Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness

My computer at my old office crashed, along with the next few planned blog entries, so I have to adlib here and come up with something quickly. As it happens, I finished off Reefer Madness, a book by Eric Schlosser, best known for Fast Food Nation. I may as well review both of them.

I went into FFN expecting it to be an all-out crucifixion of McDonald’s and the fast food industry: nasty, obnoxious artery-clogging filth; and evil, soulless corporations enslaving millions of hapless workers in hopeless, dead-end McJobs. I was wrong.

First off, nowhere in FFN does Schlosser condemn fast food as unhealthy. Sure, he doesn’t claim that it’s healthy or good for you, but simply the absence of positive nutritional value is not, in itself, an indictment of this class of food as poison. He falls well short of that. In fact, he goes into considerable detail about the conscientious efforts of the various chains – particularly Jack-in-the-Box – to guarantee that its food is safe and free from bacteria and other impurities which could cause food poisoning or disease. Any discussion of the long-term effects of a lifetime of McDonald’s consumption is outside the scope of his book.

He was particularly impressed with the skill of the industry at developing artificial colors and flavors, centered in their chemical plants located along the New Jersey Turnpike (which any of us familiar with that strip of highway has surely seen at some point). Note: artificial almond flavor is actually LESS dangerous than natural almond flavor, which contains trace elements of cyanide. Yep. Though the amount of cyanide in an almond is so small, you’d have to eat literally thousands, or even millions, to have a chance of dying. Death by almonds? Not likely.

He was also impressed with the scope, organization, planning and efficiency of McDonald’s. As I recall from my days as a business student in college, practically every management professor and textbook was impressed by the thoroughness with which McDonald’s structures its operations. The machines in each restaurant are specifically designed to work in a certain fashion with zero discretion left to the 16 year old no-experience, bad attitude slackers who make up the workforce.

Granted, that makes the job itself as soulless and dull as any on an assembly line in a factory – after all, the goal is to mass-produce fries, burgers, etc. and quickly serve them to hungry, impatient customers – but it means we, as customers, can count on the same food, in the same quality, and the same quick service (if not sincerely pleasant!) whether it’s a McDonald’s in New York, L.A., Paris, London, Moscow, or Tokyo, allowing for regional variations in menu and taste, which is by design, not any failure of the local operation to meet corporate standards.

Naturally the personnel practices of McDonald’s and other chains are never going to impress Michael Moore, but Schlosser falls far short of condemning the industry as feudal. That is reserved for the next book….

Despite its title, Reefer Madness is not just about marijuana, though 1/3 of the book is devoted to that subject. The theme of the book is America’s underground economy: marijuana, illegal immigrants, and pornography. Here is where Schlosser takes closer aim at questionable employment practices, particularly among illegal immigrants in California’s strawberry farms (and to a lesser extent Florida’s fruit industry). Not only does he roast the growers in California who mercilessly exploit the Mexicans, he explicitly questions the Invisible Hand of capitalism and invokes Adam Smith to specifically invoke the dreaded words “market failure”.
Unfortunately, he does little to suggest what the solution to that market failure is, beyond a passing idea of paying the workers a penny more per unit. But consider this: first of all, we already have minimum wage laws; second, these are illegal immigrants, who shouldn't even be in the country in the first place, much less working. What exactly is the argument that people who entered the country illegally and are violating the laws by working (albeit with the obvious cooperation of their employers) should receive the benefit of our labor laws? This issue was completely ignored.

On the other hand, these people do provide a valuable service, and they do something which no one else in the country is willing to do -"it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it". In fact, the growers may have a difficult time hiring Americans to pick strawberries even if they were willing to pay a decent wage and America's strawberry consumers were willing to pay a higher price. The guest worker solution - proposed by others and criticized by Schlosser - seems to be the most appropriate recognition both of the need for these workers in our economy and their illegal status.

Given how heavily he slams not only the industry but capitalism as an economic form, this is all the more reason why he should have spent an equal amount of time providing a solution – one which would not have caused more problems than it solved. I didn't hear much of that from him besides his cursory rejection of the guest worker proposal. All very well to sneer at “the invisible hand” and write off the Libertarians as naïve children who fail to recognize the true complexity of modern society and economics, but if you can’t propose a realistic solution, or a better alternative to other proposals, you should just shut up. Two words: RENT CONTROL.
The other two thirds of Reefer Madness concern marijuana, with a strong emphasis on how stupid many of these mandatory minimums are, and the hypocrisy of politicians who demand the death penalty for drug dealers – except when their own children are caught selling pot by the pound under their very noses. He’ll get no argument from me: amen, brother, he’s preaching to the choir…. Obviously marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco, yet gets hammered as if it’s cyanide. Come on. Both the idiocy of the harsh drug laws and the rapant tyranny of the asset forfeiture laws (discussed briefly therein) could fill entire books.

The third part is porn. The majority of this section is a lengthy biography of Rueben Sturman, the man who singlehandedly created the US porn industry; covering Sturman basicially describes how the porn industry itself got started here. Here’s where Schlosser is more simply informative and isn’t up on his Marxist-Socialist soapbox. It's hard to tell whether Schlosser considers him a victim or a hero; on one hand he developed an important industry, on the other he evaded taxes until an IRS agent finally brought him down. Perhaps he's neither - or both.

Entertaining, on both counts. Unfortunately the porn section didn’t provide any samples…