- There has been a huge
rise in the last two decades
in foodborne illness
according to the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Not all of that is due to fast food,
but this centralized industrialized system
is a perfect way to spread disease.
- Hey everybody, this is
Klaus from Plant Based News.
I wanted to re-upload the
speech which was filmed
and presented 20 years ago.
It's presented by investigative
journalist, Eric Schlosser,
who wrote the book Fast Food Nation:
The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
I'll play the full speech in a minute.
But before we do,
I just wanted to plug a huge giveaway.
We're doing Plant Based
News worth over $1,200
for someone from the PBN audience,
from anywhere in the
world to win a free seat
on the highly esteemed online
Plant-Based Nutrition Course,
certificated by eCornell University
and lauded by the renowned researcher
Dr. T. Colin Campbell.
There's more information about
this at the end of the video,
if you'll be interested, check
the quick link down below,
and I will get back to you
if you are one of the lucky winners.
Anyway, really hope you enjoyed the video.
- Tonight I'm gonna talk about
how I came to write Fast Food Nation.
That's some of the things
I learned during the years
that I was doing the
research and the reporting,
About some of the costs of fast food
that don't appear on
the shiny backlit menus.
And about the future of
this gigantic industry.
Will McDonald's always be with us?
Or will it someday disappear
like American Motors
and the Studebaker and Montgomery Ward?
I'm not sure it always will be with us.
First off, I should tell you a few things
in the interest of full disclosure.
I don't own any stock
in health food companies
or organic supermarkets,
and I'm not a vegetarian.
I have a lot of respect
for people who decide
to become vegetarian for
moral or ethical reasons,
but I'm not one of them.
I visited some of the nation's
biggest meat packing plants,
and I've seen some of the appalling things
that are happening inside them.
And it didn't make me into a vegetarian.
It made me angry, but it didn't
make me into a vegetarian.
My favorite meal remains
a cheeseburger and fries
and a chocolate shake.
Though, I haven't had one in a while.
I didn't set out to
write a muckraking exposé
about the dark side of
The All American Meal.
I've eaten at McDonald's
Since I was a kid,
I used to take my children to McDonald's
and buy them happy meals,
but I don't anymore.
This book started as an assignment
for Rolling Stone Magazine.
The editors asked me to look at America
through its fast food.
To go behind the counter and find out
how this gigantic system
that produces our fast food operates.
These editors believed,
and I wholeheartedly agree
that you can tell a lot about a country
by what it eats and how it eats.
When I took this assignment,
I really didn't know
anything about fast food.
Like most people I ate it,
but never really thought about it.
When I started this investigation,
I had no idea how big and how
powerful and how influential
this industry has become.
Now, of course, I knew that
fast food isn't good for you.
And I suspected that there was something
fundamentally different about it.
I think most of us realized
that almost instinctively.
Fast food tastes great
while you're eating it.
But then there's always this moment,
about 20 minutes after you're done
where there's some aftertaste.
And you wonder, "What did I just eat?"
The real turning point in my research
was when someone gave me a
pile of confidential documents
from McDonald's advertising campaign.
The basic thinking behind this campaign
seemed incredibly cynical
and manipulative to me.
There was really nothing cheery and happy
about how they were
planning to get parents
and their children into their restaurants.
And then I visited Greeley, Colorado,
and I saw firsthand what's happening
in the nation's meatpacking communities.
And that's when the story
became much darker for me.
The Rolling Stone article ran in two parts
and it was very tough on this industry.
Jann Wenner, the editor of the magazine
never pressured me to
tone the article down
or cut things out or play it safe.
And we never got sued by an industry
that very much likes to sue it's critics.
But I felt after the article had run
that there was a great deal I
hadn't been able to include,
and that I'd really only
scratched the surface
of this industry and
its enormous influence,
not just on America, but
on the rest of the world.
What we eat and how our food is produced
has changed more in the last 30 years
than in the previous 30,000.
Without most of us realizing it.
Today's fast food may look like food
that we've always been eating,
but it's really something quite different.
It has been radically transformed.
You have to look at fast food
as though it's a manufactured
industrial commodity,
something much more like a toaster oven
than like something that
you would make from scratch
and eat in your own kitchen.
The fact is that we are now such an urban
and suburbanize nation.
