Control, Profit, & Power

The fast food companies rely on meatpacking companies to generate the food products consumers will purchase. They know that meat products must be uniform and cheap. In order to keep meat products cheap the meatpacking corporations exert acute control over the production process. Their power comes from this control, and this power leads directly to real material profits.

First, the companies act as an oligopsony: a group of buyers that have enormous power of cattle ranchers because they are few and the ranchers many (117). Additionally, the meatpacking companies have “captive” cattle supplies to put downward pressure on cattle prices when ranchers go above their desired price. Once the meat has been processed, the final costs are kept down by the fast food companies themselves. They hire “marginalized workers,” or vulnerable workers that are disabled, immigrants, or elderly (71). Paid with a minimum wage, these workers can’t complain out of desperation. They serve the meat products to consumers, and lack better choices.


Composed with Maurice, Luis, & Tynaisha

Instant Gratification

In Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation he discusses the role that instant gratification plays in the consumption of food. First of all, fast food depends on visual cues to entice customers; Schlosser reports that “more than 70% of fast food visits are ‘impulsive’” (Schlosser 66). These visual cues are reinforced by the food itself, which more resembles “food products” than what we might consider ‘real’ food. Real food is food that doesn’t go through a process of mechanization and design to be eaten. It doesn’t contain chemical additives that are essential to it tasting good prior to consumption. It is hard to eat raw, uncooked food prodcuts, for instance, without heating them up. Likewise, it would be difficult to eat food products, such as Bagel Bites, if they did not contain all the additives that make them “taste” good to the tongue and brain, without actually being healthy for the body.

This manufactured taste plays an incredibly important role in food choice because it gives consumers an instant reward for selecting unhealthy food. This instant reward is "instant gratification." Even though the food is processed and specially designed to cover its flaws as a food product, the body cannot distinguish evidence of this. Instead, the taste is chemically satisfying and immediately gratifying. It’s a biological trick with alarming consequences for long-term health, both for individuals and for populations generally.

Stroking

In Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser discusses the concept of “stroking,” which is a psychological technique used by fast food managers to encourage positive emotions in employees. This is a necessary part of company strategy because these workers are otherwise alienated from their work, as it’s “deskilled,” repetetive, and low-paying.

Stroking can also be a useful way to understand an anecdote from a subsequent chapter about seling “success” to middle-management employees of the fast food chains. In this later example, Schlosser explains how celebrity speakers at a “Success Authority” convention tell platitudes to the attendees about achieving their dreams through hard-work and self-confidence. 

Both of these instances of stroking seem to imply that forging temporary emotional connections in workers is a necessary part of supplementing work that’s unattractive or not emotionally fulfilling on its own, no matter what position in the corporate heirarchy that variuos workers belong to. While the profit motive makes sense for companies as a whole, it’s often not enough to fulfill individual workers within the company.