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

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

Sting in the Tail: Spare Parts For Sale (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare Parts For Sale

Those who take the view that profit has nothing to do with health must have been startled by the reports of the General Medical Council hearing on the "kidneys-for-sale" allegations.

Four doctors were in the dock accused of serious professional misconduct. They were charged with buying kidneys from four Turkish donors for use in transplant operations.

The defence produced Geoffrey Alderman, Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at Holloway and Bedford College. University of London, who told the hearing: "I think it should be open to living donors to give or sell their kidneys."

The report in The Independent (18 January) stated:

  He claimed the decision to give a kidney would always be an altruistic one even if money was received. "No money could compensate for the loss of a kidney".
  Nor should arguments about exploiting the poor prevent the sale of kidneys, he said. "In a liberal democracy there are bound to be inequalities. This is the way of the world".

The professor's “liberal democracy" is of course really capitalism. Inside capitalism everything is for sale. We leave the reader to judge the "altruistic" nature of poverty-stricken desperate workers selling vital organs, and the "inequalities" that let people die because they are too poor to buy a life saving transplant.

As far as capitalism is concerned "this is the way of the world". As far as socialists are concerned it is time we got rid of the whole rotten system.

Caring Capitalism

From time to time we hear from the government that they care about the plight of the poor, the ill and the handicapped.

They point to such things as attendance allowance for those who look after terminally ill people.

A report in The Independent of 23 January 1990 illustrates what this "caring" amounts to in practice.

  But Community doctors at University College and Middlesex School of Medicine argue that many ill people die before their carers receive the allowance because of a six month qualifying period.
  Dr. Irene Higginson and colleagues discovered from records of nearly 500 cancer patients who were sufficiently disabled for their carers to be able to claim, that 92.8 per cent died within three months and 98.8 per cent within six.

Some "caring" - some system!

After Dinner Waffle

The Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd recently visited East Berlin. After a very good dinner he gave his host the East German Foreign Secretary the benefit of his views on free elections.

It was all very impressive stuff - dealing as it did with fair access to the media for all political parties. It must have been a very good dinner indeed for according to The Independent (23 January) he said:

  For in order to hold legitimate and successful free elections it Is not enough to assert a principle or even to fix a date. There have to be rules of fair and open administration of elections.
  There has to be equity in the opportunities open to the political parties. There has to be fair access to press, radio and television.

We applaud Mr. Hurd's sentiments, but we fear it was just another of those empty after dinner speeches much loved by politicians.

He surely doesn’t mean that in Britain at the next election the Socialist Party will have equity of access to the press, radio and TV.

This Gun for Hire

The fall of the dictatorships in Eastern Europe has not been greeted by universal joy. One group who are less than thrilled are the former spies and secret police who now face unemployment.

A number of Middle East regimes have started recruiting these security experts, thrown on the scrapheap by recent events. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Israel are now recruiting this pool of spooks, spies and thugs.

The Saudi intelligence chief, Turki Bin-Faisai is reported as having a 3 million dollar budget to start hiring secret agents, it says a lot for the "freedom and democracy" so beloved by the media, that every government in the world has a secret police.

Big Burger Business

27,000 people applied for a job in the latest McDonald's fast food restaurant according to Time magazine (February 5).

The American culinary empire - which some say has more to do with gastro-enteritis than gastronomy - already stretches from Seattle to Singapore. The newest offering, besides being the largest in the company's 11,300 chain, is also the first of 20 planned outlets in a $50 million deal that took 14 years of negotiation and which will see Big Mac boldly going where no burger has gone before.

Meanwhile, the lucky 605 youngsters chosen for exploitation at wages of S2.40 an hour are busy learning how to say "have a nice day" with the appropriate ingratiating smile. They can also look forward to dressing up in silly hats and scurrying around at top speed. After all, fast food demands staff who're fast on their feet.