That most of us really have
no idea how our food is made
or where it comes from.
Most of us have no idea
what's going on at the farms
and the ranches and the slaughterhouses
and the processing
plants that now feed us.
And I think it's very
important for people to know.
our great cities could not exist
without the agricultural
surplus of the countryside.
New York city could not exist.
Los Angeles, Chicago.
They would not exist without the hard work
and the ingenuity of America's
ranchers and farmers.
That sounds corny, but it's the truth.
And it's something that's easily
forgotten in the year 2001.
What happens on our farms and
what happens to our farmers
directly affects the rest of us.
From the beginning of
history, civilization,
all civilization has been made possible
by agricultural surpluses.
This is what allows some
people to move off the land
and live in cities.
This is what allows government and science
and the arts to flourish.
We've lost sight of that basic fact.
Of how the city and the suburb
is fundamentally dependent
on what's happening in the countryside.
There is no industry more
important than agriculture.
No other industry can
survive without agriculture.
A hundred years ago,
most people knew this.
Most people either lived on a farm
or had close relatives
that lived on a farm.
If you wanted a chicken for dinner,
you had to go outside and
grab one chop off its head,
pluck it, cook it in a pot.
Now some kids may find
this hard to believe,
but once upon a time, there
were no Chicken McNuggets.
And in those days there was
something healthy and proper
about being aware and being connected,
directly connected to your food supply.
Today, most of us grab
shrink wrap packages
of meat off the shelf at a supermarket,
or grab a plastic tray
of food off the counter
at a fast food restaurant
without a moment's thought about
how either one of those things got there.
The main goal of my book is to make people
think about these things.
To show where fast food
comes from and how it's made
and how it's changed us.
The fast food industry
has helped to transform
not just the American diet,
but also our landscape,
our economy, our workforce,
our agriculture and our popular culture.
Fast food and its consequences
are now unavoidable.
Whether you eat it every day
or have never had a single bite of it.
Now I tried hard to write something
that wouldn't be simplistic,
something that wouldn't
demonize this industry.
I met a lot of good people
in the fast food industry.
People I liked.
People who were well-intended.
I don't think that the fast
food industry right now
is being run by a group of bad men
who meets secretly every week
and plot how to make us
fatter and poison us.
I don't believe that.
I think the fast food
industry is run by businessmen
who are worried mainly
about their next quarterly profit report.
About their company's
latest earnings per share.
About what wall street
will say about them.
And not much else.
These businessmen are not really worried
about the longterm consequences
of what they're selling
or the impact on society.
They're not really worried
about what their products
are doing to the health
of America's children.
They are focused on
narrow short term goals,
measured in dollars and cents.
And that's why we have to think hard
about these consequences,
about the consequences
of buying and selling
and eating fast food.
Because if we don't think
about them, nobody will.
Now there are about 330 pages in my book,
and only 10 of those pages give my opinion
about what should be done and
what changes need to be made
to curb the worst abuses
of the meatpacking and
the fast food industries.
The rest of the book
is just straightforward
investigative reporting.
There may be some mistakes in the book,
and I'd very much like
to hear what they are.
The book was fact-checked
and went through a very
strict legal review.
The fast food industry and
the meat packing industry
have attacked me, and
they've attacked the book,
but thankfully so far,
they haven't pointed
out any serious errors
or factual errors in the book.
And I haven't been sued yet for libel.
Which is in itself, no small thing.
My aim was never to tell
people what to think
or how to feel about this subject.
I didn't set out to lecture
people about fast food
or to act like a scold.
You can read the book
and keep eating fast food
or read it and stop eating it.
But I do believe quite
strongly that you should know
what you're putting into your mouth
or into your children's mouths.
So that's how and why I
came to write the book.
And now I'll give just a brief,
a brief account of some
of the things I learned.
Firstly, let me give
you a sense of how big
the fast food industry is today.
It's huge.
This year Americans will
spend about $114 billion
on fast food.
That's more money than they'll
spend on higher education,
personal computers, computer
software, or new cars.
Americans now spend more money
on fast food than on movies,
books, magazines, newspapers,
videos, and CDs, combined.
A few facts about McDonald's
will give you a sense
of this industry's scale and its power.
McDonald's isn't just the
largest fast food company.
