Fast Food Nation

Others behaved arbitrarily, picked on workers, yelled at workers, and made unreasonable demands.

direct approach.
In 1973, amid a bitter organizing drive in San Francisco, a group of young McDonald’s employees claimed that managers had forced them to take lie detector tests, interrogated them about union activities, and threatened them with dismissal if they refused to answer. Spokesmen for McDonald’s admitted that polygraph tests had been administered, but denied that any coercion was involved. Bryan Seale, San Francisco’s labor commissioner, closely studied some of McDonald’s old job applications and found a

English is now the second language of at least one-sixth of the nation’s restaurant workers, and about one-third of that group speaks no English at all. The proportion of fast food workers who cannot speak English is even higher. Many know only the names of the items on the menu; they speak “McDonald’s English.”

Regardless of the billions spent on marketing and promotion, all the ads on radio and TV, all the efforts to create brand loyalty, the major chains must live with the unsettling fact that more than 70 percent of fast food visits are “impulsive.” The decision to stop for fast food is made on the spur of the moment, without much thought. The vast majority of customers do not set out to eat at a Burger King, a Wendy’s, or a McDonald’s. Often, they’re not even planning to stop for food — until they see a sign, a famili

And the chains now promote their food by selling school lunches, accepting a lower profit margin in order to create brand loyalty. At least twenty school districts in the United States have their own Subway franchises; an additional fifteen hundred districts have Subway delivery contracts; and nine operate Subway sandwich carts. Taco Bell products are sold in about forty-five hundred school cafeterias. Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and McDonald’s are now selling food in the nation’s schools. The American School Food Service Association estimates that about 30 percent of the public high schools in the United States offer branded fast food.

A 1998 study of these teaching materials by the Consumers Union found that 80 percent were biased, providing students with incomplete or slanted information that favored the sponsor’s products and views. Procter & Gamble’s Decision Earth program taught that clear-cut logging was actually good for the environment; teaching aids distributed by the Exxon Education Foundation said that fossil fuels created few environmental problems and that alternative sources of energy were too expensive; a study guide sponsored by the American Coal Foundation dismissed fears of a greenhouse effect, claiming that “the earth could benefit rather than be harmed from increased carbon dioxide.” The Consumers

Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk. Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers.