Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [170]
2. Your Trusted Friends
For the story of Ray Kroc, I relied mainly on his memoir, Grinding It Out; Max Boas and Steven Chain, Big Mac, and John Love, Behind the Arches. My visit to the Ray A. Kroc museum provided many useful insights into the man. Steven Watts’s The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), is by far the best biography of Disney, drawing extensively upon material from the Disney archive and interviews with Disney’s associates. Although I disagree with some of Watts’s conclusions, his research is extraordinary. Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Avon Books, 1968) remains provocative and highly relevant more than three decades after its publication. Leonard Mosley’s Disney’s World (New York: Stein and Day, 1985) and Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993) offer a counterpoint to the hagiographies sponsored by the Walt Disney Company. My view of American attitudes toward technology was greatly influenced by two books: Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) and David E. Nye’s American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
In the growing literature on marketing to children, three books are worth mentioning for what they (often inadvertently) reveal: Dan S. Acuff with Robert H. Reiher, What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids (New York: Free Press, 1997); Gene Del Vecchio, Creating Ever-Cool: A Marketer’s Guide to a Kid’s Heart (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1998); and James U. McNeal, Kids As Customers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children (New York: Lexington Books, 1992). Some of the articles in children’s marketing journals, such as Selling to Kids and Entertainment Marketing Letter, are remarkable documents for future historians. Two fine reports introduced me to the whole subject of marketing in America’s schools: Consumers Union Education Services, “Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School,” Consumers Union, 1998; and Alex Molnar, “Sponsored Schools and Commercialized Classrooms: Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends in the 1990s,” Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, August 1998. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has been battling for food safety and proper nutrition for more than thirty years. Michael Jacobson’s report “Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming Americans’ Health,” October 1998, is another fine example of the center’s work. The corporate memos from the McDonald’s advertising campaign were given to me by someone who thought I’d find them “enlightening,” and indeed they are.
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32 “One of the highlights of my sixty-first birthday”: Exhibit, Ray A. Kroc Museum.
33 “to order, control, and keep clean”: Schickel, Disney Version, p. 24.
even more famous than Mickey Mouse: According to John Love, Ronald McDonald is the most widely recognized commercial character in the United States. Love, Behind the Arches, p. 222.
34 “That was where I learned”: Kroc, Grinding It Out, p. 17.
“If you believe in it”: Voice recording, Ray A. Kroc Museum.
35 “When I saw it”: Kroc, Grinding It Out, p. 71.
“through the eyes of a salesman”: Ibid., pp. 9–10, 72.
$100,000 a year in profits: Love, Behind the Arches,