It's really set the standard
for the rest of the industry.
Its business practices
are widely imitated,
not just within the fast food industry,
but also by companies in
very different fields.
McDonald's is a Colossus.
It is America's largest purchaser of beef,
pork and potatoes.
The second largest purchaser of chicken.
The McDonald's corporation
is the largest owner
of retail property in the world.
The company earns most of its money,
not from selling hamburgers,
but from collecting rent.
McDonald's now spends more money
on advertising and promotion
than any other brand.
It has replaced Coca-Cola as
the world's most famous brand.
McDonald's is one of the nation's
largest playground operators.
And one of the largest
distributors of toys.
A survey of American school
children found that 96%
could identify Ronald McDonald.
The only fictional character
with a higher degree of
recognition with Santa Claus.
The impact of McDonald's
on the way we live today
is hard to overstate.
The Golden Arches are now
more widely recognized
than the Christian Cross.
Fast food food has become ubiquitous.
It is literally everywhere,
an unavoidable part of modern life.
More than one out of every four Americans
eat at a fast food restaurant every day.
We tend to take fast food for granted
as though it's always been
around, but it really hasn't.
The first McDonald's
restaurant opened in 1948.
In two decades, the company
built 3000 restaurants.
So in 1968, there were 3000 McDonald's.
And all of them were in the United States.
Today, there are about 30,000 McDonald's.
And the company opens 2000
new ones roughly every year.
The enormous growth of the fast
food industry started really
around 1970.
It accelerated in the 1980s
and it hit its peak in the mid 1990s.
And there was nothing
inevitable about this.
The growth of the field
food industry didn't occur
in a political and a social vacuum.
The extraordinary growth in fast food
occurred during a period
when the hourly wage
of the average American
worker was declining.
During this period,
women were entering the
workforce in large numbers,
not mainly because of feminism,
but in order to help pay
their family's bills.
During this period, sophisticated
mass marketing techniques
were being aimed at
children for the first time.
And the fast food industry,
and McDonald's in particular
has pioneered marketing and
selling things to children.
Also during the same period,
the real value you have the
minimum wage plummeted by 40%.
And it's hardly a coincidence
that the fast food industries'
biggest period of growth occurred
when the minimum wage was falling so far.
In the book, I look at how the chains
have really helped change
how Americans work.
Now, when the McDonald brothers opened
their brand new restaurant,
the first McDonald's
in San Bernardino, more than 50 years ago,
they came up with a whole
new way of preparing food.
They brought the assembly
line system from factories
into a commercial kitchen.
And instead of relying on
skilled short order cooks,
who you had to pay a decent wage to,
they broke up all the
different tasks in the kitchen.
So that one did the same thing
again and again and again.
One person would flip hamburgers all day.
One person would make
French fries all day.
Et cetera, et cetera.
And in this system, it
didn't really matter
who got bored and who quit.
Because you could easily find
someone to replace him or her
because there was so little
skill involved in the job.
A new worker was easy and inexpensive
to put into such a job.
Now in this system,
nobody is irreplaceable.
What matters most isn't any individual
or any individual's skills.
It's the system.
And it's the details
of the operating system
that govern everything.
Now when Richard and Mac
McDonald came up with this,
they weren't trying to change the world.
They didn't see any of
the bigger implications
or ramifications of what they were doing
in their little kitchen,
in San Bernardino.
They were just trying to
cut costs in their kitchen.
But the repercussions of using
that system in one restaurant
is really different from the repercussions
when there are over 200,000
restaurants operating that way.
And that's how many fast food restaurants
there are in the States today.
The restaurant industry is now America's
biggest private employer.
So what the restaurant
industry does with its workers
has enormous implications
for every other industry.
Well, the restaurant industry now pays
some of the lowest wages
in the United States.
On average, only migrant
farm workers earn less money
in America than restaurant workers.
And so the influence of
the McDonald brothers
has gone beyond the fast food industry,
into other industries that
have looked at this system
for employing people and have copied it.
And you'll find throughout
the service economy now.
Companies are borrowing from McDonald's
and borrowing from the fast food industry.
The workforce that McDonald's cultivated,
part-time, low paid
unskilled,
unlikely to stay on the job for very long,
unlikely to ever join a union,
unable to demand any real benefits
is the workforce that is increasingly
spreading through the U S economy.
