Ich Bin Ein Scheissburger (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a time when you could write what you liked about hamburgers, but to publish so much as a disloyal phrase against the Royal Family was out of bounds. (John Wilkes was sentenced to prison for it.) These days you can say what you like about the Royals, ranging from TV puppets of a dypso Princess Margaret to assertions that the Queen Mother has at last found her way from pompous arrogance to ill-concealed dotage; the Windsors will turn a blind eye to such home truths on the basis, we must assume, that when your entire function is to be conspicuously useless all publicity is good publicity. Call the Queen a bitch and a parasite and no guardsman will turn up on your doorstep, sword in hand, ready to defend the good name of the Crown. Say bad things about McDonald's hamburgers, on the other hand, and you’ll end up in the Old Bailey.

We’re no fools: this column will burst its edges with praise for the unadulterated culinary plague which has descended upon our class in the name of “fast food” Slithers of meat-like stuff with processed tomatoes, artificially-coloured sauces and enough chemicals to give Saddam Hussein a run for his money in any dirty war: Yum! Yum! Cancel the table at the Ritz — and make mine a double cheese topping with a big bag of chips — now called “fries" in case anyone might have thought they were cooked healthily. To be eaten without so much as a knife and fork (let it never be said that our masters have pretended to accord us dignity) and there you have a fast-food feast for the inferior.

The Big Mac logo is now shown in more places world-wide than any other apart from Coke’s. Eat a Big Mac with a carton of coke (allegedly leading to teeth-rot as well as an assault on your guts) and you will be playing your own horrible part in an Empire of Logos which leaves the swastika a mere bit player in history. (If only Goebbels had considered adding sugar to the sauerkraut and marketing it in stale buns.) When Western “freedom” came to Moscow it flew under the McDonalds flag of convenience.

What the Sun is to literacy Big Macs are to decent food, but that should not disguise the fact that before the Sun there was the Mirror and the Mail, and before anyone ever thought of “eating out in style" (poverty-style, to be precise) there were packaged steak pies without steak in them, skate and chips dripping with grease and, the staple diet of every self-romanticised wage slave, bread 'n’ dripping. In short, for most of recent history the working class has been expected to eat trash.

These days supermarkets contrive to invent more exotic names for their frozen portions of packaged fodder The "Mexican Delite” (spelt to warn that it’s a con) to the frozen chicken korma (mild) and “Italian lasagne” (not to be confused with Latvian lasagne, in case you were looking for that) all taste like one single pre-digested mush. The toad has fallen out of the hole in most supermarket packets, gone to find its market in your new high street Toad-U-Like or Spud-U-Like (yes, they’ve actually persuaded wage slaves to pay a quid for a potato in its jacket). What is this but the sour taste of profit before need? The truth is that the average medieval peasant ate better than the modern wage slave.

Each week in the Sunday Times the odious Michael Winner ululates in the name of criticism against selected five-star restaurants where the food was not just as it should be for the rich and privileged. Winner whines when his lobster doesn’t screech loud enough as it hits the boiling water and is merciless on any waiter who can’t get him just the right wine at just the right temperature from just the right part of France. As an advanced guard into the eating establishments of the snobs and parasites, Winner is your man. His critical hammer is not applied to the likes of Burger King whoppers, Chicken McNuggets and Kentucky Fried Cholesterol. Presumably Winner is aware that any old garbage is good enough for the Losers of the wealth-producing class.

It is costing McDonald’s £5,000 a day to mount their current libel case — the longest in British history — against the two victims who dared to publish a leaflet saying that their food was lousy, probably causes cancer and is produced by workers under super-exploited conditions. Anyone with a spare afternoon in central London should go along and laugh at the Big Mac’s briefs embarrassing themselves in public. (For example, they spent tens of thousands of dollars flying over from America expert witnesses to prove that McDonald's contain nutrients — only for them to admit under cross-examination that all food contains nutrients.)

Working on the old dictum that you are what you eat, might we conclude that the class who order quails eggs regard the class who can afford Big Macs as being a load of . . . old scheiss, if you’ll pardon my German “I am a hamburger" declared JFK in a moment of identity crisis. “Let them eat crap”, says Ronald McDonald, "and a free photo of Princess Di in the raw for every teenager ordering large fries.”

