Letter: Canteen (2000)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Canteen

Dear Editors,

Recently at my school, the council changed the cafeteria system. Before, there was one queue and it looked a bit like a proper café. Now it ‘s a McDonalds-style restaurant. It has four queues so that as many staff as possible are working at the same time. The school says that its because they want to serve us quicker but it’s really because they want the staff in the cafeteria to work harder so that our rulers get more money. The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it may cost some money to make it like this, but as the nearest McDonald’s is about a mile away and that the pupils actually like junk food like this, they would get a monopoly on the food sales for pupils at that school, and also get some more money for “our” rulers. I told someone I was walking about with that, the food had better be better than the other food we used to get. Yeah, right. At least the food they used to sell was half-decent, and although it was probably GM, the energy that I got from it gave me the energy to endure their attempts to indoctrinate me into believing that capitalism is the right way to live.

Now, the food is rubbishy—it is all mass-produced—and you have a choice of a burger, fries and a soft drink; a bit of pizza, fries and soft drink or a sandwich in which the roll is shaped for a hotdog. The burger is tasteless, the fries are soggy, the pizza is a cheap pizza base with a bit of cheese on it and the soft drinks are flat. In the pizza meal they even put the fries in the pizza box to save money on cardboard. When I was eating this I thought “That at least I only have to stand for this for the next two years” (I’m in third year). They have even introduced a card system in which you have a credit card-like card which if you swipe it on a machine in the school, it tells you how much money you have on it and your name.

The school probably have an account of how much you have spent on this rubbish to see if you have fallen for it. I’m sorry I don’t have any photos of the cafeteria, but think of what a McDonald’s looks like inside and change the name to “kids” and the main colour to red and you will be close enough.

Richard Cumming, 

Glasgow

Cooking the Books: Wages, prices and profits (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Greggs faces profit margin pressure amid rising wage costs’ reported Business Matters (15 May). Roisin Currie, the company’s chief executive, was reported as saying she expected that the company’s costs would rise by between 4 and 5 percent this year and that ‘the majority of cost inflation pressure that we face this year is wages’. This, the magazine said, underscores ‘that labour costs remain the biggest financial burden on the company.’ Wages a burden on profits? We thought it was the other way round.

Politicians and the media often lecture us that inflation, as a rise in prices generally, is caused by wage increases. Workers get a wage increase which employers, to maintain profit margins, pass on to their customers by increasing the price of what they are selling. The logic of this position is that workers should not ask for a wage increase or strike to try to get one as this won’t make them any better off.

Marx met a similar argument in his day. He countered it by pointing out that, faced with a wage increase, capitalists might want to compensate by increasing the price of what they sell, but the point was whether they could:

‘The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire into his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits’ (Value, Price and Profit, section 1).

In theory Greggs could increase its prices by 4 to 5 percent to compensate for the ‘financial burden’ of having to pay out more wages but this would not necessarily have the effect of protecting its profit margins. It could well do the opposite since its sales might fall as its customers bought their sausage rolls from one of its competitors.

The board of Greggs has evidently reached the conclusion that this is in fact what would happen. As Business Matters put it:

‘Greggs continues to navigate the challenges posed by rising wages while leveraging its expansion plans and affordable pricing to maintain its market position and drive growth’ (emphasis added).

Currie was reported as saying:

‘Greggs would continue to monitor and review price increases regularly. While the company does not have a fixed plan for pricing, she emphasized the need to remain flexible and responsive to ongoing economic conditions, reviewing their stance on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis’.

In other words, to keep testing to find out what price the market will bear without losing sales.

Greggs is in competition with others to sell take-away breakfasts and lunches. It claims to have overtaken McDonalds in the market for breakfasts and is planning to increase the number of its shops this year. In this competitive situation it would be counter-productive to try to pass on increased wage costs to customers. So Greggs has to accept the reduction in profits that follows from not raising prices. It might have the will but it doesn’t have the power to protect its profits.

