Why Fast Food Costs Too Much

These days, when his friends eat at McDonald's after school, our sixteen-year-old son goes elsewhere. He has learned that a "Value Meal" -- Big Mac, medium fries and Coke -- "delivers about 1,200 calories and three-quarters of a day's quota of saturated fat," according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). He has read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Perennial, 2002), which describes the disease-spreading filth and dangerous, underpaid work in meat-processing plants. Last summer saw the second-largest recall of meat in American history -- 19 million pounds of ConAgra hamburger contaminated by potentially fatal E. coli O157:H7 bacteria were pulled from supermarket shelves -- after 19 people were sickened. "The problem is that the contaminated meat gets into the market and our homes," Schlosser says.

Contamination, from Farm to Table

Fast-food giants like McDonald's have stimulated the consolidation of the industry into ever fewer and larger farms and processors. Contamination with E. coli O157 starts and spreads on the farm and feedlots that hold up to 100,000 animals. "E. coli grows in the gut, and when animals are confined in barns and feedlots, they're sitting or standing one inch apart from each other in their own and their neighbors' excrement," says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) in Santa Cruz, California.

At slaughterhouses, on too-fast production lines, manure and the contents of stomachs and intestines often splatter the meat. In winter, about 1 percent of cattle from feedlots harbor E. coli; in summer, up to 50 percent can do so. "Even if you assume that only one percent are infected, that means three or four cattle bearing the microbe are eviscerated at a large slaughterhouse every hour," and a single animal infected with E. coli can contaminate 32,000 pounds of ground beef, Schlosser writes.

On top of overcrowding, filth and lack of exercise, the rich corn diet that marbles cattle's fat has further weakened their resistance to disease, since cattle were meant to live on grass. "By acidifying a cow's gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain's barriers to infection," Michael Pollan writes in his New York Times Magazine article "Power Steer." "Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen [and fed corn] they're apt to get sick ..." After weaning, animals are dosed with antibiotics every day of their lives. As a result, bacteria -- including some strains of E. coli and Salmonella -- have developed antibiotic resistance. Studies published in 2001 in The New England Journal of Medicine indicate that many food-borne and other illnesses in people are now not responding to the usual antibiotics. Baytril, a drug similar to Cipro, is widely fed to chickens, potentially reducing Cipro's effectiveness against diseases such as anthrax.

Beef cattle are also fed dead pigs, horses, poultry and chicken manure, which may contain Salmonella and Campylobacter. Although the feeding of cow and sheep parts back to these ruminants is now banned because it spread mad cow disease in Europe, U.S. cows can still be fed ruminant blood and fat. Schlosser and others warn that these practices potentially expose us to fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of "mad cow."

More Environmental and Health Costs

Growth hormones are administered to two-thirds of the approximately 36 million beef cattle raised yearly in the U.S., Janet Raloff reports in Science News. Spills of hormone-laced excrement pollute water. A study led by Louis J. Guillette at the University of Florida and Ana M. Soto of Tufts University School of Medicine found hormones and fish with deformed testes in rivers downstream of Nebraska feedlots.