Fast Food Nation
In late September, McDonal'ds Australia launched a new television ad campaign. The ads feature funky young McDonald's workers being exasperated (nicely) at all the misinformation circulating about their benevolent employer. The young workers urge us to reject the trendy Macca-bashing orthodoxy and "make up our own minds" instead.
The ads direct us to McDonald's own website for the kind of neutral information we've been sorely lacking. Here we find a cleverly crafted veneer of transparency and wholesomeness. Uncertainties about "that taste" are dispelled with colourful pop-up "fact" bubbles. The aim is to convince us that McDonald's food is normal, natural and healthy, and that McDonald's is a great place to work.
The McDonald's campaign is clearly a preemptive propaganda strike against Fast Food Nation. The film is a fictionalised adaptation of Eric Schlosser's bestselling book of the same name, which exposed the shocking secrets of the fast-food industry.
When the film was due for release in the United States, the food industry launched an intensive media campaign to discredit Schlosser. The "Best Food Nation" website appeared featuring vicious rants by industry-funded groups masquerading as "independent" organisations. Schlosser was subject to protests at his book signings, attempts to stop him speaking at schools and comparisons with Hitler. While represents a tamer, saner response, the corporate food industry in Australia is no less concerned about Schlosser — and with good reason.
Fast Food Nation is a powerful film that encourages compassion for some of the poorest and most exploited workers in the US. It continues an important tradition of fictional films that engage with political issues. In doing so, it contributes valuably to both film and politics. Schlosser, together with director Richard Linklater have taken the real-life stories from the book and created a convincing and moving screenplay.
The film tells of the human cost of fast food through the lives of a number of fictionalised characters, each of whom represents a different cog in the fast food industry wheel: the migrant worker, the teenage worker at the fast-food "restaurant", the rancher and the corporate executive.
The film is written and directed with sensitivity to the interplay between structure and agency in shaping people's lives, and consequently, the world around them. There are no clear-cut goodies and baddies in this film. Ultimately, it's the system that is condemned, rather than individuals.
While the film raises issues of food quality and animal welfare, its core concern is with the impact of fast food on its workers. The film contains a particularly harrowing slaughterhouse scene, which some may interpret as an argument for vegetarianism. However, as Schlosser explains, this scene is more the about "what the workers have to endure". His point, I think, is not to minimise the importance of animal welfare, but to emphasise the way in which the slaughterhouse and all it represents is a form of violence against the workers too, and ultimately against our collective humanity.
Fast Food Nation is required viewing for anyone seeking to "make up their own mind" about the ethics of the fast-food industry.