Capitalist enterprises have to submit to the economic laws of capitalism just as much as workers and governments do.

Not so glorious food (2007)

Book Review from the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Joanna Blythman: Bad Food Britain. (Fourth Estate £7.99.)

Essentially this is an extended rant about the eating habits of the British, especially in contrast to countries with a proper food culture such as France and Italy. Recipe books and TV cookery programmes abound, yet fewer and fewer people actually cook food from scratch or sit down to eat with their family.

Instead more and more ready meals are consumed, mostly in front of the television rather than at a table. Less time is spent on food shopping and less money spent on food. Children are astonishingly ignorant about food, often being unable to identify common fruit and veg. The population are subject to food scare after food scare and gradually become desensitised to them. Junk food and snacks combine to make people fat, in what is apparently called an obesogenic environment.

The reaction at this point may be that Blythman doesn’t think much of the food consumed by people in Britain, but that people are after all free to eat what they want. Nothing forces people to eat a ready-made shepherds’ pie rather than peel and mash the potatoes, cook the mince, and so on. But of course this freedom is found in a particular context, and people often say they are too tired to do much in the evenings, especially cook. The pressures of capitalism are such that workers really do have insufficient energy (though maybe enough time) to cook properly.

We also have to look at the pressure exerted by the food industry. Snacks mean big profits (‘mini bites for maxi profits’, according to Proctor and Gamble), and fast food and ready meals are big profit-earners too, much more so than fresh fruit and vegetables. The food manufacturers also resist any government efforts to to rein them in a little, and are becoming increasingly involved with sports sponsorship in order to foster a healthy image.

Mind you, if living under capitalism is what makes the British diet so bad, one wonders how workers in other capitalist countries manage to fare rather better. Blythman’s final message is, ‘Eat as little processed food as possible and base your diet on home-cooked meals, made from scratch from raw ingredients.’ Advice to be borne in mind in Socialism, perhaps, when people really will be free to eat as they wish.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: The pecking order (2011)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The pecking order

 

If you’ve ever staggered home from the pub, you may have been lured inside a branch of Southern Fried Chicken looking for something to soak up the alcohol. While the fast food chain is profitable overseas, its two hundred British branches are failing financially. Concerned that the SFC “brand could be damaged”, its owner and managing director Andrew Withers has enlisted the help of Channel Four’s Undercover Boss. This programme films the directors of different organisations as they pretend to be shop-floor staff in their own businesses.

 

Disguised as ‘Jim’, Andrew spends a week in several of his outlets to learn why they have stopped bringing him much money. Predictably, he sees health and safety guidelines being breached because it would be too expensive or otherwise impractical for the franchises to follow them. But at the same time he’s impressed by the efforts of his staff, especially their speed and patience when dealing with their less sober customers. At the end of a late-night shift behind the counter, Andrew says “I didn’t realise the type of customers that come in to these restaurants”. If the owner of a fast food takeaway chain doesn’t realise that many of its punters will be the post-pub crowd, you have to wonder what planet he’s living on.

 

So, Undercover Boss has some worth by highlighting the gulf between the upper and lower ranks of a business. Normally, this distance means that the bosses don’t have to see how their decisions affect those at the foot of the corporate ladder. And these decisions often mean taking away people’s livelihoods, even if they are disguised by euphemisms like ‘restructuring’ or ‘modernisation’. So, when Andrew visits the struggling South Shields outlet his first thought is to withdraw SFC’s involvement and make a report to the Health and Safety executive. Then he is invited to the home of the family who runs the outlet, and realises how hard they work for little financial reward. He’s in a quandary, as his business instincts tell him that the outlet should close, but he also realises that this would ruin the lives of at least half a dozen people. Fortunately for his staff, Andrew has an epiphany and offers to invest in the branch. Whether he would have done the same without meeting them personally or having the cameras film his decision is anybody’s guess.

Mike Foster

The Beef Chain: A useful investigation (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Cattle ranches are destroying the rainforest enabled by giant beef companies while their US, EU (and UK) international financiers made flawed assessments.’

