Introduction to

Chew on Thisby Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Pull open the glass door and feel the rush of cool air. Step inside. Look at the backlit colour photographs above the counter, look at the cardboard ads for the latest Disney movie, join the queue and place your order. Hand over your money. Put the change back in your pocket. Watch teenagers in blue and gold uniforms busy working in the kitchen.

Moments later grab the plastic tray with your food, find an empty table and sit down. Unwrap the burger. Squirt ketchup on the fries. Stick the plastic straw through the hole in the lid of your drink. Pick up the burger and dig in.

The whole experience of eating at a fast food restaurant has become so familiar, so routine, that we take it for granted. It’s become just another habit, like brushing your teeth before bed. We do it without even thinking about it - and that’s the problem. Every day, about 2.5 million people in the United Kingdom eat at McDonald’s. Every month, about nine out of ten American children eat there. McDonald’s has become the most popular fast food chain in the world - and by far the most powerful. In 1968, there were about 1,000 McDonald’s restaurants, all of them in the United States. Now there are more than 31,000 McDonald’s, selling Happy Meals in 120 countries, from Istanbul, Turkey, to Papeete, Tahiti. In the United States, McDonald’s buys more processed beef, chicken, pork, apples and potatoes than any other company. It spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand of food. As a result it is America’s most famous food brand. McDonald’s is the largest buyer of farm products in France. It higher more workers than any other company in Brazil. The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is truly mind-boggling. The golden arches are now as widely recognised as the Christian cross.

Despite McDonald’s fame and all the money it spends on advertising, the majority of its customers don’t plan to eat there. Most fast food visits are ‘impulsive’. The decision to buy fast food is usually made at the last minute without much thought. People generally don’t leave the house in the morning saying, ‘I must eat some fast food today.’ Most of the time, they’re just walking down the street or driving down the road, not thinking about anything in particular. Maybe they’re hungry; maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re in a hurry and don’t have time to cook. And then they see a great big fast food sign - the golden arches of McDonald’s, the red and blue of a Domino’s pizza box, the picture of Colonel Sanders - and they suddenly think, ‘Hey, I want some.’ So they stop to eat fast food. They do it because they feel like it. They just can’t resist the impulse.

The point of this book is to take that strong impulse we all feel - our hunger for sweet, salty, fatty fast foods - and make you think about it. Chew On This will tell you where fast food comes from, who makes it, what’s in it and what happens when you eat it. This is a book about fast food and the world it has made.

Food is one of the most important things you’ll every buy. And yet most people never bother to think about their food and where it comes from. People spend a lot more time worrying about what kind of blue jeans to wear, what kind of video games to play, what kind of computers to buy. They compare the different models and styles, they talk to friends about the different options, they read as much as they can before making a choice. But those purchases don’t really matter. When you get tired of old blue jeans, video games and computers you can just give them away or throw them out.

The food you eat enters your body and literally becomes part of you. It helps determine whether you will be short or tall, weak or strong, thin or fat. It helps determine whether you will enjoy a long, healthy life - or die early. Food is of fundamental importance. So why is it that most people don’t think about fast food and don’t know much about it?

The simple answer is this: the companies that sell fast food don’t want you to think about it. They don’t want you to know where it comes from and how it’s made. They just want you to buy it.

Have you ever seen a fast food ad that shows the factories where French fries are made? Ever seen a fast food ad that shows the slaughterhouse where cattle are turned into ground beef? Ever seen an ad that tells you what’s really in your fast food milkshake and why some strange-sounding chemicals make it taste so good? Ever seen an ad that shows overweight, unhealthy kids stuffing their faces with greasy fries at a fast food restaurant? You probably haven’t. But you’ve probably seen a lot of fast food commercials that show thin, happy children having a lot of fun.

People have been eating since the beginning of time. But they’ve only been eating Chicken McNuggets since 1983. Fast food is a recent invention. During the last thirty years, fast food has spread from the United states to every corner of the globe. A business that began with a handful of little hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California now sells the all-American meal - hamburger, French fries and a solo drink - just about everywhere. Fast food is now sold at restaurants and drive-throughs, at football stadiums, schools and universities, on cruise ships, trains and aeroplanes, at supermarkets, and even at the cafeterias of children’s hospitals. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion (£3.5 billion) on fast food. In 2005, they spent about $134 billion (£78 billion) on fast food. The British eat more fast food than anyone else in Europe. Britons now spend more than £8 billion a year on fast food. They spend more money on fast food than on televisions, videos and computers. They spend more on fast food than on cinema, theatre, museums, books, games and toys - combined.

Fast food may look like the sort of food people have always eaten, but it’s different. It’s not the kind of food you can make in your kitchen from scratch. Fast food is something radically new. Indeed, the food we eat has changed more during the past thirty years than during the previous 30,000 years.

In the pages that follow, you’ll learn how the fast food business got started. You’ll learn how the fast food chains try to get kids into their restaurants, how they treat kids employed in their kitchens, how they make their food. And you’ll learn what can happen when you eat too much of it. These are things you really need to know. Why? Because fast food is heavily advertised to children and often prepared by people who are barely older than children. This is an industry that both feeds and feeds off the young.

For the most part, fast food tastes pretty good. That’s one of the main reasons people like to eat it. Fast food has been carefully designed to taste good. It’s also inexpensive and convenient. But the Happy Meals, two-for-one deals and free refills of soft drinks give a false sense of how much fast food actually costs. The real price never appears on the menu.

Hundreds of millions of people eat fast food every day without giving it much thought. They just unwrap their hamburgers and dig in. An hour or so later, when the burger’s all gone and the wrapper’s been tossed into the bin, the whole meal as already been forgotten. Chew on this: people should know what lies beneath the shiny, happy surface of every fast food restaurant. They should know what really lurks between those sesame seed buns. As the old saying goes: you are what you eat.

Introduction to

Fast Food Nationby Eric Schlosser

CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN SITS on the eastern slope of Colorado’s Front Range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs. From a distance, the mountain appears beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub oak, and ponderosa pine. It looks like the backdrop of an old Hollywood western, just another

gorgeous Rocky Mountain vista. And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. One of the nation’s most important military installations lies deep within it, housing units of the North American Aerospace Command, the Air Force Space Command, and the United States Space Command. During the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that America’s air defenses had become vulnerable to sabotage and attack. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top- secret, underground combat operations center. The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteen buildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each; they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. The base is closed to the public, and a heavily armed quick response team guards against intruders. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout and biological weapons. The buildings are mounted on gigantic steel springs to ride out an earthquake or the blast wave of a thermonuclear strike. The hallways and staircases are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low, and there are combination locks on many of the doors. A narrow escape tunnel, entered through a metal hatch, twists and turns its way out of the mountain through solid rock. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vans from one brightly lit cavern to another.

Fifteen hundred people work inside the mountain, maintaining the facility and collecting information from a worldwide network of radars, spy satellites, ground-based sensors, airplanes, and blimps. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center tracks every manmade object that enters North American airspace or that orbits the earth. It is the heart of the nation’s early warning system. It can detect the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that missile has left the launch pad.

This futuristic military base inside a mountain has the capability to be self-sustaining for at least one month. Its generators can produce enough electricity to power a city the size of Tampa, Florida. Its underground reservoirs hold millions of gallons of water; workers sometimes traverse them in rowboats. The complex has its own underground fitness center, a medical clinic, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, a chapel, and a cafeteria. When the men and women stationed at Cheyenne Mountain get tired of the food in the cafeteria, they often send somebody over to the Burger King at Fort Carson, a nearby army base. Or they call Domino’s.

Almost every night, a Domino’s deliveryman winds his way up the lonely Cheyenne Mountain Road, past the ominous DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED signs, past the security checkpoint at the entrance of the base, driving toward the heavily guarded North Portal, tucked behind chain link and barbed wire. Near the spot where the road heads straight into

the mountainside, the delivery man drops off his pizzas and collects his tip. And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization — Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.

