Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [129]
The fast food chains have become totems of Western economic development. They are often the first multinationals to arrive when a country has opened its markets, serving as the avant-garde of American franchising. Fifteen years ago, when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Turkey, no other foreign franchisor did business there. Turkey now has hundreds of franchise outlets, including 7-Eleven, Nutra Slim, Re/Max Real Estate, Mail Boxes Etc., and Ziebart Tidy Car. Support for the growth of franchising has even become part of American foreign policy. The U.S. State Department now publishes detailed studies of overseas franchise opportunities and runs a Gold Key Program at many of its embassies to help American franchisors find overseas partners.
The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald’s represents “Americana and the promise of modernization.” Thousands of people waited patiently for hours to eat at the city’s first McDonald’s in 1992. Two years later, when a McDonald’s opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive-through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain, earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Brazil, McDonald’s has become the nation’s largest private employer. The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide. Classes at McDonald’s Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois, are taught in more than two dozen languages. Few places on earth seem too distant or too remote for the golden arches. In 1986, the Tahiti Tourism Promotion Board ran an ad campaign featuring pristine beaches and the slogan “Sorry, No McDonald’s.” A decade later, one opened in Papeete, the Tahitian capital, bringing hamburgers and fries to a spot thousands of miles, across the Pacific, from the nearest cattle ranches or potato fields.
As the fast food chains have moved overseas, they have been accompanied by their major suppliers. In order to diminish fears of American imperialism, the chains try to purchase as much food as possible in the countries where they operate. Instead of importing food, they import entire systems of agricultural production. Seven years before McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in India, the company began to establish a supply network there, teaching Indian farmers how to grow iceburg lettuce with seeds specially developed for the nation’s climate. “A McDonald’s restaurant is just the window of a much larger system comprising an extensive food-chain, running right up to the farms,” one of the company’s Indian partners told a foreign journalist.
In 1987, ConAgra took over Australia Meat Holdings, the largest beef company in the country that exports more beef than any other in the world. Over the past decade, Cargill and IBP have gained control of the beef industry in Canada. Cargill has established large-scale poultry operations in China and Thailand. Tyson Foods is planning to build chicken-processing plants in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. ConAgra’s Lamb Weston division now manufactures frozen french fries in Holland, India, and Turkey. McCain, the world’s biggest french fry producer, operates fifty processing plants scattered across four continents. In order to supply McDonald’s, J. R. Simplot began to grow Russet Burbank potatoes in China, opening that nation’s first french fry factory in 1993. A few years ago Simplot bought eleven processing plants in Australia, aiming to increase sales in the East Asian market. He also purchased a 3-million-acre ranch in Australia, where he hopes to run cattle, raise vegetables, and grow potatoes. “It’s a great little country,” Simplot says, “and there’s nobody in it.”
As in the United States, the fast food companies have targeted their foreign advertising and promotion at a group of consumers with the fewest attachments to tradition: young children. “Kids are the same regarding the issues that