Excerpt From    Fast Food Nation 

                By Eric Schlosser

            Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk in, get on line, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, place your order, hand over a few dollars, watch teenagers in uniforms pushing various buttons, and moments later take hold of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in colored paper and cardboard.  The whole experience of buying fast food has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.  It has become a social custom as American as a small, rectangular, hand-held, frozen, and reheated apple pie.

            ...   The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society.  Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years.  During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills.  In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed...the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care.  A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home.  Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants-mainly at fast food restaurants.

            ... The leading fast food chains still embrace a boundless faith in science-and as a result have changed not just what Americans eat, but also how their food is made.

            ...What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand...today’s fast food conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking facade.  Much of the taste and aroma of American fast food, for example, is now manufactured at a series of large chemical plants off the New Jersey Turnpike.

            ...Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases.  They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them.  They just grab their tray off the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in.  The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten.

            ...The fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other American industry.  Consequently, a low minimum wage has long been a crucial part of the fast food industry’s business plan.  Between 1968 and 1990, the years when the fast food chains expanded at their fastest rate, the real value of the U.S. minimum wage fell by almost 40 percent.  In the late 1990s, the real value of the U.S. minimum wage still remained about 27 percent lower than it was in the late 1960s.  Nevertheless, the National Restaurant Association (NRA) has vehemently opposed any rise in the minimum wage at the federal, state, or local level.  About sixty large food service companies-including Jack in the Box, Wendy’s, Chevy’s, and Red Lobster-have backed congressional legislation that would essentially eliminate the federal minimum wage by allowing states to disregard it.  Pete Meersman, the president of the Colorado Restaurant Association, advocates creating a federal guest worker program to import low-wage foodservice workers from overseas.

            While the real value of the wages paid to restaurant workers had declined for the past three decades, the earnings of restaurant company executives have risen considerably.  According to a 1997 survey in Nation’s Restaurant News, the average corporate executive bonus was $131,000, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

            ...Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it.  Then place your order.  Or turn and walk out the door.  It’s not too late.  Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way.

Copyright Eric Schlosser, 2001