Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [157]
Ideally, food safety would be a non-partisan issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, Labour or Conservative, Social Democrat or Christian Democrat — you still have to eat. In recent years the Democrats have been far more willing than the Republicans to support tough food-safety legislation in the United States. But that was not always the case. It was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who had the nerve to condemn dangerous concentrations of economic power, battle the meatpacking industry, and win passage of the nation’s first food-safety law. Should that sort of spirit guide the Republican Party once again, there will be fewer reasons for criticizing its policies.
Of the many reactions to Fast Food Nation, the most surprising were the international events partly set in motion by Chapter 5, “Why the Fries Taste Good.” A couple of months after the book’s publication, Hitesh Shah, a software designer in Los Angeles, contacted McDonald’s to find out if their french fries really did contain animal products. He was a regular customer at McDonald’s, a vegetarian, and a devout Jain. His religion, Jainism, prohibits not just eating animal products but also wearing them. Jainist monks cover their noses and mouths with cloth to avoid inhaling any insects. Hitesh Shah was upset by the e-mail that McDonald’s Home Office Customer Satisfaction Department sent him on March 28. “For flavor enhancement, McDonald’s french fry suppliers use a minuscule amount of beef flavoring as an ingredient in the raw product,” it said. “… (W) e are sorry if this has caused any confusion.” McDonald’s fries did in fact contain some beef; that’s why they taste so good. Shah forwarded the e-mail to Viji Sundaram, a reporter at India-West, a California weekly with a large Hindu readership. Cows are considered sacred animals by Hindus and cannot legally be slaughtered in India. Sundaram briefly conducted her own investigation, confirmed the pertinent details of my french fry chapter and of Hitesh Shah’s e-mail, then wrote an article for India-West (“Where’s the Beef? It’s in Your French Fries”) that outraged Hindus and vegetarians worldwide.
After reading the India-West article, Harish Bharti, a Seattle attorney, filed a class-action lawsuit against the McDonald’s Corporation, alleging that the chain had deliberately misled vegetarians about the true content of its fries, causing great emotional damage and endangering the souls of Hindu consumers. “Eating a cow for a Hindu,” Bharti later explained, “would be like eating your own mother.” When news of the lawsuit reached India, a crowd of five hundred Hindu nationalists marched to a McDonald’s in a suburb of Bombay and ransacked the restaurant. At another McDonald’s in Bombay, an angry crowd smeared cow dung on a statue of Ronald McDonald. In New Delhi, activists from the nationalist Shiv Sena party staged a demonstration in front of McDonald’s Indian headquarters. “We came to warn them to shut down the restaurants,” a Shiv Sena leader said, calling upon the McDonald’s Corporation to leave India immediately. The timing of the protests was unfortunate for the company. McDonald’s was planning to triple the number of restaurants in India over the next few years and had just opened the nation’s first drive-through, near the Taj Mahal.
“If you visit McDonald’s anywhere in the world, the great taste of our world famous French Fries and Big Mac is the same,” a company Web site declared. “At McDonald’s we have a saying, ‘One Taste Worldwide.’” Given such pronouncements, the outrage among Hindus in India seemed justified. The dispute over beef