reduced beef consumption in Europe and Japan, devastating farmers who raise cattle. Livestock practices that once seemed to be cost-efficient turned out to be disastrously inefficient. Feelings of anger and betrayal among consumers have prompted a fundamental reappraisal of agricultural policies. Food safety, animal welfare, and environmental concerns are gaining precedence over the traditional agribusiness emphasis on production levels. The Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Austria are seeking basic, structural changes in how European food is produced. Even Great Britain now seems to be questioning its reliance on high-volume, industrialized farming. For years the Labour government of Tony Blair had forged close ties with leading food processing, supermarket, and fast food companies. Blair’s handling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic seemed more influenced by the export needs of Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, than by the latest scientific evidence on the efficacy of vaccines. His unapologetic defense of a £15,000 political donation from the McDonald’s Corporation prompted critics to call the majority party “McLabour.” His appointee to serve as Rural Recovery Coordinator, Chris Haskins, headed a large food processing firm, ran a dairy that supplied the milk for McDonald’s milkshakes, and publicly belittled the prospects for small farms and organic agriculture. Nevertheless, even Lord Haskins proposed a shift of EU agricultural policy in October of 2001, arguing that subsidies should be awarded to farms whose production methods do not harm the environment.

The German government has taken the lead on this issue in the EU, calling for the de-industrialization of agriculture and planning to make 20 percent of its farmland organic by the year 2010. “Things will no longer be the way they are,” declared Renate Kuenast, who serves as the German minister for agriculture — and for consumer protection. Kuenast says that Germans must develop the same reverence for their food that they’ve always had for their beer. Under a German law that dates back to the early sixteenth century, no additives can be put into beer, which must be made using only water, hops, and barley. Vowing to outlaw the use of antibiotics and other additives in animal feed, Kuenast offers a revolutionary alternative: “Our cows should get only water, grain, and grass.”

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century — a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science. The same mindset that would add 4-methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable — and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived. This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel. Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.