Above is a statement on the destruction and deforestation of large parts of the Amazon, both legal and illegal, taken from a lengthy 2020 investigation by Global Witness entitled Banks, Beef and the Brazilian Amazon (tinyurl.com/4y3bmcd6). It covers all aspects along the supply chain from cattle ranchers, beef traders, international financiers, supermarkets, fast-food chains and the governments which regulate them.

The numbers are staggering, whether those of cattle on ranches, size of forest cleared or the increased speed of the devastation in recent years. The investigation finished at the end of 2020 when there were approximately 390,000 beef ranches in Brazil, 40 percent of them in the Amazon. About 70 percent of cleared land in the Amazon is populated by cattle, and there are more cows than people in the country. Starting with ranches the chain continues with the beef dealers, including three Brazilian giants, which mostly control the slaughterhouses and sell on the beef. These three beef companies slaughtered more than 18 million cattle in 2017, equivalent to 40 percent of Amazon beef. These same multi-billion-dollar beef companies sell 64 percent of the total Brazilian beef exports to the EU, US and China. Next in the chain come the intermediaries who finance all aspects. These are the banks and big finance companies: the World Bank, Blackrock, ING, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, Santander, Deutsche Bank, BHP Paris, HSBC. Nearing the end of the chain retailers and fast-food outlets include Walmart, Carrefour, Nestle, Burger King, Sainsburys, Subway and McDonalds.

Beef production in Brazil is the number one cause of deforestation emissions across Latin America. According to the World Resources Institute more than 20 million hectares of Brazil’s Amazon primary tropical forest were lost between 2002-2018. Year on year forest fires driven by deforestation increasingly devastate more of the Amazon, all for the sake of profit while the planet shows all the signs of being out of control. In the years 2005-2013, before Bolsonaro became president, state interventions helped to bring about a 70 percent drop in Amazon deforestation. Bolsonaro, as president, has attacked safeguards and agencies protecting the Amazon and the situation has now become critical. Ranches fall into one of several categories depending on the age of the cattle. First are the ranches for breeding, from which the animals are moved on to rearing ranches and then to fattening ranches. When the time comes for slaughter they are moved once again, this time to the traders’ slaughterhouse facilities.

All traders are obliged to have no-deforestation pledges and to monitor the supply chain of beef to check both non-compliance with forest destruction laws and human rights abuses. Whilst the numbers are staggering a few of the examples mentioned here give some idea of the scale of this whole beef production topic. One of the three biggest beef traders briefly mentioned above, Marfrig, describes itself as the world’s second largest beef producer with a work force of over 30,000 employees. Gross profit in 2019 – over $1 billion. Marfrig claims to have met the Greenpeace agreement regarding protection of the Amazon rainforest and no illegal deforestation nor any human rights abuses for the previous five years. Another of the ‘big three’, JBS, had audits carried out by the DNV-GL company on behalf of Greenpeace and the Pará state prosecutor. The auditor’s Code of Conduct states that it must avoid ‘any combination of roles and services that could be perceived as representing a threat to the impartiality and independence of its services. We do not classify, certify or verify our own work.’ Their audits for the Greenpeace agreement claimed that JBS’s cattle purchases were 99.99 percent compliant (2016) – but its audits for the Pará prosecutor’s agreement the same year showed almost 20 percent of JBS’s purchases were not compliant.

Similar improper situations occurred with banks claiming to be compliant with laws and agreements relating to illegal deforestation. Such examples as a leaked document seen by Global Witness from HSBC to the JBS company heavily criticising them for giving no clear information or statement regarding the sources of cattle and for having ‘no vision, action plan, timeline, technology or solution.’ Then, in the same document, HSBC recommends that investors buy shares in JBS. Other examples reveal complicity in human rights abuses of workers and those forced from their land by threats and even murder. Some perpetrators have received heavy fines or prison terms, but most escape punishment.