WHAT WE EAT

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at restaurants and drive-throughs, at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even at hospital cafeterias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music — combined.

Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk in, get on line, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, place your order, hand over a few dollars, watch teenagers in uniforms pushing various buttons, and moments later take hold of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in colored paper and cardboard. The whole experience of buying fast food has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light. It has become a social custom as American as a small, rectangular, hand-held, frozen, and reheated apple pie.

This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both as a commodity and as a metaphor. What people eat (or don’t eat) has always been determined by a complex interplay of social, economic, and technological forces. The early Roman Republic was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves. A nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.

The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years. During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one- third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning,

and child care. A generation ago, three- quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants — mainly at fast food restaurants.

The McDonald’s Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs. In 1968, McDonald’s operated about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about thirty thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald’s. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonald’s is the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes — and the second largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald’s Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald’s spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world’s most famous brand. McDonald’s operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nation’s largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was 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.

In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of “the McDonaldization of America.” He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on American life. In Eat Your Heart Out (1975), he argued that “bigger is not better.” Much of what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply. Moreover, the tremendous success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business methods. The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today’s retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.

America’s main streets and malls now boast the same Pizza Huts and Taco Bells, Gaps and Banana Republics, Starbucks and Jiffy-Lubes, Foot Lockers, Snip N’ Clips, Sunglass Huts, and Hobbytown USAs. Almost every facet of American life has now been franchised or chained. From the maternity ward at a Columbia/HCA hospital to an embalming room owned by Service Corporation International — “the world’s largest provider of death care services,” based in Houston, Texas, which since 1968 has grown to include 3,823 funeral homes, 523 cemeteries, and 198 crematoriums, and which today handles the final remains of one out of every nine Americans — a person can now go from the cradle to the grave without spending a nickel at an independently owned business.

The key to a successful franchise, according to many texts on the subject, can be expressed in one word: “uniformity.” Franchises and chain stores strive to offer exactly the same product or service at numerous locations. Customers are drawn to familiar brands by an instinct to avoid the unknown. A brand offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always and everywhere the same. “We have found out... that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,” declared Ray Kroc, one of the founders of McDonald’s,

angered by some of his franchisees. “We will make conformists out of them in a hurry... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”

One of the ironies of America’s fast food industry is that a business so dedicated to conformity was founded by iconoclasts and self-made men, by entrepreneurs willing to defy conventional opinion. Few of the people who built fast food empires ever attended college, let alone business school. They worked hard, took risks, and followed their own paths. In many respects, the fast food industry embodies the best and the worst of American capitalism at the start of the twenty-first century — its constant stream of new products and innovations, its widening gulf between rich and poor. The industrialization of the restaurant kitchen has enabled the fast food chains to rely upon a low-paid and unskilled workforce. While a handful of workers manage to rise up the corporate ladder, the vast majority lack full-time employment, receive no benefits, learn few skills, exercise little control over their workplace, quit after a few months, and float from job to job. The restaurant industry is now America’s largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages. During the economic boom of the 1990s, when many American workers enjoyed their first pay raises in a generation, the real value of wages in the restaurant industry continued to fall. The roughly 3.5 million fast food workers are by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States. The only Americans who consistently earn a lower hourly wage are migrant farm workers.

A hamburger and french fries became the quintessential American meal in the 1950s, thanks to the promotional efforts of the fast food chains. The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week. But the steady barrage of fast food ads, full of thick juicy burgers and long golden fries, rarely mentions where these foods come from nowadays or what ingredients they contain. The birth of the fast food industry coincided with Eisenhower-era glorifications of technology, with optimistic slogans like “Better Living through Chemistry” and “Our Friend the Atom.” The sort of technological wizardry that Walt Disney promoted on television and at Disneyland eventually reached its fulfillment in the kitchens of fast food restaurants. Indeed, the corporate culture of McDonald’s seems inextricably linked to that of the Disney empire, sharing a reverence for sleek machinery, electronics, and automation. The leading fast food chains still embrace a boundless faith in science — and as a result have changed not just what Americans eat, but also how their food is made.

The current methods for preparing fast food are less likely to be found in cookbooks than in trade journals such as Food Technologist and Food Engineering. Aside from the salad greens and tomatoes, most fast food is delivered to the restaurant already frozen, canned, dehydrated, or freeze-dried. A fast food kitchen is merely the final stage in a vast and highly complex system of mass production. Foods that may look familiar have in fact been completely reformulated. What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand. Like Cheyenne Mountain, today’s fast food conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade. Much of the taste and aroma of American fast food, for example, is now manufactured at a series of large chemical plants off the New Jersey Turnpike.

In the fast food restaurants of Colorado Springs, behind the counters, amid the plastic seats, in the changing landscape outside the window, you can see all the virtues and destructiveness of our fast food nation. I chose Colorado Springs as a focal point for this book because the changes that have recently swept through the city are emblematic of those that fast food — and the fast food mentality — have encouraged throughout the United States. Countless other suburban communities, in every part of the country, could

have been used to illustrate the same points. The extraordinary growth of Colorado Springs neatly parallels that of the fast food industry: during the last few decades, the city’s population has more than doubled. Subdivisions, shopping malls, and chain restaurants are appearing in the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain and the plains rolling to the east. The Rocky Mountain region as a whole has the fastest-growing economy in the United States, mixing high- tech and service industries in a way that may define America’s workforce for years to come. And new restaurants are opening there at a faster pace than anywhere else in the nation.

Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life. And yet the dominance of the fast food giants was no more preordained than the march of colonial split-levels, golf courses, and man- made lakes across the deserts of the American West. The political philosophy that now prevails in so much of the West — with its demand for lower taxes, smaller government, an unbridled free market — stands in total contradiction to the region’s true economic underpinnings. No other region of the United States has been so dependent on government subsidies for so long, from the nineteenth-century construction of its railroads to the twentieth-century financing of its military bases and dams. One historian has described the federal government’s 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in “interstate socialism” — a phrase that aptly describes how the West was really won. The fast food industry took root alongside that interstate highway system, as a new form of restaurant sprang up beside the new off-ramps. Moreover, the extraordinary growth of this industry over the past quarter-century did not occur in a political vacuum. It took place during a period when the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage declined by about 40 percent, when sophisticated mass marketing techniques were for the first time directed at small children, and when federal agencies created to protect workers and consumers too often behaved like branch offices of the companies that were supposed to be regulated. Ever since the administration of President Richard Nixon, the fast food industry has worked closely with its allies in Congress and the white House to oppose new worker safety, food safety, and minimum wage laws. While publicly espousing support for the free market, the fast food chains have quietly pursued and greatly benefited from a wide variety of government subsidies. Far from being inevitable, America’s fast food industry in its present form is the logical outcome of certain political and economic choices.

In the potato fields and processing plants of Idaho, in the ranch-lands east of Colorado Springs, in the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the High Plains, you can see the effects of fast food on the nation’s rural life, its environment, its workers, and its health. The fast food chains now stand atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control of American agriculture. During the 1980s, large multinationals — such as Cargill, ConAgra, and IBP — were allowed to dominate one commodity market after another. Farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working poor. Small towns that seemingly belong in a Norman Rockwell painting are being turned into rural ghettos. The hardy, independent farmers whom Thomas Jefferson considered the bedrock of American democracy are a truly vanishing breed. The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

The fast food chains’ vast purchasing power and their demand for a uniform product have encouraged fundamental changes in how cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed

into ground beef. These changes have made meatpacking — once a highly skilled, highly paid occupation — into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by armies of poor, transient immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and uncompensated. And the same meat industry practices that endanger these workers have facilitated the introduction of deadly pathogens, such as E. coli 0157:H7, into America’s hamburger meat, a food aggressively marketed to children. Again and again, efforts to prevent the sale of tainted ground beef have been thwarted by meat industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress. The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal — but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.