Now, in the book I look at
how the fast food chains
have helped to transform
the American landscape.
Literally have changed
what American cities
and suburbs look like.
It was Ray Kroc who had the idea
to take what the McDonald
brothers were doing
in this one restaurant in San Bernardino
and reproduce it exactly and identically
at location after
location, after location.
And it was really the fast
food industry and McDonald's
that pioneered this whole idea
of taking retail environments
and replicating them
throughout the country
as a way of growing your business.
Now, Ray Kroc founded the
McDonald's Corporation.
And he eventually got rid
of the McDonald brothers
because they, he found
them difficult work with.
The key to the success of McDonald's,
According to Ray Kroc,
could be described in
one word, conformity.
Quote,
"We have found out that way
we cannot trust some people
who are non-conformists"
Kroc once said about some
McDonald's restaurant operators.
"We will make conformance
out of them in our hurry.
The organization cannot
trust the individual.
The individual must
trust the organization."
Now that sensibility is at the heart,
not just of how the fast
food industry spreads,
but a franchising and of
all the other chain stores
that have adopted its methods.
So it was Kroc who made sure fanatically
that McDonald's restaurants
always look the same.
And that the food in them
always tasted exactly the same.
Now, other industries, as
I mentioned, copy of this.
The founders of the Gap, for example,
were quite open about how
they wanted to sell clothing,
the way that McDonald's and KFC sold food.
As a result, you traveled
through this country
and it's hard to remember
how recent it is.
It's really only in the last 20, 25 years.
You now see the same
restaurants and the same stores
and the same retail stores
strips, wherever you go.
The differences between North
and South and East and West
are rapidly disappearing.
Driven by this conformity.
Ray Kroc's belief in conformity
has left an indelible mark,
not only on this country,
but more and more on
the rest of the world.
And when you go to suburban
areas in the United Kingdom
or in Germany or in France,
you will see Walmart
and KFC and McDonald's.
And very similar strips
beginning to pop up.
So as the fast food industry got bigger,
so did it suppliers.
Encouraging concentration
throughout American agriculture.
Now, in a different era
when this was happening,
when one big company was
merging with another,
the federal government
would have stepped in
and prevented it.
Even in the Eisenhower era,
the government would have prevented
many of these huge
mergers from taking place.
Now, fast food
is some of the most heavily
processed food on the planet.
Almost everything in
a fast food restaurant
arrives there frozen or
dehydrated or as syrup.
There was very, very little cooking
that goes on in these places.
And that's deliberate.
For the most part what's
happening in a fast food kitchen
is frozen food is being reheated.
Frozen food is cheaper to buy,
and it's much cheaper to hire workers
who only have to reheat things
and don't actually have to
prepare them or cook them.
Now, the problem with a system
that relies on processed food
is that when you process food,
when you freeze it and dehydrate it,
you destroy most of its flavor.
And one of the most mind
blowing things for me
as I was doing this research
was coming upon a flavor industry
that has a reason to
manufacture the taste,
not just of most of the
fast food that we eat,
but most of the processed food
that you'll buy at supermarkets today.
This flavor industry is really a branch
of the specialty chemical industry.
And the heart of the
industry is right nearby.
It's off the New Jersey
Turnpike in New Jersey.
Most of the flavor for most
of the fast food that we eat
is coming from this industrial corridor,
off the New Jersey Turnpike.
Now, one of the chapters in
my book set out to discover
why McDonald's French
fries tastes so good.
And they really do.
I mean, they have a
very distinctive flavor
that's different from just
about all the other fries
that the chains sell.
And the reason is this one ingredient
at the back of the very end
of the list of ingredients,
you'll see the sprays natural flavor,
and it is a natural flavor.
I had to really try and figure
out where it comes from.
And it turns out it comes
from animal products
and from beef.
There's all kinds of strange things
that are being added to our fast food.
That most people don't realize.
Chicken McNuggets derive much
of their flavor from beef
and from beef extracts.
And there are all kinds of
really unusual chemicals
that are going into
these flavor additives.
And I'm just gonna read you the beginning
of a list for example,
of a strawberry flavor.
And what's in it?
