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Food to make you
fast
Chew on
This. By Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson. Penguin £6.99.
|
Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation (reviewed in the Socialist
Standard for November 2002), and this book covers some of the same
ground as the earlier one. That’s to say, it looks at the power of fast
food companies, especially McDonald’s, and the nature of the food they
serve.
McDonald’s is the largest purchaser of beef in the United States, and
this position has enabled them and the other big meat-packing companies
to drive down the price paid to ranchers, many of whom have gone out of
business. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cattle and chicken has
been aimed squarely at making profits, with little regard for the
conditions of the animals or the workers. Chicken, for instance, will
live barely six weeks and never see a blade of grass. They die
increasingly of heart attacks, caused by a thick layer of fat around
the heart.
Of course the fast food companies don’t want their customers to think
about where the food comes from and how it’s made. They’d rather you
didn’t reflect on the manufactured flavours that are added, or the fact
that food for children is made as sweet as possible. Massive amounts of
advertising are aimed at kids, who are naturally very susceptible and
can influence where their parents take them to eat. Further, the
advertising isn’t confined to food, as giving away or selling toys is
another means to get the kids in.
The employees are often not much older than children, given the fast
food industry’s reliance on teenage labour. Teenagers are simply
cheaper and easier to control. They mostly earn the minimum wage, which
in the US is worth less in real terms than it was fifty years ago.
There is a large turnover of staff, and the derogatory label ‘McJob’
sums things up well.
It may even be a McWorld that is developing, as the fast food chains
expand outside the US and Europe. The first Burger King opened in
Baghdad just nine weeks after the US-led invasion in 2003. The UK has
long been part of the McDonald’s empire, with 2.5 million people eating
there every day.
Capitalist-style fast food treats appallingly the animals that it
raises and kills. It’s also bad for the workers it employs and bad for
the consumers who eat it.
PB
Local histories
The
Class War Radical History Tour of Notting Hill by Tom Vague,
Psychogeography, 2007.
Camden History Review 31, Camden History Society, 2007
|
The Class War pamphlet, the ‘souvenir programme’ of a recent London
march maturely entitled “Bash The Rich”, is a rambling and rather
unfocussed (as the doubtlessly pseudonymous author’s name would
suggest) example of the local radical history writing which is
currently fashionable. In this case it also is an unintended comment on
the Class War organisation, which has itself become historic.
Nonetheless the pamphlet might help locals gain “the sense of place in
time” necessary to overcome the crazy disconnectedness of London living
which makes political action in the capital so difficult to achieve
nowadays.
In contrast the politics (and arts) issue of the Camden History Review
is, as one might expect coming from the premier local history
organisation of the capital, immaculately produced and finely focussed.
The piece on Camden’s MPs is a rather old-fashioned biographical
exercise, useful mainly for reference; however, the articles on the
fight for a free library in Highgate and the St Pancras Civil Defence
revolt of 1957-58 are prime examples of how on-the-ground-floor writing
can help illuminate the real processes of history. The particular
lesson to be learned from these two cases is that within capitalism
every advance in the freedom of knowledge or the search for peace has
to fought for tooth and nail. And how fruitless such actions, whether
achieved via constitutional reform or direct action, ultimately are.
The Socialist Party gets a mention fourth political essay, on the
radical history of Grays Inn Road, as a radical organisation which once
had its head office in the area and which pushes the solution –
production for use not profit – to all capitalist problems from attacks
on libraries to warmongering.
KAZ
History writing
The clumsy title comes from E. P. Thompson's phrase to describe
the difficulty of writing “history from below.” After the Second World
War, a group of Communist Party historians including Thompson,
Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton set out to bring the experiences of
the working class to the fore in the study of history. This was to some
extent a reaction to structuralist and functionalist interpretations in
which workers' experiences and abilities to effect social change were
down-played or ignored. The most famous example of “history from below”
is EP Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class, first
published in 1963 and still worth reading. But Thompson's concept of
class is controversial in some quarters:
“If we stop history at any given point, then there are no classes but
simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But
if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we
observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their
institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history,
and in the end, this is its only definition.”
Some have seen this definition of class as being subjective, but
Thompson must be right in saying that class is not simply an economic
category but also an historical concept. The working class was not just
the product of capitalist social relations or the industrial
revolution: “The working class made itself as much as it was made,”
wrote Thompson. Writing history from below means not invoking “iron
laws” and ignoring the abilities of the working class to effect social
change on the one hand, or getting lost in the detail and denying the
importance of class on the other hand. This short pamphlet discusses
these and other problems in writing history.
LEW
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Page 20
Socialist Standard January 2008
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