Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want To Know About Fast Food

One of the key ingredients of McDonald’s success is the taste of their french fries. The fries at the original restaurant were made from fresh potatoes. As the franchise expanded, Kroc sought the advice of Idaho potato baron J.R. Simplot, and McDonald’s switched to frozen fries, which removed the need for time-consuming preparation. 

In the 1950s, Simplot assembled a team of chemists to develop a method for freezing fries without reducing their tastiness or crunchiness. McDonald's began to sell Simplot’s frozen French fries in 1966 and when they were reheated in the company’s trademark oil, customers didn’t notice any difference. Simplot also sold his fries to other chains, helping change and increase Americans’ consumption of potatoes, and especially french fries.

While this has made Simplot—a self-described ‘“landhog”’ who controls an area of land that is three times the size of Luxembourg—incredibly rich, other Idaho potato growers have not shared in the wealth (72). In former times, when numerous small companies bought their potatoes, the farmers were able to wait and see who offered the best price. Now, however, when the small companies have been bought out and about three companies control 80% of the market for french fries, the farmers have little choice about the prices being offered for their potatoes.

The system is good for the fast food chains, who sell the fries for almost twenty times the amount they paid for them. They are made in the Lamb Weston factory in Idaho, which processes thousands of tons of potatoes daily. It is a highly automated process, involving many machines, and “if little potatoes weren’t bobbing and floating past, you might think this was a place that manufactured cars or jet engines” (75). 

Actual white-coated scientists measure the starch and sugar contents in potatoes, whose natural sugar content varies according to the seasons. Sugar is added in the fall, when potatoes are their least sweet, and extracted in the spring, when they are at their most sweet, to maintain uniform taste. 

The special taste of McDonald's fries comes from the saturated-fat-rich ingredient of beef fat. When nutritionists began to complain, McDonald’s switched to frying in vegetable oil and found a way to make a “natural flavor” out of beef (78). The exact components of the natural flavor are a closely-guarded secret, because the McDonald’s brand depends on exclusivity.

The heart of the flavor industry, which is responsible for tastes as diverse as breakfast cereals, mouthwashes and pet foods, lies between Exit 4 and Exit 19 of the New Jersey Turnpike and is called International Flavors and Fragrances. All flavors are made “through the same basic process: mixing different chemicals to create a particular smell” (80). For example, a strawberry-milkshake flavor can be produced very cheaply for an amount that costs less than the packaging, even if the chemical formula to produce it takes up an entire paragraph.

The taste for different foods is formed in childhood and while babies especially like sweet tastes and reject bitter ones, they can learn to be open-minded based on what the people around them are eating. “Fond childhood memories of Happy Meals can lead to the yearning to eat McDonald’s many years later” because the taste of fast food is designed to be remembered for a lifetime and become a staple comfort food (83). “Fresh fruits and vegetables often have complicated, unpredictable flavors that combine bitterness with sweetness” and when fast food corporations imitate them for kids’ foods, they try to get rid of the bitterness and increase the sweetness (90). 

Throughout the United States, even in remote Kasigluk, Alaska, “the menus in school cafeterias have come to resemble the menus at fast food restaurants” (99). The food is even offered by the same companies and by the early 2000s, 19,000 government-funded schools sold fast-food from chains in their canteens. As local governments spend less on education, “selling food that kids like to eat” is a more viable option than encouraging parents to pay higher taxes (100). When the unhealthiest fast food options are taken off menus, the students boycott the cafeteria. Fast food in schools, in both the United States and Britain, contributes to childhood obesity. 

The authors write that “[w]hile some companies want to enter the schools in order to make money selling products, other companies look at schools as a good place to recruit future customers” (105). The worst-funded schools accept money from fast food companies in exchange for allowing the children to see their ads. Thanks to marketing campaigns, “Americans now drink about twice [the amount of] soft drinks as they did thirty years ago,” and this mainly serves fast food corporations, who judge that 8-year-olds have sixty-five years of soda purchases ahead of them (107). Such measures include placing soda vending machines in locations where they are most accessible to children and allowing students to drink soda in the classroom.

Too much soft drink consumption is bad for children, as these drinks contain caffeine, a drug that causes headaches, irritability and disturbed sleep. All the sugar in soft drinks also causes tooth decay and even tooth loss amongst communities who have never suffered from it historically. Today, many Eskimo-Alaskans are toothless because they drink six cans of soda a day as a replacement for water, which in some rural areas is difficult to find. Soda companies have exploited this issue and gone to concerted efforts to advertise soda to Inuit kids in publicity campaigns aimed to make them feel as though soda consumption will connect them to the glamour of the outside world.

Schlosser and Wilson state that “the power that fast food companies and soft drink companies now wield inside schools has led many critics to believe that changing the law may be the only way to kick these companies out” (113). However, plans to turn off soft drink machines in schools during certain hours and find alternative funding are met with opposition from powerful entities such as the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which seeks to take the blame off corporations and put the onus on individual responsibility. The fight against the fast food corporations is often left to lone individuals and small lobby groups. It is a small triumph when a single drink machine gets removed from a single school hallway.