A typical artificial strawberry flavor,
like the kind that you'll find
in a Burger King Strawberry milkshake
contains the following ingredients;
Amyl acetate, amyl butyrate,
amyl valerate,
anethole,
anisole formate,
benzylacetate, benzylisobutyrate,
butyric acid,
cinnamol,
isobuterol,
and about 35 to 40 other
chemicals that have that name.
Now by law, the FDA doesn't
require these companies
to list the ingredients
in a flavor additive.
But if they had to the ingredients
in these flavor additives
often out number, usually outnumber
the ingredients in the food itself.
Now there's not anything
necessarily dangerous
about these chemicals,
but there's really something
strange about them.
About this whole system.
About these flavor
factories off the Turnpike.
And for me, this is important,
not because I wanted to make
people scared of their food
or scared of these chemicals,
but really to show them
that this fast food
is a very different creature, literally.
It's an industrial product,
a manufactured product.
And for me, this is a
very important symbol
of how our whole food
supply has been transformed
in the last 30 years.
Now, the fast food chains
have changed not only
what Americans eat, but also
what Americans look like.
It's hardly a coincidence
that as fast food consumption
has risen in the United States,
so has people's weight.
The rate of obesity among American adults
has more than doubled
since the early 1960s.
Now our obesity epidemic
has many complex causes,
but there's little doubt that
fast food is one of them.
Human beings have an
instinctive craving for fat.
It comes from thousands and
thousands of years of scarcity
of food scarcity.
When it was really a struggle to survive.
And we developed very efficient mechanisms
for putting on fat and keeping
it for the lean periods.
We're not very good at losing
the fat once it's put on us.
Fast food is some of
the fattiest high salt,
high sugar food that's
sold in the United States.
And this isn't accidental.
The amount of fat in fast food
is very carefully designed
and very carefully calibrated
to make you want to eat more of it.
So this industry is really
addressing a basic human craving
and making an enormous
amount of money off of it.
The portion sizes have
also increased dramatically
in the last five to 10 years
because the concentration in agriculture
has pushed down the
price of the food so much
that these companies can now
offer you a much bigger serving
and still make a huge profit on it.
When you get a large
order of French fries,
there's just a few pennies
worth of potatoes in it.
So they can give you a larger
serving and make a lot more
by charging you an extra 20 to 30 cents,
they're only giving you
one or two more cents
worth of potatoes.
And that's true for the sodas also,
which are really where they
make most of their profit.
These supersized sodas
that they're selling
are basically pure profit.
The only cost that they
have is the cost of the cup
and the syrup, which is basically sugar
and cost a few pennies.
So it's been extremely
profitable for these companies
to increase their portion size,
but it's had an enormous effect
on American eating habits
and especially on the eating
habits of the poorest Americans
who eat the most fast food.
Now,
if an adult wants to buy
a double cheeseburger with bacon
and a supersize fries
and a super-size Coke,
it's a free country.
And I think that's great.
People should go right ahead.
But one of the real problems
that we're facing today
is obesity among children.
And the way the fast
food chains are marketing
these same high fat foods to children.
And to me, that's a very, very
different subject entirely.
The obesity rate among American children
has doubled since the late 1970s.
And we have the highest
obesity rate among children
in the Western industrialized world.
There are children now who are suffering
from early onset diabetes
in large numbers.
There are children who
are six to eight years old
who are having heart attacks
because of their obesity.
The fast food chains
from the very early days
have worked hard to market
their goods to kids.
Ray Kroc, again, really pioneered this.
And it wasn't because he loved kids.
It was because he realized,
and he's quite open in
his memoir about this,
that if you can get a child
to come to your restaurant,
you'll also get one or two of
their parents, grandparents.
And the industry's own surveys.
Now show that whenever a child sets foot
in a fast food restaurant,
the average check size is much higher
just because that child is
bringing in other customers.
So the fast food industry
and McDonald's in particular
has really pioneered very
sophisticated marketing techniques
aimed at children.
And that's to get them in their
parents in the restaurant.
There are tie-ins with the
leading toy manufacturers,
tie-ins with the leading
Hollywood studios.
And it's very hard now to distinguish
America's fast food culture
from the popular culture
of its children.
If you look at what's in happy meals
and in Burger King children meals, though,
it's extremely high fat food.