The top ten countries importing from the three biggest beef suppliers include China 34.4 percent, EU 10.9 percent, Russia 6.65 percent, US 3.51 percent and UK 2.89 percent. The major retailers listed earlier tend to sign up to various treaties such as threatening to boycott produce if further land grabbing or deforestation continues but when contacted by Global Research with questions on progress or results there is often no reply.

If we look at the position of consumers, those at the end of the chain, in this case buyers of beef from Brazil and particularly from the Amazon, this report suggests that most will only have information from those they are buying from, that is supermarkets and fast-food chains. They will know where the beef was sourced but will be unaware of the various steps in the chain. If they were aware of, for instance, the global banks and their investors, plus the multinational beef traders funded by these banks, perhaps they would have second thoughts about their purchases. Over years many consumers have become aware of the harm done in other countries by the pension fund they are personally linked to and have protested to stop it. Many indigenous people in regions of the Amazon have been forced from their traditional lands, have been threatened and even killed for protesting, and continue to suffer threats and violence while trying to protect the forests which are their home.

Regarding the final section of the report which is related to what should be done, as is to be expected it is very detailed but also filled with unreal expectations of capitalism. All is tied up with law, the responsibility of traders, auditors, banks, financial actors, importers, supermarkets, federal environmental prosecutors and the Brazilian government. Having said this the PDF is well worth reading for the sheer amount of detail it offers on any and all of these important aspects, facts and figures, plus some mention of the loss of and risk to the many varied and endangered life forms, a topic from which too many are distant or ill informed. Diagrams and photographs give some added understanding of the enormity of the problem.

This global system of capitalism which thrusts separate countries into constant competition with other nations and forces many smaller states into positions of subservience to the more powerful is absolutely the opposite of what is urgently required if the planet is to remain a safe place for all life. Surely no one can be ignorant of the fact that we are one world and that all areas affect and are affected by others, whether as the result of mining for fossil fuels on land or in the sea, from emissions of global trade practices or, as we have here, massive destruction of the lungs of the world in order to raise more beef for sale on the world market.

Janet Surman

Let them Eat School Dinners (2005)

From the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

A lot of people were happy, or at least hopeful, about the TV series Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners. To begin with there was the famous chef himself, whose on-screen success persuaded the supermarket giant Sainsburys to go back on their intention of ditching Oliver as the star of their TV ad campaign and instead give him a contract for another series, boosting his pay to £1.2 million. This was because Sainsburys were also happy; while Jamie was lambasting school dinners their sales of organic produce went up by 12 percent a week. Cherie Blair was happy; her opinion of the dinners her son Leo eats at school was: “They’re not terrific, to be honest. I am seriously thinking about sending him with a packed lunch”.

The teachers had to be happy in view of the evidence — which was available a long time before Oliver got interested in the subject — that nutrition affects a child’s behaviour and response to learning. A study Food For Thought (2003) by Derek Gillard reported that in 1999 two schools in South London and the Young Offenders Institution in Aylesbury, both behaviour and achievement were better when diets were improved. Finally, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly was happy because, far from being embarrassed by the exposure of dietary deficiencies in the schools, she was able to claim that she had thought of it first, that when she took over at Education one of the first problems she wanted to tackle was that kids were being fed fattening, poisonous rubbish in school.

Advertising

On the other hand there were those who were not happy at what Jamie did. Ex-Education Secretary David Blunkett did not appear to be delighted; in a rare and overdue spasm of less-than-fervent penitence he had to confess that while he was in charge of the schools he “probably” had not done enough to improve the pupils’ food. The £280 million promised by Ruth Kelly, perhaps in a flush of pre-election fever, to improve ingredients and staff training, seemed likely to provoke stresses among local and national government about who would have to make that kind of investment. Then what about the companies who make some of the food, like the infamous Turkey Twizzlers and Fish Portholes? Firms like Bernard Matthews, whose persistent catch phrase is “They’re Bootifool”, would not have welcomed the vengeful threat to their access to that bountiful market of under-nourished children.

