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| Photo illustration by Dior Azcuy |
Living in the fast (food) lane
Fast food is a daily fact of life for Dane Lenhard.
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As the senior advertising major readies
to graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 27 days, his days are
packed, split between attending classes, completing final projects and working
two part-time jobs.
"When I'm busy during the week, a meal is a pain for me," he said.
Most days, Lenhard doesn't eat until 3 or 4 p.m. And most days perhaps five
per week that one meal for the day comes from a fast food restaurant.
"It's not terrible, but I eat it
so often
" he said, comparing his fast food habit to the food depicted
in "The Matrix" trilogy gray mush that characters ate for energy,
not enjoyment.
Sure, Lenhard has other options. He likes to cook when he has the time. And,
sure, he could probably take advantage of his roommate's cooking skills more
often if he was ever home at dinner time.
Although he loves to eat and appreciates good food on a spring break trip to
Chicago, he was more excited about visiting the restaurants than the bars
spending $3 for a quick, convenient, tasty meal often beats the cooking and
cleanup involved in eating at home.
At 21, Lenhard is too young to remember not having fast food within walking
distance and available at any hour, but there was no such option just a
generation or so ago.
On Friday, the ubiquitous golden arches will celebrate their golden anniversary.
Yes, 50 years ago this week the behemoth king of all fast food was born in Des
Plaines, Ill.
McDonald's was not the first of its kind independent drive-ins dotted the
country before April 15, 1955 but the chain has inarguably been the biggest
influence in the five decades of fast food history.
During that history, coincidentally or not, we have seen diabetes and obesity
rates climb, we have seen the agriculture and food production industries
transformed, we have seen children trained as consumers before they can walk, we
have seen familiar logos spread across the globe so that one place looks just
like the next, and we have seen the daily family gathering around the dinner
table replaced by a burger we can order, purchase and consume without unbuckling
our seatbelts.
In the past 50 years, as fast food has grown from a big idea into a big
business, it has changed our lives.
Well, that assertion is arguably a chicken-and-egg sort of thing: Did the advent
of fast food revolutionize society to the point that we now want everything
fast, uniform, cost-efficient and automated? Or did society's craving for those
things develop first and fuel the fire of fast food?
The question elicits a chuckle from George Ritzer, a sociology professor at the
University of Maryland and the author of "The McDonaldization of
Society," which describes "the process by which the principles of the
fast food restaurant are coming to affect more and more sectors of society in
more and more parts of the world."
"That's not a know' question," he said, because it probably
happened both ways.
In many ways, the values of the fast food industry efficiency,
calculability, predictability and control through nonhuman technology were
built into the assembly line of American society long before McDonald's and
other chains debuted, Ritzer said.
When fast food came along, it fit pretty well, and so was a success.
But that success has also "exacerbated and amplified these things,"
said Ritzer, who first wrote about McDonaldization in 1983. As time passes,
"we need to be ever more efficient and we need to do more and more things
efficiently," he wrote.
The fast food philosophy, he said, has also changed other societies as America
has exported it to places like Paris and Rome, where the culture has
traditionally valued the savoring of long, inefficient meals.
Furthermore, the efficiency, calculability, predictability and nonhuman
technology of Ritzer's McDonaldization theory have spread to a variety of other
industries, not just more upscale restaurant chains but also so-called
megachurches, hotel and motel chains, clothing stores, weight loss centers,
bookstores, hair salons, oil change and auto repair centers, tax preparation
services, pharmacies, campgrounds, coffee shops you name it.
Ritzer offers the "almost pure example" of online universities as one
that's easy to understand:
It's more efficient to earn a degree while sitting at a home than to
commute to campus, just as it's more efficient to drive-through than to prepare
a meal at home or even get out of the car.
In an online university, everything is quantified, from what assignments must be
completed to the grade received, just as production in fast food establishments
emphasizes the products' size and cost and the time it takes to get them.
And that whole process of taking courses, earning grades and receiving
credentials is very predictable, just as a Big Mac bought in Beatrice is the
same as one bought in Boston.
Finally, the whole system is built upon nonhuman technology.
"Ultimately," he said, "you have no contact with any human
being."
The fast food equivalent is the production of food. Workers at individual
restaurants don't make your order from scratch; it arrives frozen and is heated
to its standard quality and consistency at the push of a button.
***
Some Lincoln-based regional chains have managed to succeed in the restaurant
business without wholeheartedly embracing the fast food philosophy.
The Runza burger chain is absolutely considered fast food, said Vice President
Renee Sjulin, and it has followed some of the industry trends, such as offering
entr้e salads for more health-conscious customers.
But Runza National's signature stuffed sandwiches are still made from scratch
from the same recipe Sjulin's grandmother used when she founded the restaurant
in 1949.
More than that n they're homemade not at some central kitchen but every day at
every one of the 67 stores throughout Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas and Iowa.
Meanwhile, Valentino's centrally produces some products like its pizza dough and
salad dressings, said executive Vice President Mike Alesio.
And the chain has in recent years converted most of its 22 corporate outlets n
there are also 18 franchises across the Midwest n so that they offer carryout
and delivery services and have little or no dine-in space.
But although they certainly value convenience and speedy service, Valentino's
has never been a quick-serve restaurant, Alesio said.
"We've never felt ourselves in that niche at all. We've never looked at
ourselves that way or emulated that," he said.
Despite the fact that both chains have avoided following the fast food flock,
Sjulin and Alesio are well aware of the societal changes that have been exacted
by fast food over the past 50 years.