I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem now haunting the United States. In some cases (such as the malling and sprawling of the West) the fast food industry has been a catalyst and a symptom of larger economic trends. In other cases (such as the rise of franchising and the spread of obesity) fast food has played a more central role. By tracing the diverse influences of fast food I hope to shed light not only on the workings of an important industry, but also on a distinctively American way of viewing the world.

Elitists have always looked down at fast food, criticizing how it tastes and regarding it as another tacky manifestation of American popular culture. The aesthetics of fast food are of much less concern to me than its impact upon the lives of ordinary Americans, both as workers and consumers. Most of all, I am concerned about its impact on the nation’s children. Fast food is heavily marketed to children and prepared by people who are barely older than children. This is an industry that both feeds and feeds off the young. During the two years spent researching this book, I ate an enormous amount of fast food. Most of it tasted pretty good. That is one of the main reasons people buy fast food; it has been carefully designed to taste good. It’s also inexpensive and convenient. But the value meals, two-for-one deals, and free refills of soda give a distorted sense of how much fast food actually costs. The real price never appears on the menu.

The sociologist George Ritzer has attacked the fast food industry for celebrating a narrow measure of efficiency over every other human value, calling the triumph of McDonald’s “the irrationality of rationality.” Others consider the fast food industry proof of the nation’s great economic vitality, a beloved American institution that appeals overseas to millions who admire our way of life. Indeed, the values, the culture, and the industrial arrangements of our fast food nation are now being exported to the rest of the world. Fast food has joined Hollywood movies, blue jeans, and pop music as one of America’s most prominent cultural exports. Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.

Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in. The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten. I’ve written this book out of a belief that people should know what lies behind the shiny, happy surface of every fast food transaction. They should know what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns. As the old saying goes: You are what you eat.

BBC World Service: Fast Food Factory http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1616_fastfood

Cows into Burgers After Coca-Cola, the hamburger is the best-known American food invention to spread around the world.

A hamburger is not made of ham but of ground-up beef, shaped into a patty, which is then grilled and placed between the two halves of a sesame seed bun.

It takes a lot of cows to provide the world’s hamburgers, and turning so many cattle into so much beef meat needs an industrial process. Cattle eat grass at pasture or on the range, but in the USA many are specially fattened up for their last three months before slaughter.

In giant feedlots up to 100,000 cattle eat grain from concrete troughs, along with a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones. According to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture, these crowded conditions are a breeding ground for infectious diseases.

Many feedlots are owned or controlled by the four giant meatpacking firms that slaughter 84% of the USA’s cattle.

In 1960 a revolution occurred in this industry. A company called Iowa Beef Packers created a "disassembly" line for cattle slaughter that eventually did away with old-style skilled workers.

It was like the Henry Ford system for building motor-cars, based on “scientific management” theories of maximising efficiency. Each worker is required to stand in the same spot and do the same movements for an eight-hour shift.

When the cattle are driven into the slaughterhouse, the “knocker” shoots each one in the head with a compressed air stunner that drives a steel bolt into its brain, knocking the beast unconscious. The cow falls down, and another worker attaches a chain round a rear leg which then hauls the animal into the air upside-down. The “sticker” then severs the carotid artery in the neck, one every ten seconds. The whole carcass is then carried on down the disassembly line past other workers with chain-saws, hooks and knives who carve it up further into the bits for retail.

The de-skilled work of meatpacking is dirty and dangerous and rarely unionised according to Eric Schlosser who investigated slaughterhouses for his book Fast Food Nation.

Much of this work is done by recent immigrants or illegal aliens in giant factories near the rural feed-lots.

Automated Meat Recovery Systems can get every scrap of meat off a bone. The bones, hooves, blood and scraps can also be rendered into pet-food.

Giant grinders are installed for making hamburgers. Modern plants can process 800,000 pounds of hamburger meat a day, from many thousands of different cattle.

The meat in a single fast food hamburger could come from dozens, or even hundreds of cows.

BBC World Service: Fast Food Factory http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1616_fastfood

CHICKEN into NUGGETS What America does first in fast food, the rest of the world does next.

In 1979, when poultry was becoming more fashionable to eat and sales of beef were wilting, Fred Turner, the Chairman of McDonald’s had an idea for a new meal. “I want a chicken finger-food without bones, about the size of your thumb. Can you do it?” he asked.

After six months of research, the food technicians and scientists managed to reconstitute shreds of white chicken meat into small portions which could be breaded, fried, frozen then reheated. They used chemical stabilisers but also beef fat to enhance their taste.

Test-marketing the new product was positive, and in 1983 they were launched in the USA under the name Chicken McNuggets.

These were so successful that within a month McDonald's became the second largest purchaser of chicken in the USA, after Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The demand revolutionised the poultry industry too. To provide an adequate poultry supply to McDonlad's, Tysons Foods developed a new breed of chicken with large breasts.

By 1992, Americans were eating more chicken than beef, and most of that chicken meat was supplied by Tyson Foods, who dominate the poultry farming business.

Tyson supplies day-old chicks to thousands of independent contractors, and then returns seven weeks later to collect the chickens ready for slaughter.

The chicken grower provides the land, the labour, the poultry houses and the power supplies. Tyson provides the feed, the veterinary services and the technical support.

The competition is brutal, and the profit margins are slender. Half the US chicken growers leave the business after three years, often selling out or losing everything.

As fast food companies spread to other countries, they require the same industrial production of chicken in battery cages. The supplier has to conform to meet the demand.

Children love chicken McNuggets. One reason for this may be that they contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.

BBC World Service: Fast Food Factory

MANUFACTURING FAST FOOD ADDICTION Flavour is the key to the attractiveness of fast food. It is not just the blend of salt, sugar and fat, but the combination of taste and smell which is now micro-engineered by the big food corporations’ chemists.

Nearly 90 per-cent of what we think of as taste is actually smell.

The 10,000 taste-buds on our tongues and in our mouths can pick up the 5 basic tastes: salt, sour, sweet, bitter and “umami”. But we humans have subtle olfactory nerves that can distinguish about 20,000 odours in the tiniest amounts.

Smell is a powerful sensation that helps to shape our psychology, and is strongly linked to memory.

From earliest infancy, humans swiftly learn what is in their food, what is pleasant and what may be poisonous. The flavours of childhood food seem to mark us indelibly, and adults often return to these primary sensations as “comfort food” without knowing quite why.

Fast food companies happily capitalise on this.

Fast food is industrially processed before it is served. It requires colour additives to make it look good, and chemical flavour compounds to make it taste right.

Technically it is perfectly legal to call these flavours that are manufactured in plants "natural".

Food scientists also study “mouthfeel” – and can adjust crunchiness and chewiness, density and dryness, by using a range of fats, gums, starches, emulsifiers, and stabilisers.

This subtle and sophisticated art is also required for snacks, drinks, confectionary, medicines, perfumes and cleaning products as well.

The scientists have been almost too successful, and their chemistry for some has become addictive.

Americans spend $110 billion a year on fatty, sugary fast food, more than they do on films, videos, books, magazines, newspapers and music combined.

Nearly two thirds of Americans are now overweight, and the US Surgeon General says 300,000 Americans die each year of obesity.

As fast food chains spread through Europe and Asia on a rising tide of affluence, people got fatter in those countries. It is called “globesity” by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

In 1995, the WHO estimates there were 200 million adults and another 18 million under-five children classified as overweight. By 2000 the number of obese adults had risen to 300 million.

This is not just a problem in industrialised societies. In developing countries, says the WHO, over 115 million people suffer from obesity-related problems.

Employees send McDonald’s to bottom of top 10 ranking of fast food chainsThe Big Mac maker's employees have spoken

By Rebecca Burn-Callander, Enterprise Editor07 Aug 2015

McDonald's has come bottom of a ranking of the top 10 fast food chains to work in, based on an anonymous poll of its staff and ex-employees. Jobs website Glassdoor has ranked the best bars and eateries to work in the UK. Just three companies ranked below average in the 10-strong list.

McDonald's UK came last, followed by sandwich chain Pret A Manger and Domino's Pizza UK.

