Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [152]
Even the anticipation of consumer anger has prompted McDonald’s to demand changes from its suppliers. In the spring of 2000, Mc-Donald’s informed Lamb Weston and the J. R. Simplot Company that it would no longer purchase frozen french fries made from genetically engineered potatoes. As a result, the two large processors told their growers to stop planting genetically engineered potatoes — and sales of Monsanto’s New Leaf, the nation’s only biotech potato, instantly plummeted. McDonald’s had stopped serving genetically engineered potatoes a year earlier in Western Europe, where the issue of “Frankenfoods” had generated enormous publicity. In the United States, there was relatively little consumer backlash against genetic engineering. Nevertheless, McDonald’s decided to act. Just the fear of controversy swiftly led to a purchasing change with important ramifications for American agriculture.
The challenge of overcoming the fast food giants may seem daunting. But it’s insignificant compared to what the ordinary citizens, factory workers, and heavy-metal fans of Plauen once faced. They confronted a system propped up by guns, tanks, barbed wire, the media, the secret police, and legions of informers, a system that controlled every aspect of state power — except popular consent. Without leaders or a manifesto, the residents of a small East German backwater decided to seek the freedom of their forefathers. And within months a wall that had seemed impenetrable fell.
Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food. The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it. The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit. The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald’s should feel daunted; they’re outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you. A good boycott, a refusal to buy, can speak much louder than words. Sometimes the most irresistible force is the most mundane.
Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it. Then place your order. Or turn and walk out the door. It’s not too late. Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way.
afterword: the meaning of mad cow
Fast Food Nation was published on April 26, 2001, as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spread across Great Britain, providing ghastly televised images of sheep and cattle burning in funeral pyres. At the same time, European governments were beginning to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cattle potentially infected with mad cow disease (BSE). These two calamities no doubt generated interest in the book and its critique