The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Here’s the last of my “Hamburgers” media posts. It’s the NPR Fresh Air

interview with Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. (Yeah, this

interview’s old, but it’s still good.)

My quickie notes taken while listening to the interview:

• The flavour industry: an offshoot of the fragrance industry, and how it became a big player in fast food
• The Chicken McNugget and how it changed the food industry
• Meatpacking — once one of the highest-paid industrial jobs in the US. Now it has

  become one of the lowest-paid, in spite of being one of the most

  dangerous

• Fast food industry wages:
• The lowest of any industry.
• Fast food is the largest

  minimum-wage-paying industry in the US

• Companies in the industry decided that it was better to have a large

  poorly-paid poorly-trained workforce than a small well-paid

  well-trained workforce.

• It doesn’t have to be this way; Schlosser cites In-N-Out burger as the standout case, with an

  $8/hr starting wage, managers who get paid an $80K salary and full health and dental coverage for their employees.

• Growth of the industry parallels the decline of minimum wage (in real terms) in the US. 

• Fast food companies are biggest opponents to any

  rise in the minimum wage

• Meat and disease:
• The changes that the fast food industry have made to the meatpacking industry have made it “the

  perfect vehicle for Food-borne illnesses”. It used to be that your

  burger came from the meat of perhaps one or two cows — now a butger

  can come from a large number of cows, which means that one sick cow can

  contaminate the meat across the country.

• After the Jack in the Box outbreaks, the FF companies have worked hard to prevent contamination in meat
• Meat at Jack in the Box and McDonalds is the most tested; however this is done at the expense of the meat at your grocery
• McDonalds operates more playgrounds than any other private entity

  in

  the US. A lot of communities have local governments who are unwilling

  or unable to spend money building playgrounds; in those places,

  McDonald’s is the only alternative. The problem: McDonald’s marketing

  — they’re targeting kids and selling htem unhealthy food. The rise of

  childhood obesity parallels rise of fast food industry.

• Fast food places are good targets for robbery — far better than

  places like 7-11, which have implemented practices to keepas much money

  as possible in a safe which employees cannot open. The average take

  from a 7-11 robbery is $37; you can make thousands if you rob a fast

  food place at the right time. Half of fast food robberies are inside jobs.

• Schlosser “tried to write something that wasn’t black and white”.

  Most people

  in the fast food industry aren’t bad people but business people; give

  them business reasons to change their practices and they’ll do it.

• Schlosser on fast food: “Most of it tastes pretty good”
• He says that in the book, he didn’t talk much of fast food’s

  influences on the landscape of the industry. The McDonald’s model —

  the mass reproduction of a specific retail environment — has inspired

  other retailers : The Gap, Sunglass Hut, Banana

  Republic. The outskirts of one American community is pretty

  indistinguishable from

  another

• One of the most surreal moments in researching the book: at Las

  Vegas at a fast food convention. Mikhail Gorbachev was a keynote

  speaker. At his keynote, he praised McDonald’s entry into Russia and

  asked the fast food executives to invest in Russia. Schlosser says he

  was reminded of the old Roman practice of brining leaders of countries

  they conquered and putting them on display at circuses.

• Schlosser: “If I were king of the world, I would really try to

  internalize the costs that they’re imposing left and right on society.”

The interview is in two parts:

• Part 1 [8.9 MB MP3, enclosure]
• Part 2 [7.9 MB MP3, enclosure]

I’ve got an essay on The Farm about this little machine:

…which includes a link to this beautiful infographic about the Mac Sweet Spot created by Paul “Nixlog” Nixon:

Good insightful stuff, just the sort of thing you’ve come to expect from me, Tucows and The Farm. Read it!

On the file-sharing-and-posting site whose first rule is that you don’t

talk about it, I found this a little war of Mac opinion, waged in the

form of graphics.

Here’s the first salvo:

After which a Mac fan returned fire:

Which led the PC guy to return fire:

Now that’s not necessariliy true, especially for the really intense 3-D

shooters. There’s no way the cheapo graphics cards on the $499 Dell

will play them; they’re built with the intent of becoming TPS

Report-writing machines. Someone responded that if you really wanted

great games at a low price point, you’d be better served with a

PlayStation 2 or XBox.

The final shot, with this apples-and-oranges logic in mind:

With the rise of cheap videocasettes and VCRs in the 1980s came the rise of the training and educational videos. I remember that the one for Kelly (the temp agency) was mildly if unintentionally amusing and the “How to play synths” one by the keyboard player for the Dungeons-and-Dragions-rock band Dio was downright hilarious. However, since I’m riffing on a hamburger theme, allow me to present this Wendy’s training video, in which you, the neophyte burger-slinger get mad burger science dropped on you — 1985 rap style!

Update – June 12, 2006: I once included the video with this entry, but I’ve recently received a “cease and desist” letter from Wendy’s You’ll just have to imagine what it’s like now.

If you’re hoping to see Dave Thomas do a walk-on cameo and breakdance, you will be disappointed. I believe this was before the era when he started appearing on the commercials. One would at least think that the “Where’s the Beef?” lady would do a quick rap Wedding Singer-style, but alas, it was not to be.

Still, it’s an entertaining video, and if it helps you make better hamburgers on your own grill, so much the better.