The burger chain ranked particularly low on salaries, posting just a 2.4 score for compensation and benefits - anything below 3.2 is poor. Workers also criticised the corporation's senior management, posting a satisfaction rating of 2.7. Career opportunities, culture and work/life balance all received a 2.9 score. Nearly 7,000 reviews of McDonald's have been posted on Glassdoor by McDonald's employees. "Rotation hardly happens, long shifts, pay, send you home if there's high labour," were among the "cons" listed by one user. "Grease, some poor hygiene, issues were occasionally poorly mediated, there was some bitterness in staff towards customers," said another.

McDonald's, which has 1,249 restaurants in the UK, said that it was surprised by the report's findings, given that the company invests more than £43m a year developing its people. “We have a strong heritage of employing people at all stages of their lives and that is as true today as it was when we first opened our doors 40 years ago," a spokesperson said. "Our people enjoy flexible hours, allowing them to fit work around their studies and home/social life. They receive fantastic formal training as well as the development of essential soft skills."

Pret A Manger, which has 288 outlets in the UK and prides itself on "Good Jobs", also fared poorly in the report. Staff complain that despite promises of fair pay and great opportunities, the company

Rank Company Employee Satisfaction Rating

1 Greggs 3.8

2 Pizza Hut UK 3.8

3 Nando’s UK 3.6

4 Carluccio's 3.4

5 Starbucks 3.3

6 Whitbread (own Costa) 3.3

7 Wagamama 3.1

8 Domino’s Pizza UK 3.1

9 Pret A Manger 3.1

10 McDonald’s UK 3.1

frequently falls short. "You only get paid the living wage if you pass the mystery shopper report," said one anonymous poster on the site. "Even if you did a great job the whole week, another staff member would make a mistake, and you would be underpaid for that reason.” "Nothing you do there is appreciated, you get crazy over a sandwich!" said another. "Horrible atmosphere and you feel too much pressure all the time."

Domino's Pizza, which came third last in the poll, was lambasted for long hours, poor pay and bad relations between front-line staff and senior management. One reviewer wrote: "Breaks only given to people who smoked! Low pay. No gloves or hair nets. No set finish time.” A second posted: "Unsociable hours, some customers can be hard work, managers can be difficult, no real benefits even if you work New Years Eve."

In contrast Greggs, the sandwich chain, was voted the best place to work for those in the food and drink industry. It achieved a rating of 3.8, followed by Pizza Hut and chicken chain Nandos UK. Greggs' employee satisfaction rating has taken a significant upturn this year, rising from just 2.9 at the beginning of the year to 3.8. The "pros" of working at Greggs include: "Good pay for a retail job compared to some of it's competitors", and "the profit share scheme and social club organisation are a good idea".

“Bars, fast food outlets and restaurants tend to have relatively high staff turnover due to the nature of the work and the age profile of the workforce, but that doesn’t mean that they are not good places to work," said Joe Wiggins, Glassdoor's career trends analyst. "While career opportunities might not match that of some other sectors, a company like Greggs heading this list shows that employee satisfaction can be high.

"This culture goes a long way to help recruit and retain staff. Greggs' pay and profit share scheme are cited as key benefits for working there and this probably gives them the edge over the iconic brands of McDonald's and Starbucks.”

However, the industry as a whole boasts poor satisfaction ratings overall when compared with other sectors. In its ranking of the best 25 organisations in the UK, scores start at 3.2 and reach more than 4.

The Glassdoor research only ranked companies in the UK bar and restaurant sector that had a separate UK profile, which is why brands such as KFC, Burger King, and burrito chain Chipotle were excluded. Brands without a sufficient volume of reviews were also omitted. Leon and Patisserie Valerie only boasted a single review each, while Wasabi, the sushi and noodle chain, only had four.

However, a Telegraph analysis of some of the other major industry brands did find three worse offenders: Pizza Express appears to have an overall score of just 2.7, while sandwich chain EAT scores just 2.2. Yo! Sushi scored 2.4.

Fast food walkouts: how do US employment rights differ from UK conditions?The recent wave of fast food strikes in the US has shed fresh light on the employment conditions of workers in the UK.

By Maya Oppenheim16 September 2014

Thousands of American fast food workers walked out of their restaurants and took to the streets at the beginning of the month, demanding a pay rise and the right to unionise. In 150 cities across the US, over 400 of these workers were arrested for protests, traffic blockades and other acts of civil disobedience. This is the seventh time in almost two years that workers from McDonald's, Burger King, KFC and other large chains have staged national walkouts. Behind the glowing images of Big Macs and shiny shop counters, tension has been steadily rising as workers have demanded more from their employers.

Life as a fast food worker in the US is considerably bleaker than it is here in Britain. For one, the minimum wage is significantly lower, in the UK it is £6.31 and rising to £6.50 next month, whereas in America, the minimum wage is only $7.25 (£4.46) an hour: this works out at a measly $16,000 (£9,850) a year. In addition to this, American fast food workers pay considerably higher individual tax rates, while British workers do not have to pay any tax for their first £10,000 of earnings, Americans have to pay 10% tax for their first $9000. What’s more, US fast-food employers are under no legal obligation to provide health insurance for their workers.

The situation with paid maternity leave and holiday leave is no better. US employers are not legally required to pay employees for any leave after the birth of a child and nor are they obliged to pay for any time which isn’t spent at work. As a result, it is almost unheard of for fast-food corporations to pay their workers maternity leave or holiday leave. On top of all of this, fast-food workers in the US are not legally entitled to union representation. To sum up, the difference between workers in America and Britain is a reflection of much wider transatlantic differences in employment rights.

As the fast food movement has grown rapidly across the US, similar campaigns have sprung up on home soil. While, the employment conditions of fast food workers in the UK are not as poor as they are in the US, workers over here aren’t short of their own problems to grapple with. For one, the wages are low, despite the fact that the fast food chains saw sales rise to £6.9bn in 2012, the average fast food worker in the UK earns just £5 an hour, according to PayScale figures from January this year. This is because these chains employ high numbers of under 21-year-olds who they are legally able to pay less. For example, nearly half of McDonald's workforce across the whole of Britain are aged between 16 and 21.

Another key issue is the prevalence of zero-hour contracts across the fast-food industry. In McDonald's and Domino's, 90 per cent of the entire UK workforce is on a zero-hour contract, while Burger King employs all of it's non-management staff - that includes 20,000 restaurant workers - on zero-hour contracts. Subway is also heavily reliant on zero-hour contracts, according to the terms of its contract: "The company has no duty to provide you with work. Your hours of work are not predetermined and will be notified to you on a weekly basis as soon as is reasonably practicable in advance by your store manager. The company has the right to require you to work varied or extended hours from time to time". On top of this, Subway employees relinquish their legal rights under working time regulation laws to work no more than 48 hours a week.

Despite the controversy that surrounds them, zero-hour contracts are relatively easy to understand - the employer is under no obligation to guarantee the individual work, and the individual is under no obligation to accept work. However, the reality is not that simple. While the worker is not legally obligated to work, if they are not consistently "available" for work, they are highly unlikely to continue being called in for work - one ill-timed sick day can easily result in a prolonged lack of work.

Ben Havez who worked at Billingsgate McDonald's for just over two years and left in 2013, says: "You always have a niggling worry at the back of your head because you have no real job security. For all you know you could get no shifts next week. This gives all the power to the employer because they can pick and choose when they want you". While the flexibility of zero-hour contracts might be a freelancer's dream, the lack of financial security can be a nightmare for anyone trying to pay the bills or look after children. How can you plan ahead, look for other work or arrange childcare, if you don't know where you are going to be working from week to week?

Nevertheless, the precarity of work lessened when Ben joined the McDonald’s apprenticeship programme and was lucky enough to be placed on a 20 hour a week contract. In spite of this, few perks came with this contract: I still wasn’t paid for any of his breaks and was forced to clock out any time he wasn’t hard at work. What’s more, according to Ben, the majority of the employees in his store were under 21: “This was a deliberate attempt to keep labour costs low”.

