Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [135]
Gorbachev sounded like a politician from a distant era, from a time before sound bites. He was serious, long-winded, and sometimes difficult to follow. His mere presence at the Mirage was far more important to this crowd than anything he said. The meaning hit me as I looked around at all the fast food executives, the sea of pinstriped suits and silk ties. In ancient Rome, the leaders of conquered nations were put on display at the Circus. The symbolism was unmistakable; the submission to Rome, complete. Gorbachev’s appearance at the Mirage seemed an Americanized version of that custom, a public opportunity for the victors to gloat — though it would have been even more fitting if the fast food convention had been down the road at Caesars Palace.
As a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev never learned when to leave the stage, a flaw that led to his humiliating defeat in the election of 1996. He made the same mistake in Las Vegas; people got up and left the Grand Ballroom while he was still speaking. “Margaret Thatcher was a lot better,” I heard one executive say to another as they headed for the door. Thatcher had addressed the previous year’s Chain Operators Exchange.
The day after Gorbachev’s speech at the Mirage, Bob Dylan performed at the grand opening of the new Mandalay Bay casino. And billboards along the interstate announced that Peter Lowe’s Success 1999 was coming to Las Vegas, with special appearances by Elizabeth Dole and General Colin Powell.
an empire of fat
FOR MOST OF THE twentieth century, the Soviet Union stood as the greatest obstacle to the worldwide spread of American values and the American way of life. The collapse of Soviet Communism has led to an unprecedented “Americanization” of the world, expressed in the growing popularity of movies, CDs, music videos, television shows, and clothing from the United States. Unlike those commodities, fast food is the one form of American culture that foreign consumers literally consume. By eating like Americans, people all over the world are beginning to look more like Americans, at least in one respect. The United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. More than half of all American adults and about one-quarter of all American children are now obese or overweight. Those proportions have soared during the last few decades, along with the consumption of fast food. The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s. The rate of obesity among American children is twice as high as it was in the late 1970s. According to James O. Hill, a prominent nutritionist at the University of Colorado, “We’ve got the fattest, least fit generation of kids ever.”
The medical literature classifies a person as obese if he or she has a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher — a measurement that takes into account both weight and height. For example, a woman who is five-foot-five and weighs 132 pounds has a BMI of 22, which is considered normal. If she gains eighteen pounds, her BMI rises to 25, and she’s considered overweight. If she gains fifty pounds, her BMI reaches 30, and she’s considered obese. Today about 44 million American adults are obese. An additional 6 million are “super-obese”; they weigh about a hundred pounds more than they should. No other nation in history has gotten so fat so fast.
A recent study by half a dozen researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the rate of American obesity was increasing in every state and among both sexes, regardless of age, race, or educational level. In 1991, only four states had obesity rates of 15 percent or higher; today at least thirty-seven states do. “Rarely do chronic conditions such as obesity,” the CDC scientists observed, “spread with the speed and dispersion characteristic of a communicable disease epidemic.” Although the current rise in obesity has a number of complex causes, genetics is not one of them. The American gene pool has not changed radically