Fast Food Nation part 2

In Fast Food Nation, there is a section that focuses on advertising and children.  Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children - Disney, McDonald's, candy makers, toy makers, manufacturers of breakfast cereal.  The explosion in children's advertising occurred during the 1980s.  Many working parents began to feel guilty about spending less time with their children and started to spend more money on them to make up for it.  This decade was considered "the decade of the child consumer."  Market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.  The very popular camel used to sell cigarettes, showed how easily children can be influenced by the right corporate mascot.  This being said, in 1991, nearly all of America's six-year-old could identify the Joe Camel, who was just as familiar to them as Mickey Mouse.  This familiar mascot was constantly being displayed towards young children and young teens, 1/3 of the cigarettes illegally sold to minors were Camels.  This goes to show how advertising can influence young children.  The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has an immediate goal, giving children a specific reason to ask for the product.  Children are being described as "surrogate salesmen" who persuade their parents into buying what they wanted.  TV advertising aimed at kids is now broadcast twenty-four hours a day and the typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television.  During the course of a year, a child watches more than thirty thousand TV commercials.  In my opinion, this is outrageous! I was more appalled when the book stated "Outside of school, the typical American spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping."  What happened to playing outside?

Fast Food Robbery 


The fast food industry's expansion coincided with a rising incidence of workplace violence in the United States.  Fast food nation explains that a robbery will most likely occur when only a few crew members are present, early in the morning or late near closing time.  Since I am an employee in the fast food industry and park/walk to work, I am always keeping an eye out when I walk to my car or I have someone walk me to my car.  About 2/3 of the robberies at fast food restaurants involve current or former employees.  From my experience working in the food industry, I have found this statement to be true!  I have worked with an employee that had attempted to steal beer from the beer cooler in the basement.  I could not believe that an employee would steal from his own work.  In a 1999 survey constructed by the National Food Service Security Council, a group funded by the large chains, found that about half of all restaurant workers engaged in some form of cash or property theft.  This was not including the theft of food.  The typical employee stole about $218 a year and new employees stole almost $100 more!  Fast food Chain restaurants have tried to reduce violent crime or prevent the crimes from occurring by spending millions on new security measures such as video cameras, panic buttons, burglar alarms, additional lighting, etc.  I found it very interesting that America's fast food restaurants are more attractive to rob than convenience stores, gas stations, or banks.  What makes them so attractive is that fast food restaurants often have thousands of dollars on the premises while gas stations or convenience store chains have worked hard to reduce the amount of money in the till.

   
Everyone has the same question when they eat McDonald's famous french fries; what makes them taste so good?  The taste of fast food fry is largely determined by the cooking oil.  For decades, McDonald's cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottenseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow.  This mixture gave the fries their unique, and ever so popular, flavor- and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.  Eventually McDonald's moved away from its original mixture and used pure vegetable oil but gave the company an enormous challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in tallow.  A look at the ingredients now used in the preparation of McDonald's french fries suggest how the problem was solved.  At the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet odd phrase: "natural flavor."  This ingredient helps to explain why most of the food American's eat today taste the way it does.  "Natural flavor" is a man-made additive that give most processed food its taste.  I found it interesting that the aroma of a food can be responsible or as much as 90%  of its flavor.  "Flavor" is primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you've just put into your mouth. 


Dangerous Jobs
The author of Fast Food Nation visited one of the nation's largest slaughterhouse entering about five thousand head of cattle everyday.  He found that the injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory.  Many workers will make a knife cute very two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift.  One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaiughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line.  The faster it runs, the more likely that workers will get hurt.  Old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour and today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour.  The pressure to keep up with the line has encouraged a widespread methamphetamine use among employees.  Meatpackers take "crank" to feel charge and self-confident and supervisors have been known to sell or give away crank to their workers in return for certain favors.  Although "crank" allows one to feel charged with lots of energy, they are actually putting themselves at risk and increases the chance of an accident to occur.