And the trend in the industry
right now is to actually
make the portions even bigger.
McDonald's has just
introduced something called
a mighty kid's meal,
which has a bigger burger.
And so,
this is a major, major
issue facing the industry.
And it's very different
from selling this kind of food to adults.
The centralized meatpacking
system that we have
largely to serve the interest
of the fast food industry
has also become a very effective mechanism
for taking dangerous pathogens
and all kinds of bugs
that cause food poisoning
and spreading them
throughout the United States.
There has been a huge rise
in the last few decades,
in a foodborne illness,
according to the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Not all of that is due to fast food,
but the centralized industrialized system
is a perfect way to spread disease.
Every day in the United States,
about 200,000 people get a
bad case of food poisoning.
900 are hospitalized and 14 die.
And we're finding that there
are all kinds of new pathogens
that are entering this food system.
Like E. Coli 015787
and listeria that we
didn't even know existed
until about 20 years ago.
Studies have found that
bouts of food poisoning
not only involve the
acute phase of illness
when you're really feeling terrible,
but can have lasting
lifelong physical effects.
Now, the outbreak of mad
cow in the United Kingdom
is one more example of a pathogen
that no one had ever heard of,
and no one had ever anticipated
entering the food supply
and spreading throughout the system
before anyone realized it.
And that's what our meat packing system
has really made possible.
The meat packing companies
and the fast food companies
in the last 20 years have formed
very, very close alliances
with the right wing of
the Republican Party
and have an enormous amount
of power in Congress.
As a result at the same
time that the industry
was becoming very concentrated
and the potential for large
scale outbreaks was increasing
our federal public health
system and food safety system
was largely being dismantled.
At the moment,
there were about a dozen
different federal agencies
that are responsible for food safety
and more than two dozen
congressional subcommittees
that oversee them.
There are huge gaps in enforcement.
Most people would be surprised to learn
that the federal government right now
has the authority to demand the recall
of defective stuffed animals,
but cannot order the
recall of contaminated meat
that could potentially sicken thousands,
if not millions of people.
Right now, all recalls
of meat are voluntary.
And while the government is negotiating
with a meat packing company
over how much meat does
need to be recalled
that meat remains on the market
and people continue eating it.
Now the question that I've
gotten most from people
after writing this book has been,
"So what's in my burger?"
And the answer is, if
it's a fast food burger,
there are probably pieces of dozens,
if not hundreds of different
cattle in that burger
because of the huge hamburger grinders
that now grind thousands and
thousands of animals together.
And there may be some theses in that
most of the outbreaks of food
poisoning related to meat
are caused by fecal
contamination of the meat
at these slaughterhouses.
And I go in, I explore
at length in the book,
all the different food borne illnesses
that are now being spread
through this industrialized system.
But it was not my intention
to make people afraid of their food.
There are a lot of things to worry about.
And you shouldn't necessarily
be afraid of your hamburger?
The odds are it won't make you sick.
But the odds are somebody
is gonna get sick from that.
Every year, about a
hundred thousand Americans
come down with his bad E. coli.
This very serious E. coli infection.
So to statistically,
it won't be one of you,
but it's going to be someone.
And it's really important to be informed
about what's happening.
And also, as I discussed in the book,
how unnecessary so much of this is.
And with stricter regulation
of the meatpacking industry
and stricter food safety laws,
nowhere near as many people
would be getting sick.
What stays with me the most
from all my reporting for this book
were my visits to meat
packing communities.
And again, there's been an enormous change
in the last 20 years in what's happened
to meat packing plants and
to meat packing workers.
A hundred years ago,
Upton Sinclair wrote about
the extremely dangerous
conditions in meatpacking.
But things got better.
Over the course of decades,
things got much better
in meat packing plants
in the United States.
And by the early 1970s meat packing
was one of the highest
paid industrial jobs
in the United States with one
of the lowest turnover rates.
It was a good job.
There were waiting lists for jobs
in American meat packing plants.
And then as the meat packing
industry became concentrated.
And as these four companies,
really three companies
wielded enormous power over the industry.
They began to break labor
unions one after another,
and they began to change the
nature of meatpacking jobs.
And they began to recruit
a whole new type of worker,
really Mexican and Guatemalan workers,
many of them illegal immigrants.