However, a spokesperson from McDonald's responded by saying: "This allegation that the restaurant was trying to keep labour costs down with the majority of workers being under 21 is simply not true. In our Billingsgate restaurant, the highest proportion of employees in this age group (in any quarter over the last three years) is 29% and the annual averages are lower than that. All of our employees, regardless of age, qualify for a range of benefits including holiday allowance, employee discounts and access to a full range of training and nationally recognised qualifications.”

All in all, it seems that once you get behind the shiny counters and flashing order screens and join the chain-gang of deep fat fryers and titanic ovens, employment rights are few and far between. These low-skilled, low-wage workers can be as readily disposed of as the chicken nuggets which they produce. During a time at which job opportunities are scarce and people are desperate, fast food chains are able to bypass certain employment rights with insecure, precarious forms of labour.

10 Ways Fast Food is Destroying the WorldAmericans flock to fast food like bees to honey. From drive-thrus to supermarkets, fast food is everywhere.

As if pink slime and obesity weren’t enough, here are 10 more shocking ways fast food wreaks havoc on our health, animals, and the environment:

What are the effects of fast food … on our health?

1. Depression

Studies show that piggin’ out on junk food is directly linked to depression, even in small quantities. Affecting an estimated 121 million people worldwide, results reveal that consumers of fast food are 51 percent more likely to develop depression or some form of mental illness.

2. Premature Ageing

Forget botox and ditch the fast food instead. The sugars, trans fats, and starches found in fast food cause insulin levels to spike, triggering an inflammatory response in the body. The end product? Glycation. This speeds the ageing process and destroys the body’s own natural age fighting antioxidants making you more prone to skin damage and premature ageing.

3. Aspirin Dependency

Tyramine, a chemical found in food colorants, dyes, and nitrates (nitrates are common in hot dogs and other processed meats) is a known headache inducer. Experts believe that Tyramine increases blood flow to the brain which in turn causes vascular changes that result in headaches, leaving you reaching for the aspirin.

…on animals?

4. Factory Farming

Most, if not all, meat, eggs, and dairy products used in fast food is produced at factory farms. In factory farms, animals are forced to endure inherently cruel and inhumane conditions that deprive them of all their basic instincts.

5. Hormones

In efforts to make the fast food industry more profitable, animals are fed hormones that increase growth, milk, and egg production which can lead to painful inflammation of the udder known as mastitis, as well as crippling and debilitating conditions for poultry.

6. Assembly Lines

In the fast food industry, profit margins are slim and volume is everything, meaning workers are pressured to kill more animals in less time. Most facilities operate 24 hours a day seven days a week, slaughtering and processing hundreds of thousands of animals every hour.

…on the environment?

7. Packaging

Fast food places use a heck of a lot of packaging. From the wrappers and straws to the boxes and bags, fast food packaging counts for an estimated 40 percent of all litter (including drinks, chips, candy, and other snacks) with Styrofoam being the most common food waste. What’s more, Styrofoam takes an unbelievable 900 years to breakdown in landfill!

8. Greenhouse Gases

You probably wouldn’t think of eating a Big Mac as contributing to your carbon footprint but the intensive resources required to make just a standard cheeseburger, from growing the wheat to make the buns to feeding the cattle, and eventually their slaughter, and even the energy required to pickle the cucumbers, the resulting consumption is phenomenal converting to CO2 emissions of somewhere between 1 – 3.5 kg (and that’s not taking into account the methane produced by the cow itself).

9. Transportation

It’s not just burgers and chips that play a role in the effects that fast food have on the environment. Ready meals and other prepared food is equally to blame for damaging our precious planet. Distributing trucks add to the pollution, emissions, and congestion, all of which contribute to climate change. Reports suggest that ordering online and having groceries delivered to your door can actually cut carbon costs, but an even better idea is to buy locally and always car share or walk when possible.

10. Water Contamination

Thanks to all the pathogens, hormones, drugs, and fertilizers that are used to produce fast food, seeping into our water supplies, water quality has suffered dramatically. Outbreaks of waterborne illness including E. Coli, marine life dead zones, and numerous other hazards can all be contributed to fast food.

In sum, as you can see, fast food is definitely far from the best choice for you, animals or the planet. So instead, opt for a home-prepared meal of locally-grown foods, for maximum resource reduction and the best health benefits, or, if you fancy an eat-out, choose more conscious eateries through a quick browse on Yelp, Happy Cow, or a humane eating app for suggestions prior to stepping out the door.

Is it time fast food restaurants became more responsible?Research has revealed people are seriously underestimating the calories they are consuming at fast food restaurants

Sponsor's feature: Health and environment from BUPAPaul Zollinger-Read5 July 2013

While numerous studies have found that fast food chains are drivers of obesity, there is actually still insufficient proof of a direct link. The obesity epidemic is being driven by a number of factors, and those who eat more fast food are likely to be prone to other behaviours that lead to obesity. But the fact is, obesity rates have soared in a similar time period to a huge increase in the number of fast food restaurants. One can't help but point the finger – especially as more and more research is emerging to support this link.

Most recently, research published in the BMJ has revealed that people are seriously underestimating the number of calories they are consuming at fast food restaurants. The study revealed that teenagers in particular are unaware of their calorie intake, underestimating their consumption by an average of 259 calories – nearly a third fewer than they actually had.

Adults underestimated their calorie consumption by an average of 175 calories. And an overwhelming 25% of people thought their meals were 500 calories less than they actually were.

This research was the first large-scale study of its kind and has highlighted an area of real concern. People seem to be unaware of what they are actually consuming at fast food restaurants and are greatly underestimating how calorific and fatty the foods they're choosing to eat are.

And despite soaring obesity figures across the globe, fast food chains continue to serve meals that are associated with serious health risks. Branding and advertising campaigns often make fast food look and sound appealing. Cheap prices and meal deals encourage people even more, while skipping any mention of calorie content or warning label. The simple fact is, many fast food meals are incredibly fattening and can seriously affect your health if eaten regularly over a long period of time.

This research highlights the need for clear, or clearer, calorie labelling, whether it's on food packaging in a supermarket or in a fast food restaurant. Many people are obviously not

aware of how unhealthy and fattening certain foods can be; and you can't blame them, as some fast food options are even dubbed as healthy, when they're far from it.

Although I doubt displaying the calorie content of fast food meals will discourage people altogether, it will at least allow people to make informed choices. Making people aware of what they are consuming gives them the control and choice to order it, fully knowing the implications. It may also discourage 'supersizing' their meal or ordering a fizzy drink to accompany an already calorie-laden meal.

There is action on this issue in some parts of the world. In the US, for example, there are forthcoming calorie menu labelling requirements, which might help to correct this underestimation of calorie content. But this is a global issue, the responsibility of which should lie, in part, with the fast food chains themselves.

The carbon footprint of fast foodOn a sustainability note, fast food is far from any shade of green. The way we live and eat is changing and unfortunately it's not supporting our environment. Throughout the entire life cycle of food, which includes agricultural production, storage, transportation, processing, preparation and waste disposal, emissions are released at every stage. This is before you even consider the carbon impact of people travelling to restaurants and supermarkets.

If we look at fast food restaurants specifically, the process behind producing, delivering, cooking and packaging the food is huge, and therefore, so are the emissions. The production of processed meat in particular has a huge impact on the environment. All ruminants (cud-chewing animals that regurgitate partly-digested food, such as cows and sheep) in the world emit about 2bn metric tons of CO2 equivalents per year. In addition, clearing of forests for more grazing and farm land is responsible for an extra 2.8bn metric tons of CO2 emission per year.

A very simple way to keep healthy, as well as reduce your carbon footprint, is to cook more, eat out less and limit the amount of red meat you have. There is a lot to be said for using local produce, local farm shops and buying fresh foods that are available on many people's doorsteps.

Fast food restaurants are changing the way we live, affecting our health for the worse and putting a strain on our environment. Who is going to be held responsible in the long run? I highly doubt it'll be the fast food restaurants themselves.