That should be no problem for the new starts according to George Cohon, President of the Canadian subsidiary of McDonald's.

"These kids win a lot of medals in the Olympics," he says. "We can train them to work in McDonald's"

So where is this new 700 seat restaurant? It's in Pushkin Square, Moscow, just a few streets from the Kremlin.

Is there anyone out there who still thinks capitalism isn't a world wide system?


Only Human

If you ever watch "The Money Programme" or "Business Daily" on TV you will see some of society's great men being interviewed.

They are industrialists, bankers and financiers. How assured and articulate they are. and how they seem to have all the answers to every question. Here, surely, are brilliant men whom workers should admire and regard with awe.

But are they really so brilliant? Many of them who were lionised only yesterday don’t look so clever now. For example Ernest Saunders, ex-chairman of Guinness, is in disgrace and awaiting trial on serious charges. Then there's Alan Bond, the Aussie who could do no wrong but whose vast financial empire now lies in ruins. And what about all those so-shrewd bankers who threw away billions by lending to countries the rest of us wouldn't have trusted with a fiver?

Now we learn that Ferranti was taken for £215 million by a con-man who sold them a dodgy American company. What does this make Ferranti’s chairman and board?

So all of these men are clearly as fallible as anyone else and probably owe their exalted status to a combination of ability, luck, having the right connections and, in many cases, not having been caught yet.

Scorpion. 

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

“Old McDonald's had a brand...” (2007)

From the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world's biggest fast-food chain trains customers in its own image - but we don't have to be part of its assembly line.

McDonald's is one of the largest global mass consumption brands, straddling the world like a ravenous colossus. With a presence in 119 countries, over 30,000 restaurants and 48 million customers daily (2005 data), it is the world's largest fast food chain.

What is it that McDonald's sell? At first sight, the question may seem foolish, as McDonald's is synonymous with hamburgers. But that is not how the brand sells itself, or how it wishes to be portrayed. Since the 1950s, Ray Croc – the great disseminator of the McDonald's brand – insisted that he was not in the hamburger business, but in show business. McDonald's sell not only bread but circus, too, which makes it an outstanding paradigm of what has been called the "image society".

The early McDonald's: the pursuit of fun
McDonald's started as a small drive-in in California in the late 1930s, when mass production began with Henry Ford and his Model T and movies were becoming an industry. The appearance of drive-ins brought promise to the business of serving consumers inside their cars. The McDonald brothers (the original owners prior to purchase by Ray Croc) decided in the late 1940s to renovate their drive-in and turn it into a fast food restaurant. Their innovations included replacing all utensils with disposable wrappings; doing away with waiter service – customers would have to leave their cars and order at the counter; and a new way of making and delivering sandwiches: the menu was reformulated and reduced and orders prepared as if on an assembly line.

To encourage the public to identify with their business, the McDonald brothers developed the company's first branded character, a cartoon chef called Speedee. They figured that service speed would be appreciated by customers, as would predictability of product.

In the 1960s the association of brand image, brand character and entertainment was achieved through the creation of clown Ronald McDonald. There was also an architecture and design mix that matched the goal of selling fun. According to his "biography", provided by the company, Ronald is a smart, sensitive clown who loves hamburgers, fun and children. Ronald McDonald is a superstar, the company's official speaker for children, and became the world's most publicised clown.

Children's pester power was enlisted to boost sales. "Ask Mummy and Daddy to take you to McDonald's." But the clown's tone was always happy, innocent and sincere, matching his appearance. His look was dictated by McDonald's products. His hat was a tray with a styrofoam hamburger, a bag of French fries and a milk shake. His shoes were shaped like buns and his nose was a cup. He wore a styrofoam belt from which he would magically pull hamburgers.

