For instance, insurance, as you know, is very costly. Insurance is not available to new employees until they've worked there for a period of a year or, in some cases, six months. Vacations don't accrue until the second year. There are some economies, frankly, that result from hiring new employees. To place all this in perspective, Schlosser tells us that a dollar wage increase for restaurant employees would mean a rise in burger cost of only two cents.
During that time, he or she must pay medical bills and find a source of income. Many rely on public assistance. The ability of meatpacking firms to delay payment discourages many injured workers from ever filing workers' comp claims.
It leads others to accept a reduced sum of money as part of a negotiated settlement in order to cover medical bills. The system now leaves countless unskilled and uneducated manual workers poorly compensated for injuries that will forever hamper their ability to earn a living.
The few who win in court and receive full benefits are hardly set for life. Farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working poor. Small towns that seemingly belong in a Norman Rockwell painting are being turned into rural ghettos.
The hardy, independent farmers whom Thomas Jefferson considered the bedrock of American democracy are a truly vanishing breed. The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers The giant processing companies do their best to drive down the prices offered to potato farmers. The increased productivity of Idaho farmers has lowered prices even further, shifting more of the profits to the processors and the fast food chains.
A panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences warned in that the nation's meat inspection program was hopelessly outdated, still relying on visual and olfactory clues to find disease while dangerous pathogens slipped past undetected. Three years later, another National Academy of Sciences panel warned that the nation's public health infrastructure was in serious disarray, limiting its ability to track or prevent the spread of newly emerging pathogens.
Without additional funding for public health measures, outbreaks and epidemics of new diseases were virtually inevitable. Department of Agriculture with officials far more interested in government deregulation than in food safety.
The USDA became largely indistinguishable from the industries it was meant to police. McDonald's is now the biggest purchaser in the world of beef, pork, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes, and the second-biggest buyer of chicken, after KFC.
When it decided to add apple slices to Happy Meals a few years ago, the company quickly became the biggest buyer of the shiny red fruit in the United States. Analysts expect the chain to soon become a power in kale as well, if its tests with the leafy vegetable — reportedly under way in Canada — are successful. Indeed, every tweak to its menu has a butterfly effect, sending ripples that reverberate all the way to the dinner table, from the price of your meal to how it gets to your plate.
The building of this influence began 75 years ago on May 15, , when Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a drive-in burger restaurant on busy Route 66 in San Bernardino, Calif. Dining out was previously reserved for the rich, but the drive-ins that were popping up around southern California catered to increasingly prosperous middle-class, automobile-owning families.
To boost volumes, the McDonald brothers refitted their operation with a bigger grill and spatulas that could flip several burgers at once. Cutlery and flatware were turfed in favour of disposable paper wrappers. The wait staff was fired and customers were expected to walk up to the window to place their orders. The new-and-improved "Speedee Service System" impressed Chicago entrepreneur Ray Kroc, who initially visited the McDonalds to sell them milkshake makers.
They ended up signing a deal for national franchise rights. He introduced further volume-enhancing improvements, including modular stainless steel kitchens adapted from military submarines. From there, growth came rapidly. By the early s, McDonald's had several hundred restaurants in the U. International expansion started in Canada in with an outlet in Richmond, B.
Nearly 50 years later, the company has 1, outlets in Canada. When did they stop putting country of origin on meat? Does meat have to be labeled with country of origin? What companies control the meat industry? Does US import meat from China? Where does US get most of its beef? Who owns IBP? What does IBP stand for? Beef has always been a harder challenge apparently, simply because cattle live longer than chicken, and thus have a much longer time frame in which they can get sick -- and because of a lack of other treatments.
But it seems that won't be an option. If McDonald's sticks to its principle, and if ranchers and beef producers want to sell to McDonald's or other large customers, they'll have to change their ways. And that could change a lot of other things about the fast food industry in general -- to say nothing of what you think of a hamburger.
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