Entertainment

Foods A revolution has taken place in our eating habits, and its implications for agriculture, health and the environment are enormous. The interests of agribusiness and fast-food corporations are now merging with those of the media and entertainment industries, and the result is an unprecedented corporate takeover of our food supply which is transforming not only how we eat, but also how we think. Food has lost its significance, has been wholly de-ritualized, and has become little more than pre-packaged family entertainment. By Claire Hope Cummings.

Fast-food is such a pervasive part of American life, it has become synonymous with American culture, fast-food was born in America and it has now bloated into a $106 billion industry.1 Our worldwide export of fast-food, and its attendant corporate culture, has probably been more influential and done more to destroy local food economies and cultural diversity than any government propaganda programme could hope to accomplish. No corner of the Earth is safe from its presence and no aspect of life is unaffected, fast-food is now found in shopping malls, airports, hospitals, gas stations, stadiums, on trains, and increasingly, in schools. McDonald's alone has 23,000 restaurants, and opens

Americans spend more money on fast food than they do on higher education. another 2,000 every year.2 Its effect has been the same on the millions of people i t feeds daily and on the people it employs. Fastfood culture has changed how we work, from its assembly-line kitchens filled with robotic frying machines to the canned phrases spoken to customers by its poorly paid part-time workforce.3

In the United States, more that 57 per cent of the population eat meals away from home on any given day, according to a 1995 study.4 Americans spend more money on fast-food than they do on higher education, personal computers, or even on new cars.5

breed of chicken was even developed to facilitate the production of "McNuggets".7 The power that these corporations exert, with their constant demand for uniform commodities, puts them in an unprecedented bargaining position and gives them the ability to keep prices artificially low. This purchasing power also maintains industrial farming practices necessary for the production of the commodities demanded by fast-food giants. As a result the small producer and family farmer, whose costs are higher, are squeezed out of the market.8

The effect on personal health is no less alarming. The industrial diet is based on refined foods, stripped of nutrients .. . sugar, white flour and rancid and altered vegetable oils. These foods do not satisfy the body's basic needs and the appestat responds by demanding more food. Americans are eating much larger portions and restaurants have even increased the size of their serving plates. In 1980, our annual per capita food consumption was 84 pounds, i t is now up to 101.6 pounds.9 Not surprisingly, 54 per cent of Americans are heavier than is considered healthy. In 1980 only 8 per cent of Americans were obese, today it is 20 per cent. At the same time, we are spending $40 billion every year on diets and weight loss treatments.10 Studies in the UK show that the British diet is also one of the worst in the developed world and lacks fresh fruit and vegetable intake. I t is also too high in sugar and other refined foods.

The massive growth of fast-food enterprises has had a devastating impact on the farm economy. The buying practices of fast-food corporations gives them enormous control over producers. McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef and potatoes: it is the second largest purchaser of poultry in the United States.6 A new

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Astonishingly, the connection between increased dependence on 'cheap' fast-food and the soaring costs of health care are rarely made. And while, according to the American Cancer Society 1 in 2.5 people wil l get cancer in their lifetime, the larger health risks of our industrialized food supply have gone unreported and the corporate interests are all but invisible to the consumer." An International Food Information Council study concluded that media coverage of food information was declining (there was a drop of 17 per cent in 1997) and that the voice of governments giving health and nutrition advice was weakening and was being replaced by that of the paid spokesperson.

Chea p Foo d Cheap food has long been defended as the basis of a strong economy. In a market economy, the price of food acts as the primary rationing device controlling the equilibrium between demand and supply. Al l well and good, except that our industrialized food system is not a market economy. Corporate consolidation of the financial resources, land ownership for the growing, processing and distribution of food (McDonald's is the largest owner of retail property in the world),12 and the shrinking number of companies who sell seeds and agricultural inputs, now keep the industrial

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The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No 1, January/February 1999
ENTERTAINMENT FOODS

We are building houses, strip malls and fast-food outlets on prime farmland at the rate of 1 million acres per year. That is two acres

of productive farmland lost, every minute, to urban sprawl.

farmer in virtual serfdom. 'Cheap' food is in any case not 'cheap'. Were it not for enormous corporate subsidies of every conceivable sort and the practice of externalizing all the associated environmental, health and social costs of industrial food production, so-

called 'cheap' foods would be very much more expensive than

their smaller-scale counterparts.

Certainly, the artificially low price of food to the con­

sumer does not favour the farmer, who generally

receives little more than 21 per cent of the US food

dollar.13 The rest goes to the corporations.

Since 1980, depending on how the term is defined, America has lost almost one million medium to small-sized family farms.14 The last two summers have been the hottest ever recorded, and the attendant droughts and crop damage in North America are driving even more farmers out of business. With prices so low, the cheap food system is contributing to the decline of United States' world-renowned $600-billion agricultural sector. We are building houses, strip malls and fast-food outlets on prime farmland at the rate of 1 million acres per year.15 That is two acres of productive farmland lost, every minute, to urban sprawl. In September, 1998 the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced an effort to save US farmland, saying it would spend $17.2 million in 19 states, because, as Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said, "Our farms are in danger of becoming subdivisions of shopping malls." However, the USDA is so intricately involved with industrialized farming that their pro-

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