Dr Paul Zollinger-Read is Bupa's chief medical officer

This article is provided by Bupa, supporter of the health and wellbeing hub

In defence of fast foodby Brian DunningFeb 07 2013

It’s no secret that I’m not a giant fan of CNN.com’s science reporting, especially in recent years. But when I happened upon a story by chef Virginia Willis on CNN.com’s “Eatocracy” section, I felt that it went a little too far over the line of responsible reporting, and deserved some response. Here are the two opening paragraphs, verbatim:

“As a chef and food writer, I rarely eat fast food. The quality is generally atrocious and much of it is radically unhealthy. The menu offerings are the polar opposite of local and seasonal. There are dire implications concerning worker’s rights and wages, as well as animal welfare and factory farms.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the country, every interstate exit is identical with the same usual suspects offering the same sad sacks of chemically laced, artificially flavored fare, all swimming in high-fructose corn syrup. Cheap, fast food is at the core of what is wrong with our food system.”

This is pop tripe. Her worst points are wrong, her best are debatable. It has long been politically correct to bash fast food, and this article opens with all the most tired cheap shots that are unworthy of a culinary professional.

Ironically, her article goes on to discuss how much she likes Chick-fil-A, a fast food restaurant serving basically the same chicken and HFCS soft drinks as other fast food restaurants — she fails to convincingly argue why the same food is OK when Chick-fil-A serves it, but not other similar chains. But, be that as it may; today I’d like to address Willis’ points from her opening paragraphs. Too many people blindly accept such pop attacks on fast food without reflection on the facts. Let’s go point by point:

The quality is generally atrocious…

I’d say the quality is almost always exactly up to expectations; I don’t get an especially sloppy cardboard burger any more often than I get a restaurant meal that fails to delight. If she’s saying a cheeseburger is not French cuisine, well, no duh, it’s not intended to be. Without defining “quality” this statement is really just a weasel word to poison the well. If she means the flavor, well, that’s purely a matter of opinion.

…and much of it is radically unhealthy.

I will have this argument all day long. I’ve investigated this for Skeptoid, and this is simply untrue. The ingredients used in fast food are the same as used in fine restaurants and that you can buy in a supermarket. If you’re talking about calories, I call BS. The typical fast food meal is actually quite small and takes 5 minutes to eat, compared to almost any restaurant meal where you spend a solid hour eating almost constantly. The worst offenders — naturally sweetened soft drinks (sugar or HFCS) and milk shakes — are identical to what you’d get ordering the same thing at a restaurant or buying it from the supermarket. This myth that fast food is magically unhealthy is simply not supported by any facts.

Indeed, it’s a valid argument that the opposite is true. No one will ever die from malnutrition eating fast food: it’s got just about everything your body needs. Eat four 510-calorie Big Macs a day and you’ll lose weight, and get more protein and vitamins than you would from most other similarly caloric diets. If you don’t believe that, do the research for yourself, instead of simply parroting ideologically-driven pop tripe.

The menu offerings are the polar opposite of local and seasonal.

So what? There’s no benefit to either. Locally-grown is a fine boutique experience, but as I’ve written before, there’s no other real benefit. It’s also usually worse for the environment, contrary to what appears obvious.

There are dire implications concerning worker’s rights and wages…

I am not aware that this problem is specific to fast food chains at all. BusinessInsider.com found that a lot of fast food chains are beloved by their employees. I’m unconvinced that this is not the case with most any industry.

…as well as animal welfare and factory farms.

Again, any issues that exist are common to the food industry as a whole, not to a given category of restaurant. And exactly what is a “factory farm” besides a weaselly way to say “farm”?

It doesn’t matter where you are in the country, every interstate exit is identical with the same usual suspects offering the same sad sacks of chemically laced…

“Chemically laced”? What chemicals? What are these malevolent “chemicals” found in fast food that are not common to all food?

…artificially flavored fare…

Really? OK, let’s take a McDonald’s combo. Soft drink, sure; same as you’d get if you bought a Coke anywhere. What’s the “artificial flavor” in the fries? Nothing. What’s the artificial flavor in the cheeseburger? The only possibility I can think of is the Heinz ketchup; but according to Heinz, it’s all natural flavoring. Willis just parroted something that seemed obvious to her, but does not appear to be supported by facts. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that artificial flavoring is more common in fast food than in regular supermarket food.

…all swimming in high-fructose corn syrup.

Really? Obviously this is hyperbole. Pretty useless hyperbole, too. HFCS is no more common on fast food menus than it is on any other menu. Even if it were, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it that you couldn’t say about regular sugar.

Cheap, fast food is at the core of what is wrong with our food system.

I’m going to disagree wholeheartedly. The abundant availability of cheap, fast food shows that our food system has reached the pinnacle of success. This perspective is symptomatic of someone with many snobby choices — and offering many choices, catering to anyone’s personal preferences, should be the ultimate goal of any nation’s food system. Ask someone in Ethiopia, Eritrea, DRC, Sierra Leone, Burundi or Chad if they would consider abundant cheap food choices to be a sign of their food system’s failure.

It’s perfectly fine to dislike fast food, or high-calorie food, or whatever it is that you don’t care for. If you think Americans eat too many calories and you want to place the blame on the food providers, then place it equally among everyone who offers over-calorific food — starting with Starbuck’s and big-plate sit-down restaurants. Simply parroting pop pseudo-food-facts is part of the overall problem of a lack of critical thinking in society.

Food advertising and children: Making sure we have a healthy debate30 May 2014

Adverts can inform, entertain and promote choice, as well as fund the media, sport and culture we all enjoy. But they can also, occasionally, be controversial. For instance, they can cause concerns about their impact and whether they have the potential to be harmful or irresponsible. It’s these concerns that have generated an ongoing debate around food advertising and children.

The debates about food advertising to children, or more specifically ads for less healthy products, are linked with wider concerns about childhood obesity. As such, various campaign groups and health bodies are actively calling for tighter restrictions around this type of advertising, believing it to have a negative impact on children’s health.

We’re alive to these concerns. The issue of food and drink advertising to children is an important one and a key focus of our policy and enforcement work. Importantly, the protection of children sits at the heart of our work, and there are strict, product specific rules, including for food and soft drinks.

Strongly held views

Some health campaigners believe advertising of food and drink to children is harmful and question why we don’t introduce tougher rules or an outright ban.

First and foremost, the rules are already strict and have long prohibited any ad from encouraging poor nutritional habits or an unhealthy lifestyle in children.

It is not unusual for people to have different views about the role of the rules governing advertising. We often find ourselves in the middle of competing and equally strong viewpoints about whether the ad rules are too weak or too strict. Just as there are numerous campaigning groups who call for advertising bans or further restrictions around various products and services, there are also companies and groups who argue that advertising rules should be relaxed.

It’s our job as the advertising regulator to make sure that we take a balanced approach, taking into account different views but always making sure the rules are based on evidence.

A brief guide to the food advertising rules

So what are the current food advertising rules and how did they come about?

The Advertising Codes were significantly tightened in 2007. This followed the publication of a Department of Health ‘Choosing Health’ White Paper which included a call for the strengthening of the advertising food rules to children, particularly on TV as part of a package of measures aimed at reducing obesity and improving diet and nutrition.

Evidence based and proportionate regulation

But if children are prevented from seeing ads for HFSS (High in Fat, Salt or Sugar) products on TV, how come they’re allowed to see or hear them in other media?

The rules differ because, as the available evidence shows, media differ; with TV having the most persuasive, although moderate, impact on children’s food preferences.

This issue is far from black and white. It’s important to note that the restrictions around TV ads for HFSS products do not stop children from seeing HFSS TV ads completely, and this is because such an absolute restriction would have been disproportionate to the evidence around advertising’s impact on food choices.