Just how bountiful can be gauged by the money poured into advertising by the food industry. In 2001 nearly £200 million was spent on promoting chocolate, sweets and crisps — some of which presumably went to ex-football star Gary Lineker for his role advertising Walkers Crisps. In 2002 McDonald’s advertising bill came to £42 million, including payments to Alan Shearer — another football hero — for his appearance in their TV campaign. And then there were the firms who prepare and dish out those awful school dinners; they were unhappy about the threat to their contracts with local education authorities and some of them made it clear that they were not about to surrender their rights without a fight. One of these is a company called New Schools but they do not actually get to heating the burgers or cooking the Turkey Twizzlers because they have sub-contracted it to another company called Atkins Asset Management, who in their turn have subcontracted it to an outfit called Scolarest.

Protest

The Guardian of 25 April reported on a protest about the food supplied by Scolarest in the London Borough of Merton. Scolarest claimed they had not had any complaints about the food and warned that any schools trying to opt out of their contracts may have to pay the equivalent of a year’s profit as compensation. Meanwhile angry and anxious parents were in no doubt about the quality of what Scolarest supplies. One mother wrote to the newspaper that her children “have rarely eaten school dinners at their Merton school because of the poor quality of the contracted-out, underfunded provisions” and a teacher at Merton, who has three sons at schools there, said “the unbalanced diet in our schools is affecting the health of our children now and will change their health for years. They deserve better”. Unhappily, the protests were energised by the assumption that food is produced and processed – by Scolarest, McDonalds or whoever – in order to nourish people. That is a nice idea but it does not fit in with the logic of capitalism’s priorities. “For contractors,” said the MP whose constituency includes Merton, “what matters is the bottom line”.

An official concern over standards of childhood nutrition is not new. A particular incentive to tackle the problem was the fact that over a third of the volunteers to join the Army in the Boer War were too small, undernourished or sick to be allowed to take part in that imperialist enterprise. This was serious, as it cast doubt on how British capitalism would fight its future wars of which, it was assumed, there would be many. Better, ran the reasoning, to start feeding the children now. The advent of compulsory education was another spur to action; in 1889 the London School Board set up the Schools Dinner Association which supplied cheap, or in some cases free, school meals. In haste a Committee on Physical Deterioration was established and from that there emerged the 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act, which encouraged local authorities to provide meals at schools, on the well-founded assumption that the children were unlikely to get them at home.

The policy was developed between the wars until the 1944 Education Act set out that every child in a maintained school should be provided with a meal, the full cost of which was met by the state.

Poverty

The 1964 Labour government began the retreat from this high spot in education services in 1967, when they withdrew the 100 percent grant for school meals. In 1978 a White Paper on public expenditure opted for halving the £380 million cost of providing school meals, which led to the lowering of standards and the introduction of junk food. The big assault came with the Thatcher governments, which abolished the statutory duty on Local Education Authorities to lay on meals for all school children and then introduced compulsory competitive tendering. This opened the way for the private companies which, to screw the largest possible profit from the arrangement, introduced the cafeteria system and the provision of junk fast food like burgers and chips. The day of Scolarest had dawned.

The link between nutrition and health and behaviour seems so obvious and the evidence for it seems so overwhelming, that it hardly needs to be established through investigation. Booth and Rowntree surveyed the extent of the deeper levels of poverty in London and York respectively in the late 19th and early 20 centuries but the limits to the usefulness of their work can be gauged by the fact that when Booth began to collect his data he thought the extent of  deprivation to be over-estimated and that in any case the condition of many of those in poverty was self-inflicted. The problem today is critical but in many respects different.

As Jamie Oliver and many others have found, malnutrition is not always a matter of lack of food but of having access only to food which may be filling but is nutritionally deficient. That is itself related to working class poverty. At a Diet and Health Forum in October 2003 Julia Unwin, Deputy Chair of the Food Standards Agency, said “Children a century ago were not getting enough of the right things to eat. British children today are eating too much of the wrong things. Within the last month the Health Development Agency has spelled out in chilling detail the scale of the problem we face …  And hardest hit are those worst placed to react — children living in socially deprived circumstances. We are talking here about a disease of poverty.”

