The Fast Food Industry

The sins of the fast food industry are not hard to identify. The industry discovered early on that it could market its products to kids, who would then pester their parents into pulling into the next McDonald's or Burger King selling to kids (Schlosser 40-51). The full weight of social science has been pressed into service in this endeavor. One author on marketing to children has for example identified seven distinct kinds of "nags," from pleading to emotional blackmail to throwing a tantrum (Schlosser 44). Parents might well be glad that their seven-year-olds will not read this book and learn how to improve their techniques, though admittedly the insight of the marketers seems to be that children are quite competent at nagging their parents on their own.

The fast food industry has explored some other dubious innovations as well, such as

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ocessed, and delivered to the freezers of fast-food outlets. It makes grim reading. We meet traditional ranchers ruined by corporate ranching, and packing-industry workers maimed by performing dangerous work under harsh conditions subject to little effective regulation. Nothing is new about these conditions. They evoke memories of Upton Sinclair's famous muckraking novel The Jungle, which described awful conditions in the meat packing industry nearly a century ago. The question is whether the fast food industry has contributed to conditions that long predated it. Gary Alan Fine, writing in Reason magazine, argues the opposite: Evidence indicates that the fast food industry contributes to the improvement of sanitary and work conditions. The providers of consumer services to a large public are particularly susceptible to consumer pressure, and especially wary of poisoning their customers (Fine). In 1993, several children died after eating Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with E. coli bacteria (Schlosser 198-99). For Jack in the Box it was a severe public relations crisis û but we can fairly wonder if the incidents would have gotten similar attention had the tainted meat been served by a scattering of stand-alone resta
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Approximate Word count = 1809
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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