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Who’s a Beastie Boy, then? (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who’s a Beastie Boy, then?
Their name was a warning of what to expect but there was still much outraged surprise when the American pop group the Beastie Boys flew into Britain some weeks ago on a jet stream of invective. The fame which preceded them was based on incidents such as their warmly greeting some disabled members of their audience as "fucking cripples". They went on to perform at "concerts" which featured a predictable uproar.

At an event in Brixton there was something akin to a minor riot. In Liverpool some of the audience tore up seating for missiles to add to the cans of beer which were flying backwards and forwards. When the group left the stage tear gas was fired into the crowd. Presumably some music (actually the Beastie Boys specialise in "rapping", or talking to a rhythm) was played at some point in these proceedings.

As a result the leader of the group. Adam Horowitz, was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a girl in the audience who was said to have been on the receiving end of a can of beer which he threw.

Their leader's court appearance was an ideal opportunity for the group to grab the headlines again in a show of what incorrigible. fearless rebels they are. They might, for example, have described the magistrates as "fucking geriatrics" or something similar. But it was not to be; the case was notable for a distinct absence of reckless defiance. Horowitz's solicitor told the court that he is not an outrageous anarchist but a good boy who is close to his father (who is an eminent film producer); their lives are "intertwined". The group's reputation for madness and mayhem is no more than an image.

It is not uncommon for some entertainers — musicians, comedians, boxers, tennis players among them — to grow fat on the proceeds of a reputation for abusive and disruptive behaviour. Sometimes this is deliberately created by a cynical publicity machine. While in some cases a genuine ability may lurk behind this nonsense, it is not unknown for a talentless void to be covered by such outrageous, publicity-obsessed gimmickry. A lot of people were anxious to pay to watch John McEnroe (who had real talent) play tennis in the hope of seeing Super Brat get his comeuppance. A lot of people buy newspapers to thrill with anger at the latest excesses of groups like the Beastie Boys, whose talents are not yet as apparent as McEnroe's.

It all expresses the appalling decadence of capitalism, where cash is king and whatever makes money, however execrable it may be, has to be good.


Fast food philosophy
The Wimpy burger chain are clinching a deal with Bulgaria to set up trash-food joints in that Russian-bloc country. Wimpy's marketing director, Trevor Barnes, said on BBC Radio Four (Friday 20 March) that he wanted to "put across a philosophy" in the famous buns.

A fascinating example of metaphysics here — the trans-substantiation of hamburgers into philosophy. Better watch it, the next time you tuck into a Wimpy (if you can bear to, that is): strange things may begin to happen inside your stomach and brain.

They already have, obviously, inside Trevor Barnes's. . . .


Nostalgia
The fortyish middle-management people with 1.8 children, a Volvo and a building society to support, yearn for those balmy student days of '68 when they took part every week in the demonstrations intended to revolutionise society. Now, when they read the Sunday heavies, the colour supplements are full of nostalgia — forties furniture, fifties fashion, sixties music. Victorian values, all carefully packaged, sanitised, made desirable. There's money in nostalgia.

Stand in a Post Office queue when the pittance called a pension is being collected by someone whose life has unwittingly been devoted to the continuation of capitalism. Ask them about the good old days. Listen as they recount stories of hardship and poverty. Finally they tell you. with pride, “Everyone was happier then". Through NHS rose-tinted spectacles, they remember balls of whitewash, the sixty-hour week (if you were lucky enough to have a job), fighting for their (?) country and being skint three days after pay-day.

SuperMac said, we'd never had it so good. Did he mean us? As a member of the producing but non-possessing working class, you've never had it at all. Every politician both before and since has endeavoured to con the working class that the capitalist system of society is the only one capable of fulfilling the workers' aspirations. But if these are the good times we'll all back on tomorrow, the future appears quite bleak. Colour television sets, 200 shares in British Telecom and Ford Fiestas are a poor panacea for the ills of the working class.

Poverty, homelessness, wage slavery, making do with second best, are these the things that we want to be nostalgic about? Forget about the past, look to the future. Look to Socialism.


Business as usual
Obviously assuming that no one would object to such an assault on their visual senses, a company called Henderson Administration took advantage of the election furore to publish an advert showing photographs of every prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1934.

It was an uncomforting sight. Baldwin in his bowler hat and wing collar; Chamberlain looking stubborn; Attlee smiling diffidently; Eden earnestly handsome; Callaghan grumpy; Thatcher strong and noble. . . .

"Since our formation in 1934" said the advert. "We've seen 21 general elections and 12 Prime Ministers". Through all that time — bull and beer markets, war and peace. Henderson has succeeded and has grown. Now it describes itself as one of the largest "independent" (whatever that may mean) investment management firms in Great Britain, organising over £7 billion worth of investments.

Now this is very illuminating. A general election is — every one of those 21 was — an opportunity for the capitalist political parties to make extravagant claims about the blissful progress which would follow their return to power and then to warn us about the awful consequences of victory for their opponents. To elect the other side, they have asserted, is to risk a rapid descent into ruin and decay.

Since Ramsay MacDonald's nominally National administration the people of this country have experienced Conservative, Coalition and Labour government. They have tried them all. While all this has been happening, through all the changes, amid the parties' promises and threats, the normal, essential business of capitalism has carried on. Money has been invested; workers have been exploited; fortunes have been amassed; a small class of social parasites has kept its privileged, secure, opulent position.

The small segment of British history contained in that advert told us that anyone who voted on the assumption that they were making a choice about society was wrong. They were wasting their time and their vote. Whatever the parties called it — the Tories with their people's capitalism, the Labour party with their "socialism" — the social system remained the same. Whoever was prime minister capitalism continued with all its problems of repression, war, poverty, famine, disease.. . .

Come the next election the same advert could well reappear, with another photograph as the only difference. The smug message, on behalf of the ruling class to the working class voters, will be the same. We're doing very nicely, thanks for keeping it that way.

Hamburger Society (1982)

From the February 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who in America does not know the McDonald chain of hamburger shops? The large illuminated red and yellow sign is a beacon for hungry folk and around five-hundred million of them were beckoned by it in 1978. Inside the shops they found everywhere the same standardised product—a bun, throwaway packaging and clean, informal seating. A few quick bites and it's time to go. Over the next few years every large town in Britain is likely to find a McDonald's opening in its centre. Add up the other fast food outlets like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wimpy, other assorted burger bars, hot bread shops and pizzaries and you have an astonishingly large market. Burger shops in America alone total 15,000.

What's happening? What does it all mean? Are we workers being brainwashed into the fast food habit by psychologically engineered advertising? Is it just monopoly capital moving into the cheap restaurant market and cleaning up? Or is it a capitalist plot to break the tradition of the wholesome family meal in the home and get us to eat junk, so that the exchange of commodities and alienation of human existence into the very process of eating?

Fast food and capitalism

On an analogy with motor cars and petrol stations, the explanation that these food outlets are a cheap way of refuelling the workers has some plausibility. But why hamburgers particularly? People have a physiological need for food, but it does not have to be minced, pressed beef. Cheapness, speed, convenience for the customer: ease of production and standardisation for the manufacturer, provide some of the reasons; but there are social and intellectual adjustments to be made by the people who use these food outlets. In brief, hamburgers change consciousness.

The capitalist class control the means of disseminating information and so can sometimes manipulate consciousness in the workers directly, so it is said. Sometimes, too, we are told that institutions like the nuclear family condition workers into an acceptance of authoritarian relationships; hierarchy and power in the home—hierarchy and power in society; which symmetry is supposed to reinforce the attitude that wage-labour and capital relationships are natural and prevent a desire for socialism.

What are the links between food and society? "Man is what he eats", said Feuerbach. Does eating hamburgers make socialism impossible.

The abominations of Leviticus

Social anthropologists try to find links between cultural phenomena. One problem that vexed them for years has to do with the eating habits of the ancient Hebrews. Why did the Jewish religion forbid the eating of pork? There is a list of this and other abominations to be abjured in book eleven of Leviticus, a chapter in the old testament.

Tentative explanations for Jewish eating habits were that pork meat was unclean, infested with tapeworm, that pigs grew by feeding on dirt, that pig flesh went bad after slaughtering and so on. Such ideas may be summed up by saying that they credit the Jews with some awareness of hygiene rules and with primitive bacteriological knowledge. But, if this was an explanation, why does Leviticus prohibit the eating of snake meat? After all, snakes are cold-blooded animals whose flesh is easily dried and preserved from infection. Other interpreters dismissed the whole chapter as beyond comprehension, because it forbade the eating of bats, but praised the wholesome qualities of locusts. Actually Leviticus was an early field-guide on the passing livestock of the Jews, an Egon Ronay handbook on the good and the abominable food outlets in Judea.

The ancient Hebrews lived by pasturing sheep and goats in the hills and valleys. So, the exemplary clean animal for them was a cloven-hoofed ruminant. The pig crossed the boundaries of this classification because although it was cloven-hoofed, it did not chew the cud. All things that walk upon the earth must have feet and legs; the snake has neither, it is an abomination! All birds that fly through the air have feathers and beaks; but the bat has skin and teeth, it is confusion! All fish that swim in the waters have finrays and scales; but the shark, porpoise and sturgeon have neither, but they are anathema! The Hebrews took these rules to the extreme and classified the whole animal kingdom into the sacred and the profane, starting from their own means of subsistence.

Hedged around by warring tribes, conquered over and over, delivered into bondage in Egypt, these food rituals preserved the fabric of the old Hebrew society. "Be thou holy as I am holy", means, "Be thou separate from all other peoples."

All in a bun

Meals can be ideological. In an expensive restaurant the chef and waiter conspire over a complex ritual of place-settings, wine-tasting and food preservation, leaving you the impression that a meal is a measure of your social status. You go to a four-star establishment for the sake of the food, while the whole brigade of staff cunningly suggest that, as a top-class person, the food and service are only what you deserve. So the meal is taken in a social pantomime celebrating your own status as an individual in a society where everyone who can pay is a lord for a night.

There is, too, an ideology of food consumption that goes with the nuclear family meal, in a home where everyone knows their place and definite authoritarian rituals are observed: like "father carves the meat", "mother serves the vegetables" and "Johnny sits there". Such rituals can become sanctified over time, causing father to lose his temper when interrupted by unexpected visitors, or the telephone.

In contrast, meals in hamburger shops are taken in public democratic surroundings. You may sit anywhere, but there are no boundaries, no cutlery and no place settings. So, as the fast food habit grows, we may expect the mysticism and ritual that surround eating to evaporate. You may gauge progress in this direction by questioning the friends you meet coming out of McDonald's. Some will wholeheartedly espouse the ideology of food as refuelling: it should be cheap, quick, convenient, clean and so on. Others will assure you that four-star cuisine is their normal fare but that time, the kids, the mother-in-law or their jobs, conspired to thwart them.

Try one yourself. Walk into a burger bar and you're out in minutes. All the clutter that goes with a restaurant meal is eliminated, leaving only the bare commodity transaction and the bun. The leap from that situation to imagining the wealth of the world being freely available is a difference you'' enjoy.

B K McNeeney

Food to make you fast (2008)

Book Review from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chew on This. By Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation (reviewed in the Socialist Standard for November 2002), and this book covers some of the same ground as the earlier one. That's to say, it looks at the power of fast food companies, especially McDonald's, and the nature of the food they serve.

McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the United States, and this position has enabled them and the other big meat-packing companies to drive down the price paid to ranchers, many of whom have gone out of business. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cattle and chicken has been aimed squarely at making profits, with little regard for the conditions of the animals or the workers. Chicken, for instance, will live barely six weeks and never see a blade of grass. They die increasingly of heart attacks, caused by a thick layer of fat around the heart.

Of course the fast food companies don't want their customers to think about where the food comes from and how it's made. They'd rather you didn't reflect on the manufactured flavours that are added, or the fact that food for children is made as sweet as possible. Massive amounts of advertising are aimed at kids, who are naturally very susceptible and can influence where their parents take them to eat. Further, the advertising isn't confined to food, as giving away or selling toys is another means to get the kids in.

The employees are often not much older than children, given the fast food industry's reliance on teenage labour. Teenagers are simply cheaper and easier to control. They mostly earn the minimum wage, which in the US is worth less in real terms than it was fifty years ago. There is a large turnover of staff, and the derogatory label 'McJob' sums things up well.

It may even be a McWorld that is developing, as the fast food chains expand outside the US and Europe. The first Burger King opened in Baghdad just nine weeks after the US-led invasion in 2003. The UK has long been part of the McDonald's empire, with 2.5 million people eating there every day.
Capitalist-style fast food treats appallingly the animals that it raises and kills. It's also bad for the workers it employs and bad for the consumers who eat it.

Paul Bennett