The complexity of this debate is perhaps best demonstrated by the key findings from the work of Professor David Buckingham, The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing. It found that on the issue of obesity and the role of marketing:

“Expert opinion is divided on this issue. Most experts agree that advertising does have some impact, but the evidence is that the impact is very small. [Also], food choice is only one factor in obesity; and other factors – such as the availability and price of food, the influence of parents, patterns of physical activity, and the lack of access to outdoor play areas – play a much greater role.”

Professor Buckingham’s report also states:

“… we found a surprisingly small amount of reliable evidence relating specifically to television advertising and to obesity.”

Crucially, then, the role that advertising plays in childhood obesity is generally understood to be small relative to other factors that influence children’s food preferences such as parental or guardian choices and physical exercise.

The advertising rules are designed to include restrictions that are proportionate to the role that advertising may play in childhood obesity. If we see evidence that suggests the rules need to go further then we will not hesitate to take action. To date we haven’t seen evidence that, in and of itself, advertising of HFSS products in non-broadcast media is problematic.

Brands continue to target fast food marketing at kidsCompanies are ploughing more and more money into marketing unhealthy foods to children. What will turn the tide?

Liza Ramrayka25 February 2014

Each year, the world's food and beverage companies spend billions on marketing and advertising their products to children and teenagers. The overwhelming majority of these products are high in calories, added sugar, saturated fat and sodium – fast food, fizzy drinks, sweets and chocolate to name just a few. Ask your child to recall a food advert and chances are that it won't be one for apples or broccoli.

US fast food restaurants alone spent $4.6bn on advertising to children and teens in 2012. According to Fast Food Facts 2013, children under six saw almost three adverts for fast foods every day, while 12-17-year-olds saw almost five adverts a day.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of kids' meals at fast-food restaurants increased by 54%. But the percentage of items that qualified as healthy – less than 1% – remained stagnant.

Report lead author Jennifer Harris, director of marketing at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, is concerned that many companies are shifting their focus to increase reach into markets not currently covered by the current system of voluntary self regulation.

"A lot of companies have switched their marketing target to the 12-14 [age] group. This is a really vulnerable time for kids; they are seeing more media and making more decisions on their own," Harris says.

Around one in three children in the US - and in the UK - is overweight or obese. A study published this month by Roberto De Vogli of UC Davis in California found that fast food purchases were predictors of increases in the average body mass index (BMI) in the US and 24 other wealthy nations between 1999 to 2008.

So what is business doing?

Encouraging food and drink companies to rethink their messages is the aim of the first White House convening on food marketing to children. Launching the meeting last September, US First Lady Michelle Obama called on the private sector to "move faster" to market responsibly to children.

In January 2014, Subway became the first quick service chain to join Partnership for a Healthy America, a campaign endorsed by Obama to bring together business, charities and health advisers to tackle childhood obesity. A three-year commitment worth $41m will see it market healthier options and promote fruit and veg consumption.

Disney has pledged that by 2015, all food and beverage products advertised, sponsored, or promoted on Disney-owned media channels, online websites and theme parks will be required to meet nutritional guidelines promote fruit and vegetables and limit calories, sugar, sodium, and saturated fat.

Earlier this year, Lidl became the first supermarket group in the UK to remove unhealthy products from all tills across its stores, with no seasonal exceptions for Christmas or Easter confectionery. Lidl is replacing these products with healthier options including fresh and dried fruits, nuts and bottled water.

Should regulation be playing a bigger role?

In the UK, regulation exists to prevent adverts for unhealthy foods from being broadcast during or around programmes specifically made for children. But the Children's Food Campaign (CFC) argues that the popularity of family entertainment shows like The X-Factor means later bedtimes for many children – and advertisers are taking advantage by promoting unhealthy foods at these times.

In a joint campaign with the British Heart Foundation, the CFC will next month call for a 9pm watershed for fast food and drinks ads and clearer definition of 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' foods, to close existing loopholes.

But the ISBA, which represents British advertisers, argues that the link between the ads that viewers watch and the food choices they make is "minimal", and ad prohibitions are currently viewed at the "silver bullet" for tackling a complex public health issue.

Ian Twinn, ISBA's director of public affairs says: "Encouraging people to change their lifestyle rather than slapping bans on ads is what will make a difference.

"There are plenty of good examples of big brands changing their messages to ensure they stay relevant to their consumers but support the overall message for a healthier lifestyle. Coca-Cola, for instance, only advertises its low calorie or sugar-free products."

The UC Davis study suggests that if governments take action to control food industries, they can help prevent obesity and its serious health consequences, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. This echoes calls in the UK and US for more robust, government-led regulation of the industry, rather than voluntary self-regulation.

Why you shouldn't order a salad at McDonald's: Chain's new 'healthy' menus feature quinoa and kale - but contain MORE calories than their burgers and nuggets Restaurants across the world incorporating healthy ingredients in menus However more often than not these so called 'healthy' foods are calorific Some salads contain more fat and calories than nuggets or cheeseburgers

by Anucyia Victor & Emily Clark31 December 2015

It may be famous for its Big Macs, McNuggets and Happy Meals but fast food giant McDonald's is dipping its toes into new territory in an attempt to win over more health-conscious customers. Restaurants in Canada, US, New Zealand and Japan have all started to introduce items such as quinoa, kale, sprouts, matcha and green tea to the menu. It seems as though the chain is turning over a 'clean eating' new leaf, but how low in calories, fat and sugar are the new offerings?

If you thought these options would keep the pounds off, think again - the nutrition labels show they contain as much, if not more, fat and sugar than its usual fare.

In the US, the blueberry pomegranate smoothie sounds like the no-brainer when it comes to a body-boosting choice, But just one of these medium sized smoothies contains 54g sugar, and only offers four percent of the daily requirement of vitamin C. A medium size serving of Coke has 170 calories and 42g sugar To put this into context, consider this: that's five and a half Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts worth of sugar. The World Health Organisation recommends 25g of sugar a day - so one smoothie is equal to two days' worth of sugar.

Matcha green tea is known to be extremely high in antioxidants, with plenty of vitamins and minerals, but the Matcha latte from McDonald's Japan has more calories than a regular latte at 218 cals - which is equivalent to the calorie content in a large glass of wine. A normal latte however has just over half the calories and fat. A McDonalds cheeseburger has 301 calories, just four less than a matcha frappe. Japan's matcha frappe is even higher at 297 cals and 14.2g of fat - around four calories less than McDonald's cheeseburger, which has 301 cals. And you would need to spend two hours walking to burn off Korea's green tea latte which has a whopping 330 calories.

The avocado in New Zealand's 'Zesty Guacamole Chicken Burger' is the seemingly healthy addition to a burger that has 24.1g of fat and 269 calories. Upgrade the guac situation into a meal deal and you're looking at 41.7g fat (with a thirst-inducing 4g of salt).

Next up is salad. And while edamame, kale and almonds might sound like they belong on Deliciously Ella's shopping list, combined with America's buttermilk chicken strips in the premium Asian salad, they start to sound less appetising, with a surprising 24g of fat - around a third of your daily allowance.

Speaking of suspicious salads, Switzerland's side of lamb's lettuce with pumpkin seeds boosts your meal by 269 cals and a baffling 22g of fat. That's nearly as much as a Gregg's sausage roll and ten calories more than a serving of six McNuggets.

In Canada, patrons can indulge in some healthy sounding greens, including the 'I'm Greeking Out salad bowl' which comes with baby kale, topped with feta cheese, couscous and pita crisps, sliced cucumber and fresh red peppers – and a startling 280 calories and 12g of fat. That's more calories than a hamburger, which has 250.

Even the new McCafe in Toronto, offering a health food menu incorporating ingredients such as quinoa and sprouts fails, with quinoa edamame mandarin salad containing 270 calories.

But why are these so-called healthy foods are often worse than the chain's normal offerings? Some experts have speculated that this surprising amount of calories is down to the dressing used in the salads. The McDonald's Caesar salad for instance is more fattening than the burger as, with dressing and croutons, it contains 425 calories and 21.4g of fat, compared with the 253 calories and 7.7g of fat in a standard burger.