So if you go into a meat
packing plant today,
you will find some of the
poorest often illiterate workers
in the United States
working in a job that is
unpleasant and dangerous
beyond my powers of description.
According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics
today, meat packing is
the most dangerous job
in the United States.
In 1999, more than one quarter
of America's meatpacking workers
suffered an on the job injury or illness.
And that means something more serious
than just going to get first aid.
The meat packing industry,
not only has the highest injury rate,
it has the highest rate
of serious injuries.
As measured in lost work days.
Now, if you accept the official figures,
that means about 40,000
meatpacking workers
are injured every year.
But there's very good reason
to believe those numbers are low
and that the actual numbers
are much, much higher
because of how vulnerable
this workforce is,
how rarely the injuries are being reported
and the falsification of injury reports.
So to give you a sense of
what's going on in these plants,
I'm gonna read off a list
of some accident reports
from OSHA,
some meatpacking accident reports.
Okay, great.
And these will give you a
sense of what's going on.
Employees severely burned after
fuel from his saws ignited.
Employee hospitalized for neck laceration,
from flying blade.
Employees' finger amputated
in chutney machine.
Employees' fingers
amputated in meat blender.
Employees' arm amputated when
caught in meat tenderizer.
Employee killed when arm caught
in unguarded meat grinder.
Employee killed when
head crushed by conveyor.
Employee killed by stunned gun.
Employee crushed and killed
in hide fleshing machine.
Employee caught and killed
in gut cooker machine.
Now, most of the injuries
that are happening,
aren't this extreme.
Most of them are lacerations
people stabbing themselves
or stabbing someone nearby.
But the injury rate is astronomical.
And one of the things that I realized
is that there are many other
countries that eat meat
and eat beef
and produce beef in slaughterhouses,
and don't have anywhere
near the working conditions
that we have
and don't have anywhere near
the injury rate that we have.
Now, one of the big criticisms
of my book after it came out
was that it was overly critical
of the Republican Party.
And one sided and its criticism
of the Republican Party.
Well, the fact of the matter
is that for the last 20 years,
the Republican Party
has worked very closely
with a fast food industry and
with the meat packing industry
to avoid tough worker safety
laws and food safety laws,
and has really worked to
avoid the sort of regulations
that would keep real competition
in our agricultural markets.
I'll give you an example.
In the new Republican Congress
Representative Charles Norwood
has jurisdiction over OSHA,
which is the federal agency
that looks after the safety of workers.
Now, Norwood right now is in
charge in Congress of OSHA.
Well, in the past, Congressman Norwood
has introduced legislation
to abolish OSHA.
One of the most serious
problems in meatpacking today
are cumulative trauma injuries,
which happened when you do the same task
over and over again.
The meat packing industry
has the highest rate
of cumulative trauma of any industry.
It's about 35 times higher
than that of any other,
than of the average in industry.
Well, representative, Congressman
Norwood has publicly said
"That workers tend to get
cumulative trauma injuries,
not from their jobs,
but from playing too much
tennis and from skiing."
So it's hard not to be critical
of the Republican Party.
I'm not a Democrat, I'm
a registered independent.
And ideally all of these
issues involving food
would be dealt with in
a nonpartisan spirit.
Sincerely.
It doesn't matter whether you're
a Republican or a Democrat,
you have to eat.
And so do your children.
Although Democrats in recent years.
Have worked for food safety
and for worker safety legislation
and have taken on the
meatpacking industry,
it was a Republican president
a hundred years ago, almost
who really was America's
greatest champion of food safety.
It was a Republican.
Theodore Roosevelt had the nerve
to battle the meat packing industry
and not just the meat packing industry,
but to really take on the concentration
of economic power in this country.
And unfortunately, almost a century later,
there really is a need
to battle these same forces once again.
So I hope the Republican
Party will soon reclaim
this great Republican tradition.
The 20th century was largely characterized
by a battle against totalitarian power,
state power, fascism, communism.
And I think that this century,
this new century is gonna be dominated
by a battle against excess
of corporate power worldwide.
It's not just in the fast food industry
or the meat packing industry.
It's remarkable how similar
our economic landscape
is becoming to that of 1901.