Ronald McDonald appeared within a culture that was already in process of being branded by consumerism and at a time when television was becoming ever more popular. Mass culture was, and still is, attempting to fill the leisure time of workers with the commodities of the Industrial Revolution and beyond: consumer goods and services of all kinds. The activities of production and promotion are done by workers who then wear their other hat as consumers: only a relative few big owners can stand outside and control this duality, making sure they are the people with real privileges and benefits.

McDonaldisation as part of globalisation
Globalisation is a complex of inter-related processes which have in common the basic idea that relationships and organisations have spread increasingly around the world. Its key components are the destruction of distance barriers, the stretching of relationships beyond national boundaries, a growing awareness of the world as a whole, and an increasing inter-dependence between different parts of the globe.

The world is becoming a singular domesticated space, a place where everyone is in process of becoming assimilated into a common culture – a dominant capitalist culture. The success of fast-food franchises such as McDonald's is a case in point. Ritzer, in his 2001 book The McDonaldization of Society, argues that this is a process to be found not only in food but also in car maintenance, education, child care, supermarkets, cinemas, theme parks, and so on. McDonaldisation represents not just food but also a cultural message. The burger is not only consumed physically but also as an image and an icon of a particular way of life - capitalist way of life. Extravagant claims are made for the "freedom" of personal choice, but this is increasingly being governed and determined by market forces.

Brands and images in socialism?
Nineteenth-century socialists like Marx and Morris didn't have to worry about things like brands and images. There weren't any. Perhaps that last statement is a bit too sweeping. There were probably some early indications of how capitalism would develop from its primarily goods stage to its increasingly services stage (the Great Exhibition of 1851? Barnum and Bailey?).

Then and now it basically was and is the same system – private or state ownership, class division into workers and capitalists, access according to monetary demand. But the emphases have changed over time, especially in what has become known as the First World. It is not that food, clothing and shelter have stopped being marketed. They haven't. It is not that industries and places of work like factories, offices, mines and railways have disappeared. Generally speaking, they haven't. But today, much more than in the past, "intangibles" have been pushed to the front of the market.

Appearances, brands, celebrity, many things to do with computers, entertainment, experiences, fantasies, fashion, icons, illusions, images, lifestyles, mass markets, niche markets, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, show business, simulations, spectacle, virtual reality, waste - all are on the march, even though not everyone is in step. To say that shopping is not what it was is no mere expression of nostalgia - it is to recognise that the dominant capitalist culture has changed for many people the buying of things into a socially-produced and market-promoted but self-administered drug - from "don't really need" to "must have".

The future shape of socialism is more likely to be influenced by its replacing and converting the later than the earlier forms of capitalism. No one will buy or sell brands, images and suchlike. But does that mean there will be no use for them and therefore no need of them? We can, of course, simply say that the people at the time will decide. But we can be a bit more imaginative, and discuss, admittedly in a very tentative way, plans for a socialist future.

It seems safe to say that brands like McDonald's won't have a brilliant future. Perhaps there will be living museums in which "customers" will stand in line to place their orders for hamburgers and volunteer "staff" will experience for a short while what a McJob was like. Not to everyone's taste, but maybe fun for some, especially children.

There is a better case for the survival - even development - of images in socialism. Take travel, for example. Today the market for mass tourism is being promoted furiously and satisfied recklessly. But it is clear that this trend can't go on. The six and a half billion world's population - let alone the 9 billion expected by 2050 - won't all be able to travel at First World frequencies and distances.

Image - the experience of being there but not the reality - may come to the rescue. "Walking around" an art museum or suchlike is not physically limited. Feeling what it's like to skim over a mountain top is potentially open to everyone. Here we are in the exciting but sometimes scary territory of technology. Bearing in mind the unforeseen inventions of the last 50 years, who knows what the next 50 years will bring? The greatest challenge to be met is how to get from the capitalist world to the socialist world.

Stan Parker

Note: some material in this article is taken or adapted from Isleide A. Fontenelle, Fantasy sandwiches: image as value in the McDonald's case, World Leisure Journal, 1, 2007.

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