"I think originally n well, I'm thinking back to 1949 and again I wasn't
around, so maybe I'm just guessing here n but I think it was an event to go to a
carhop type of place. You know, I think it was a family event and originally I
don't think people thought of it as, Well gosh, we're in a hurry, and this is
what we need to do before Johnny's baseball game,'" Sjulin said. "I
think that as moms started working more, that has driven that growth for fast
food."
She can even point to examples of how her own life is different from her
grandmother's, like the "homemade" chicken pot pie she recently made
for dinner at home with a frozen pie crust.
Said Alesio: "Dinner was more or less the central point where families
gathered and exchanged information. Now, they're still together but they're
doing different things. Food doesn't have the same central role.
"There's no question what has happened. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just
different, the way it is."
***
These days, however, the consensus seems to be that it is bad.
Thanks to the wildly successful book "Fast Food Nation" and the wildly
successful documentary "Super Size Me," critiquing the merits of the
fast food industry has more or less become a national pastime in the past few
years.
Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" was the first to make fast food
criticism popular, riding high on the New York Times bestseller list for two
years after its 2001 release.
Among the topics Schlosser expounds upon:
* Targeting children with the clown Ronald McDonald and other cartoon
characters, indoor playgrounds and toy giveaways often tied to popular animated
movies, as well as corporate sponsorships that allow advertising into schools.
* Mistreatment of employees by aggressively combating unionization and keeping
costs down by cultivating a workforce that's overwhelmingly unskilled, part-time
and without benefits.
* The flavor industry, which manufactures chemicals both "natural" and
"artificial" so that the processed foods we eat don't actually have to
taste good; we just think they do.
* The practices of the livestock and meat processing industries, such as feeding
leftover cattle meat to other cattle and speeding up the disassembly lines in
meatpacking plants, that have given rise to epidemics of E. coli and mad cow
disease. The changes in procedure have also made meatpacking one of the nation's
most dangerous jobs.
In an interview featured on the DVD version of "Super Size Me,"
Schlosser sums up his book thus: "It's like the Wizard of Oz, look
behind the curtain,' only it's a whole lot nastier."
The Oscar-nominated movie was the latest pop culture phenomenon to critically
examine the fast food industry, specifically McDonald's.
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock fulfilled "every 8-year-old's dream" by
vowing to eat three squares a day of McDonald's fare for one month.
By the end of the experiment, Spurlock gained almost 25 pounds and his health
deteriorated faster and more dramatically than expected by any of the three
doctors he consulted.
Along the way, he also focused his lens on the issues of marketing to children
and the recent rash of lawsuits aiming to blame fast food chains for the obesity
epidemic.
That's the main area for fast food-related public discourse these days.
But not all the blame can be placed on the big corporations, said Wanda
Koszewski, an assistant professor of nutrition and health sciences at UNL.
There's also the not-so-small matter of consumers choosing convenience over
considerations of sugar, cholesterol and fat, particularly saturated fat.
Part of the reason more people are making that choice is because the way our
society thinks about food has changed.
"We now have two generations, maybe more, that don't know how to cook, so
they're gonna go for the convenience," Koszewski said. "We've gotten
away from what food was all about, and that was sitting down, eating. There was
a social part of food."
Still, she's hopeful that the system we now have can work in our favor.
"If consumers will demand certain types of food from the fast food
industry, I think the industry would respond. But as long as we're buying the
Big Macs if that's what sells, that's what they're going to offer," she
said.
***
While Ritzer's book is a work of social criticism, he doesn't mean to imply that
there are no good things about fast food. It's just that they're not his
responsibility.
"I don't need to tell the reader all the good things about McDonald's
because McDonald's spends a billion dollars a year to advertise all the good
things," he said.
Cheekily, he refers to the influence McDonald's had when it opened in China for
the first time and customers were impressed by its spic and span bathrooms. The
standard for other public restrooms followed.
Seriously, the introduction of Ritzer's book offers 12 positive results of
McDonaldization. Among them: "A wider range of goods and services is
available to a much larger portion of the population than ever before" and
"People are more likely to be treated similarly, no matter what their race,
gender or social class."
So what does Ritzer wish to see in the future?
Well, what he'd like to see and what he expects to see are two different things,
he said.
"My problem is not McDonald's," he said. "It's this process of
driving out all the alternatives."
What he would like to see in the future is rebellion against McDonaldization, a
large movement that seeks out alternatives to the homogenized "islands of
the living dead."
Does he expect that to happen? No.
***
Lenhard expects that after graduation he'll no longer eat many meals made up of
$1 McChicken sandwiches, double cheeseburgers and fries.
He doesn't expect to eat fast food at all, except maybe for lunch during those
busy days in the real world of work.
"For dinner, though, no," he said. "That's the thing that I want
a job for, is that when I go home, I don't have to do a bunch of homework."
Reach Patti Vannoy at 473-7254 or jspvannp@journalstar.com.
Fast food facts
* In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food. In 2001, they
spent more than $110 billion.
* In 1960, the typical American ate 81 pounds of fresh potatoes and about
four pounds of frozen french fries. Today, the typical American eats about 49
pounds of fresh potatoes every year and more than 30 pounds of frozen french
fries.
* In the 1990s, the average American ate three hamburgers a week, and more
than two thirds of those hamburgers were bought at fast food restaurants.
Children between the ages of 7 and 13 ate more hamburgers than anyone else.
Source: "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser