pulling a fast one

Ecologist, The, June, 2001 by Iain Elliott

In his recent book Eric Schlosser exposes the unsavoury taste of the global fast food industry. Here, Iain Elliott summarises some of the meat of his arguments.

As the fast food industry has grown more competitive in the US, the major chains have looked to overseas markets for their future growth. The McDonald's Corporation recently used a new phrase to describe its hopes for foreign conquest: `global realisation'. A decade ago, McDonald's had about 3,000 restaurants outside the US; today it has about 15,000 restaurants in more than 117 countries. It currently opens about five new restaurants every day, and at least four of them are overseas. Within the next decade, Jack Greenberg, the company's chief executive, hopes to double the number of McDonald's. The chain earns the majority of its profits outside the US, as does KFC. McDonald's now ranks as the most widely recognised brand in the world, more familiar than Coca-Cola. The values, tastes, and industrial practices of the American fast food industry are being exported to every corner of the globe, helping to create a homogenised international culture that sociologist Benjamin R Barber has labelled `McWorld'.

The fast food chains have become totems of Western economic development. They are often the first multinationals to arrive when a country has opened its markets, serving as the avant-garde of American franchising. Fifteen years ago, when McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Turkey, no other foreign franchiser did business there. Turkey now has hundreds of franchise outlets, including 7-Eleven, Nutra Slim, Re/Max Real Estate, Mail Boxes Etc, and Ziebart Tidy Car. Support for the growth of franchising has even become part of American foreign policy. The US State Department now publishes detailed studies of overseas franchise opportunities and runs a Gold Key Programme at many of its embassies to help American franchisers find overseas partners.

The anthropologist Yunxiang Yan has noted that in the eyes of Beijing consumers, McDonald's represents `Americana and the promise of modernisation'. Thousands of people waited patiently for hours to eat at the city's first McDonald's in 1992. Two years later, when a McDonald's opened in Kuwait, the line of cars waiting at the drive-through window extended for seven miles. Around the same time, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca set new sales records for the chain earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In Brazil, McDonald's has become the nation's largest private employer. The fast food chains are now imperial fiefdoms, sending their emissaries far and wide. Classes at McDonald's Hamburger University in Oak Park, Illinois, are taught in 20 languages. Few places on earth seem too distant or too remote for the golden arches. In 1986, the Tahiti Tourism Promotion Board ran an ad campaign featuring pristine beaches and the slogan `Sorry, no McDonald's'. A decade later, one opened in Papeete, the Tahitian capital, bringing hamburgers and fries to a spot thousands of miles, across the Pacific, from the nearest cattle ranches or potato fields.

As the food chains have moved overseas, they have been accompanied by their major suppliers. In order to diminish fears of American imperialism, the chains try to purchase as much food as possible in the countries where they operate. Instead of importing food, they import entire systems of agricultural production. Seven years before McDonald's opened its first restaurant in India, the company began to establish a supply network there, teaching Indian farmers how to grow iceberg lettuce with seeds specially developed for the nation's climate. `A McDonald's restaurant is just the window of a much larger system comprising an extensive food-chain, running right up to the farms,' one of the company's Indian partners told a foreign journalist.

In 1987, the American ConAgra Beef Company, the biggest meatpacker in the world, took over the Elders Company in Australia, the largest beef company in the country that exports more beef than any other in the world. Over the past decade American multinationals Cargill, and IBP, have gained control of the beef industry in Canada. Cargill has established large-scale poultry operations in China and Thailand. Tyson Foods, one of the biggest chicken processors in America, is planning to build chicken-processing plants in China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. ConAgra's Lamb Weston division now manufactures frozen french fries in Holland, India, and Turkey. McCain, the world's biggest french fry producer, operates 50 processing plants scattered across four continents. In order to supply McDonald's, JR Simplot, America's great potato baron, began to grow Russet Burbank potatoes in China, opening that nation's first french fry factory in 1993. A few years ago Simplot bought 11 processing plants in Australia, aiming to increase sales in the East Asian market. He also purchased a 3-million-acre ranch in Australia, where he hopes to run cattle, raise vegetables, and grow potatoes. `It's a great little country,' Simplot says, `and there's nobody in it'.