So Jamie Oliver may not have been aware of what he was cooking up, when he set out to expose school dinners on TV. Malnutrition is an aspect of poverty, which is an inescapable reality of capitalism’s class society. Food is a commodity – produced for sale and profit – like all of capitalism’s wealth. That is why the companies could fight to assert the legal right to safeguard their profits, even at the cost of malnourishing school kids. It is a typically tragic mess of this social system, that children can be starved as they are fed.

Ivan

Voice From The Back: Behind the statistics (2011)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Behind the statistics

We are bombarded today by unemployment statistics but what we may often fail to appreciate is the real human misery behind those figures. “In California, former auto worker Maria Gregg was out of work five months last year before landing a new job –at a nearly 20% pay cut. In Massachusetts, Kevin Cronan, who lost his $150,000-a-year job as a money manager in early 2009, is now frothing cappuccinos at a Starbucks for $8.85 an hour. In Wisconsin, Dale Szabo, a former manufacturing manager with two master’s degrees, has been searching years for a job comparable to the one he lost in 2003. He’s now a school janitor. They are among the lucky. There are 14.5 million people on the unemployment rolls, including 6.4 million who have been jobless for more than six months” (Wall Street Journal, 11 January). Behind the faceless figures of  unemployment are the millions of people like Maria, Kevin and Dale whose standard of living has collapsed and yet have still got to survive with their dependants in the dog-eat-dog society of capitalism.

A sense of values 

We live in a society where many are concerned about world hunger, homelessness and rising unemployment, but the British Government have much more important issues to concern themselves with – primogeniture. This deals with the perplexing problem of whether or not if Prince William has a daughter before a son she can become queen. “Luckily the Prime Minister has recognised that this a matter of the deepest seriousness… ‘It is’, said his spokesman, ‘a complex and difficult matter that requires careful and thoughtful consideration…’” (Observer, 23 January). A jobless father of several children might consider his unpaid mortgage a trifle more pressing than primogeniture. In fact he could well ask what the hell is primogeniture anyway?

The widening gap

In an article describing the life of the extremely wealthy and the rest of us the Times recently laid out a list of some of these super-wealthy individuals living at present in London. The Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal worth $6.4 billion, the Russian Alisher Usmanov worth $7.2 billion and the Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk a mere $3.1 billion. “The extravagance of the super-rich at a time when the vast majority of people are feeling the financial squeeze seems incongruous at best. But the reality is that the gap between the UHNWIs (ultra-high net worth individuals) and the rest is widening. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, said recently that high-income individuals, banks and corporations had rebounded from the global downturn, while pretty well everyone else struggled…The world’s wealthiest 10 per cent now control 83 per cent of all assets” (Times, 5 February). When even the ultra-conservative Times can report on the widening class differences in capitalism the ultra-rich must be very convinced of the docility of the working class. Fellow workers – wake up!

The National Ill-Health Service 

One of the fallacies much beloved of British politicians is that the NHS is a no-expense spared service that provides patients with unbeatable treatment, but the evidence of Aseem Malhotra seems to contradict that claim. “The healthcare that clinicians offer is usually exemplary. Why, then, are the ill served such disgraceful meals? I mend hearts. Then I see my patients served junk food by our hospitals. Fry-ups, burger and chips, fizzy drinks and ice cream for pudding. You would expect to see these delights on the menu at a McDonald’s or Burger King. But, sadly, this is the sort of food that is also likely to be served at your local hospital. I work as a cardiologist at one of Britain’s leading cardiac centres…Coronary artery disease is the biggest killer in the western world and a significant part of my job involves performing a lifesaving procedure, angioplasty, to restore the blood supply to the heart muscle. Coronary atheroma (fatty deposit within the artery wall) takes many years to develop and is the culmination of risk factors, of which lifestyle – and diet in particular – is a major contributor” (Observer, 13 February). Dr Malhotra asks why they are served such meals, but the newspaper provides the answer. “The majority of hospitals spend an average of less than £1 on each meal per patient.”

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 (Penguin £6.99)

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

Chips With . . . Nothing? (2002)

Book Review from the November 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation

You may well think that companies like McDonald's are objectionable, serving nasty junk food and disfiguring high streets across the land. But, as Eric Schlosser shows in this thoroughly-researched book, the impact of the various fast-food corporations is far greater than this, reaching into almost every aspect of daily life, and producing massive profits.

In the United States, every day a staggering 75 million people eat fast food. Within a generation, there has been a massive shift from eating at home to eating in (mainly fast-food) restaurants, reflecting the fact that many more women are now employed outside the home. This itself is tied to the steady decline in average US hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) since the early 70s. And the restaurant industry is America's largest private employer, with the greatest number of employees on the minimum wage. Workers at these companies - most of them in their teens - have few rights and benefits, learn no employable skills, are rarely able to join a union, and have little control over their job. No wonder there is such a massive turnover of staff.

The big fast-food companies spend massive amounts on advertising, and have special promotions aimed at children, from free toys with kids' meals to sponsored teaching materials in cash-starved schools. Their capital expenditures are reduced by reliance on franchising, which desperate franchisees see as an easy way to business success, even though the failure rate among franchises is far higher than other businesses. They also spend masses of money inserting flavours into the food they sell, because all the processing and freezing applied to the food removes most of its original flavour. And the food isn't even good for you, being full of fat. More than half of all American adults are obese or overweight, and this figure is increasing. One 19-stone man from New York is now suing McDonald's, KFC and others for causing his obesity: "The fast-food industry has wrecked my life. They said 100 percent beef. I thought that meant it was good for you" (Guardian, 27 August).

One of the most wide-ranging impacts of the fast-food industry is on American agriculture. The raising of chicken has already become the virtual monopoly of a small number of companies, and now beef production is going the same way. Cattle ranchers are quitting the land in droves as enormous meatpacking companies dictate prices, pushing them ever lower. The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers is three times the US average.

The American emphasis may make the book less interesting to those living elsewhere, even though fast food is now a more or less world-wide phenomenon. There is an interesting chapter on the globalisation of fast food, with an illuminating section on the former East Germany. The first McDonald's to open there was in the town of Plauen, where the new franchisees were the couple who ran the previous state-controlled food service monopoly. As Schlosser says, "Throughout the former Eastern bloc, members of the old Communist elite have had the easiest time adjusting to Western consumerism."

One of the strengths of the book is the individual case studies it contains, in addition to all the facts and figures. One example relates to a man named Kenny, who worked for the Monfort company in a meatpacking factory. While working, he was hit by a box that fell from a height. The company doctor told him he was just suffering from a pulled muscle, but in fact he needed back surgery, and was only able to return to work after fourteen months. He was transferred to another company plant, where he now had to do heavy work rather than light duties. He was exposed to chlorine while cleaning a blood tank and spent a month in hospital, his lungs having been burned. Back at work again, he broke his leg when he stepped into a hole in the factory's concrete floor, then he shattered an ankle, then had a heart attack at work. While he was recuperating from this, Monfort sacked him. To my shame, when I first read Kenny's story, I thought it was an amalgam of the experiences of a number of workers. But no, Kenny is a real person: "His heart is permanently damaged. His immune system seems shot. His back hurts, his ankle hurts, and every so often he coughs up blood. He is unable to work at any job . . . Once strong and powerfully built, he now walks with difficulty, tires easily, and feels useless, as though his life were over. He is forty-six years old."

Schlosser's own proposals are the reformist ones of tougher government standards on safety at work and the processing of food. But they are not the point of this impressive book, which tells you a great deal about the realities of life under capitalism, and of the real cost of burger with fries.

Paul Bennett