And when I was in these
meatpacking communities
in Colorado and Nebraska and in Texas,
it didn't feel in many ways like 2001.
It felt like a hundred years ago.
So the question is, will
McDonald's always be with us.
I'm not so sure.
It seems hard to believe.
There's so many of them.
They're everywhere.
You can't escape them.
And yet I think they're
built on a fragile base.
There's a quote I have in the book
from a leading fast food executive
about the industry's fundamental dynamic,
which is "Grow or die.
And the industry isn't really growing
in the United States anymore.
As a matter of fact,
the year 2000 is the first year
that the fast food industry
didn't get any new customers
in the United States.
And as a result, they
focused all of their energies
on expanding overseas and
opening in every country
that they possibly can.
But their sales overseas
now are starting to slow.
And it may be.
And I hope I'm not being overly optimistic
that the fast food industry right now
is like the British empire.
Right before the first world war.
It looked huge.
It straddled the globe,
but at heart, at its core,
there were some fundamental contradictions
that would lead to its undoing.
Now the British empire still exists.
It's just very small.
It's Gibraltar and the Falkland islands.
And in the same way, the
fast food industry, I think,
is either gonna have to change,
to adapt to changing
conditions in the new century,
or it's gonna get smaller, much smaller.
I mean, what the book tries to look at
is all the costs of our cheap food
that don't appear on the menu.
And I think those costs are enormous.
The cost of obesity are twice as high
as the total revenues of
the fast food industry.
So as people become more
aware of what they're eating
and what their consequences,
I think there's enormous
potential for change.
Now, I've spent a lot of time
holding the fast food industry responsible
for a lot of these business practices,
but it's really not that simple.
I think people have to take responsibility
for their own purchases
and for their own behavior.
Nobody is forced to buy fast food.
And this industry exists
really at the pleasure
of consumers.
So, you know, the future is really
in every individual's hands.
I mean, you can keep on eating
it or you can stop buying it.
And it's really one of the
last remaining instances of
you can really have it your way.
Thank you.
- Thank you so much for
watching this video.
Please subscribe for more.
And don't forget about
the Epic Plant-Based
Nutrition Course giveaway
that we're doing in
collaboration with Eco Now,
and Nutrition Studies.
- [Announcer] Everyone
strives to live the happiest,
healthiest life they can.
But for the vast majority of us,
something seems to be missing.
At the T Colin Campbell
Center for Nutrition Studies,
we get it.
Because if you aren't taking advantage
of the benefits of a whole
food plant based lifestyle,
you're not getting the
full value out of life.
- The vast majority of the people,
the public are really quite confused
about this topic of nutrition.
Which is pretty sad.
Because now we know that
nutrition ought to be
the premier bowel medical
science of the future.
- [Announcer] You could be
feeling better, living longer,
being kinder to our planet,
leaving a better future for
the next generation and more.
That's why Dr. Campbell
felt we needed a way
to teach people the real
science behind nutrition
and how it affects our bodies.
An education even most
doctors rarely receive.
- I thought the program was fantastic.
I really loved it.
You absolutely do not
need to have a background
in nutrition to take the class.
I think that the information
is very easy and accessible
for anybody that's interested in learning
about plant-based nutrition.
- [Announcer] But the question remains,
what exactly is it that's missing.
If you've ever tried to
understand nutrition,
then you've seen the
vast amount of over-hyped
conflicting information out there.
What can you believe?
Our plant based nutrition
certificate program
was created by the world renowned
Dr. T Colin Campbell and his staff
in conjunction with prestigious
online educator eCornell
to be scientifically based,
easy to understand and
incredibly accessible.
It's a six week, three part
education on everything
from how food is affected by big business,
to how an optimal diet can
help prevent or even reverse
chronic diseases like
diabetes and heart disease.
- And all that happens
with plant based nutrition
is that the benefits improve
with the passage of time.
Perhaps the most important thing of all
is that the patients
are empowered by the knowledge,
that they are in control of this disease
that was destroying their lives.
- [Announcer] Amazing, isn't it?
That the key to good health
is never further away
than the end of your fork.
And yet so many people feel
it's an unattainable dream.
It's not.
And with the understanding
you'll gain from our program,
you'll have the tools to
help yourself and others
stop wondering what's missing
and start living healthy,
happy whole lives.
