Sludge Watch ==> What's in your burger ? And Sh*t in the spinach

[Maureen Reilly]

What's in your burger? Just ask 'Fast Food' writer
By CHRIS GARCIA
Cox News Service
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas

You  are about to walk into a cesspool of bad news.

Eric Schlosser, author of the globally best-selling expose "Fast Food 
Nation," is talking about food. American food. Our food. And it's kind of 
gross.

Schlosser, who looks and sounds like actor Ed Harris, is at the Driskill 
Hotel in Austin promoting the feature film version of "Fast Food Nation," 
which he co-wrote with Richard Linklater, who directs. Partly shot in 
Austin, the movie opens Friday, following Tuesday's premiere at the 
Paramount Theater.

"He's one of my favorite filmmakers," Schlosser says of Linklater. " 
'Slacker' and 'Dazed and Confused' spoke to me."

The film, a rousing bit of agitprop that might have you thinking thrice 
about that burger patty, stars Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino 
Moreno, Avril Lavigne and others in a carousel ensemble.

Schlosser and Linklater distilled much of the nonfiction book's muckraking 
reportage and fashioned fictional lives to dramatize some of its core 
issues, such as the dangers facing America's beef supply, worker 
exploitation, illegal immigration, corporate greed and the treatment of 
livestock.

"The only way it seemed to make sense was to take the title of the book and 
some of the themes, then put the book aside," says the soft-spoken 
Schlosser. "It's the same in spirit, not a literal adaptation."

Since the release of "Fast Food Nation" in 2001, mainstream consciousness of 
obesity, food contamination and organic foods has boomed. But much remains 
to be done, Schlosser says.

"People's awareness is significantly better," he says. "When you have the 
conservative governor of Arkansas and the Republican governor of California 
kicking fast food and soda companies out of schools, that's a big change."

(Schlosser was interviewed last month before Democrats won control of 
Congress.)


Austin American-Statesman: So some good has happened since the book's 
publication. Still, in the paperback's afterward you note that the Bush 
administration has pushed some things in the meatpacking industry 
dangerously backward.

Eric Schlosser: The meatpacking industry owns and operates the United States 
Department of Agriculture. The biggest meatpacking company is Tyson, and the 
head of the American Meat Institute is the chairman of Tyson.

The chief of staff at the USDA is the former chief lobbyist for the National 
Cattle and Beef Association. These big institutions work completely in 
concert with one another.

If you just look at where the money goes, McDonald's gives 80-something 
percent of its political donations to the Republican Party. The meatpacking 
industry gives the same. The restaurant industry gives 90 percent. And they 
are particularly in league with the right wing of the Republican Party. They 
appeal to its core issues.

The fast-food industry does not want the minimum wage increased. It's that 
simple. They are the biggest employers of minimum wage labor, and the 
National Restaurant Association hugely deserves credit or blame for keeping 
the minimum wage at the lowest it's been since 1951.

They also don't want tough food safety rules, especially rules that create 
liability for the meatpacking companies. The companies are not deliberately 
poisoning their customers, but if somebody gets sick, they don't want a 
quick, traceable trail right back to the company and feedlot where the 
cattle came from.

They've been remarkably effective in Congress at blocking any kinds of 
attempts to do common-sense food safety stuff, like test the cattle for mad 
cow disease.


AAS: The movie deals with E. coli in American beef, which felicitously 
parallels the recent outbreak of E. coli in American spinach.

Schlosser: Yeah, there's (expletive) in our spinach. There's a scene in the 
film where they're talking about how (cow urine and excrement) is put in 
these big lagoons and it leaks into rivers, and there you go. These factory 
farms produce 1 trillion pounds of waste a year.

Traditionally cattle on the prairie would eat grass, relieve themselves — 
which fertilized the prairie — then walk away. But when you have 100,000 
cattle living in one feedlot, they're basically living in each other's 
waste. . . . We've been living with cattle and pigs and chickens for 
thousands of years, but it's only in the past 25 years that we've treated 
them and housed them this way. The most disturbing is what we do to pigs. 
It's like out of a horrible, dystopian science-fiction movie.


AAS: How serious is it that this is happening to our greens? Is it just the 
tip of the iceberg?

Schlosser: It's a big problem. The bottom line is: Wash your own spinach. 
Ground beef gets contaminated because if there's one infected animal and you 
grind it up together with thousands of other animals — your typical 
fast-food hamburger patty has pieces of a thousand or more cattle in it — 
the odds of you encountering an infected one are huge.

If there's a little bit of bacteria in one head of lettuce, well, bad luck 
if you eat it. But if they chop it up and wash it in these big vats with all 
the other lettuce, that's a perfect way to spread the contamination 
throughout the United States.

It's the industrialization of our food system combined with terrible 
mistreatment of livestock. Here's the payback. There's a reason those 
burgers cost only 99 cents. Maybe it's better to pay a little more now and 
not pay big-time in other ways.


AAS: Experts are telling us to do something simple: "Eat local."

Schlosser: It's America in 2006. It's impossible to be pure. You can't live 
a totally virtuous life, unless you're off the grid, growing all your own 
food and using solar power. To the degree that you can buy food that's 
produced near to where you live, buy it from the farmer and not the 
middleman, that's all good.


AAS: What are three things that could be done to improve the quality and 
safety of our food supply?

Schlosser: Limits on the industrialization of livestock is one. Really 
putting limits on these gigantic hog and poultry farms, with tough animal 
welfare rules. You shouldn't be able to have these massive hog-confinement 
factory farms. The health of these animals is integrally connected to the 
people who are going to eat them. Do you want to eat something that's 
perfectly healthy? Or do you want to eat something that's being given daily 
doses of antibiotics because it's living in the fecal material of all of its 
fellow creatures?

Two, not having government subsidies for really unhealthful foods. Right now 
corn growers get 50 (percent) to 60 percent of their annual income from 
direct federal subsidies. If you grow fruits and vegetables, you get 
nothing.

The policies of the USDA help determine what we're going to eat. You can't 
have a feedlot with 100,000 cattle unless you have really cheap cattle feed 
to give them, and it's that really cheap corn that becomes cheap beef and on 
and on. So make sure the federal subsidy program is encouraging people to 
eat good food and not cheap corn syrup, high-fructose sweeteners in their 
sodas, etc.

The third thing is compassion, which is probably the most in short supply, 
and a recognition that the people who pick your fruits and vegetables and 
who work in the meat packing plants and fast-food restaurants getting 
minimum wage are preparing your food. If they're treated like (expletive), 
that bad treatment extends all the way up the food chain into your mouth.

You want the person preparing your food to earn a decent wage, to be healthy 
and have access to health care. It's possible to eat food without the whole 
system being dependent on the exploitation of those at the very bottom.


Chris Garcia writes for the Austin American-Statesman.

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