Adding a portion of fries to your burger brings the calorie count to 459 - still less fatty than the salad at 16.7g.

New tax proposal for salt, sugar, alcohol and fat

A Professor of Nutrition at Glasgow University says the UK will soon be a nation of 'elderly blobbies'. Another expert says the only way to save ourselves is to tax junk food.4 April 2011

‘There is now a substantial global epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease,’ says Sir Nicholas Wald, director of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London. ‘There is no single way to tackle it, but one way is to engineer society to make the healthy foods cheaper relative to the unhealthy foods.’

His idea is to tax the four major ingredients of junk food that contribute most to health problems: salt, alcohol, sugar and saturated fats. The tax would not apply to the ingredients sold separately. The foods most affected by the plan would be fast food, ready meals, soft drinks and alcohol, but it would also raise the price of less obvious items. The salt in bread, for example, contributes a significant amount of salt to the diet.

Obesity is a modern problem – statistics for it did not even exist 50 years ago – but increasingly it is a global issue. The rise of convenience foods, of labour-saving devices, of motorised transport and of more sedentary jobs means people are getting fatter worldwide. The World Health Organization predicts there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world by 2015 and more than 700 million of them will be obese. The UK is facing a particular crisis, with obesity costing the tax payer £4.2 billion a year.

‘In 1990,’ says the nutrition expert Professor Mike Lean, ‘with 10 per cent of British adults obese, nobody believed my prediction that without new prevention strategies, Britain would reach the American level of 25 per cent by 2010. We are now above that.’

Meanwhile, doctors point out that increased obesity is leading to more health problems. People who are overweight have a higher risk of heart disease, type II diabetes and some cancers.

And how would the tax affect prices? Levying the tax at a penny a gram for sugar and saturated fats, and a penny a tenth of a gram for salt, would see the cost of a Big Mac rise from £2.49 to £2.88, while the cost of a healthier portion of Chicken McNuggets would rise from the same amount to £2.58.

Finding the keyTaxing junk food seems to make sense. But is it so simple? Along with diet and physical activity, some say poverty is at the heart of the issue. Statistically, obesity is closely linked to low income. Making junk food more expensive might simply make the poor poorer – hardly the desired outcome.

‘Education is the key,’ said one health expert. ‘We really have to educate people about food and health. And if we make junk food more expensive, fine – but we must make fruit and vegetables cheaper.’

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tom

ers

very

ser

ious

ly a

nd w

e’ve

wor

ked

hard

on

our

reci

pes

and

men

u ch

oice

to re

duce

fat,

sal

t and

sug

ar. F

or e

xam

ple:

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ve re

duce

d sa

lt in

our

Chi

cken

McN

ugge

ts b

y 36

% s

ince

20

03

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ve re

duce

d sa

lt o

n ou

r fri

es b

y a

quar

ter s

ince

20

03

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only

use

org

anic

sem

i-sk

imm

ed m

ilk in

all

of o

ur te

as, c

offe

es a

nd H

appy

Mea

l milk

bott

les.

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s m

eans

they

con

tain

less

sat

urat

ed fa

t tha

n fu

ll-fa

t var

iant

s

• We’

ve m

ade

nutr

itio

nal i

mpr

ovem

ents

thro

ugh

refo

rmul

atio

n to

eac

h of

our

top

six

selli

ngsa

ndw

iche

s on

our

men

u

• We’

ve c

ompl

etel

y re

mov

ed h

ydro

gena

ted

tran

s-fa

ts a

cros

s ou

r ent

ire m

enu.

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do fa

ce te

chni

cal c

halle

nges

aro

und

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refo

rmul

atio

n of

som

e of

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read

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eese

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ces

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re i

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ts c

onta

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dium

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ike

in p

roce

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che

ese

mak

ing.

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ever

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r ti

me

we’

ve m

ade

succ

essf

ul a

nd s

usta

inab

le c

hang

es to

our

reci

pes

by m

akin

g sm

all b

ut im

port

ant s

teps

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king

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cus

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ers

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us

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ey d

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they

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e ta

ste

they

love

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do

this

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test

new

reci

pe fo

rmul

atio

ns a

nd n

ew p

rodu

cts

wit

h ou

r cus

tom

ers

befo

rew

e ro

ll th

em o

ut a

cros

s al

l our

UK

rest

aura

nts.

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food

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food

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ade

wit

h go

od q

ualit

y in

gred

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s, t

he m

ajor

ity

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hich

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sou

rced

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mB

rita

in a

nd Ir

elan

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e of

fer b

road

men

u ch

oice

and

pro

vide

cle

ar n

utri

tion

al in

form

atio

nto

hel

p ou

r cus

tom

ers

mak

e in

form

ed d

ecis

ions

.

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prep

are

our p

rodu

cts

sim

ply

– ou

r bur

ger p

atti

es a

re m

ade

from

who

le c

uts

of 10

0%

Bri

tish

and

Iris

h be

ef, w

hich

are

min

ced.

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cook

them

wit

hout

oil

and

just

add

a p

inch

of

salt

and

pep

per a

fter

coo

king

.

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a le

adin

g re

stau

rant

cha

in in

the

UK,

we’

ve in

vest

ed s

igni

fican

tly to

evo

lve

our m

enu

durin

gth

e la

st 10

yea

rs.

We’

ve m

ade

a si

gnif

ican

t co

ntri

buti

on in

our

sec

tor

in r

educ

ing

fat

and

salt

fro

m o

urin

gred

ient

s, a

nd re

duci

ng s

ugar

thro

ugh

incr

ease

d ch

oice

. We’

re p

roud

of t

he c

hang

es w

e’ve

mad

e –

in w

ays

that

take

our

cus

tom

ers

wit

h us

– a

nd, a

s w

e lo

ok a

head

, we’

ll co

ntin

ue to

keep

mak

ing

impr

ovem

ents

and

wor

king

wit

h ot

hers

in o

ur in

dust

ry a

nd g

over

nmen

t to

help

tack

le th

e co

mpl

ex is

sue

of o

besi

ty.

Qua

lity

ingr

edie

nts

We’

re p

roud

to s

uppo

rt B

riti

sh a

nd Ir

ish

farm

ers.

We

have

a lo

ngst

andi

ng B

ritis

han

d Ir

ish

supp

ly c

hain

and

spe

nd m

ore

than

£32

0m

a y

ear s

ourc

ing

ingr

edie

nts

from

ove

r 17

,50

0 B

ritis

h an

d Ir

ish

farm

s.

Our

ave

rage

cus

tom

ervi

sits

2-3

times

per m

onth

1,200

re

stau

rant

s in

loca

l com

mun

ities

acro

ss th

e U

K

Our

cus

tom

ers

are

from

a b

road

rang

e of

age

san

d ba

ckgr

ound

s –

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ct 8

out

of 1

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es v

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a ye

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peop

le in

the

UK

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isit

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onal

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all t

ypes

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nd a

tdiff

eren

t tim

es o

f the

day

,fro

m lu

nch

to p

oppi

ng in

afo

r a m

id-m

orni

ng c

offee

Last

yea

r we

serv

ed o

ver

60 m

illio

npo

rtio

ns*

of fr

uit a

nd v

eget

able

s

FAT

• We’

ve re

duce

d th

e sa

tura

ted

fat c

onte

nt o

f our

coo

king

oil

by 8

3% s

ince

1993

to a

max

imum

leve

l of 1

2% p

er 10

0g

• We’

ve re

duce

d th

e to

tal f

at in

our

milk

shak

es b

y 34

% p

er s

ervi

ng s

ince

20

10

• We

only

use

org

anic

sem

i-sk

imm

ed m

ilk in

all

of o

ur te

as, c

offe

es a

ndH

appy

Mea

l milk

bot

tles

- th

is e

nsur

es lo

wer

leve

ls o

f sat

urat

ed fa

t,co

mpa

red

wit

h fu

ll fa

t var

iant

s.

TRA

NS-

FATS

• We

wer

e th

e fir

st m

ajor

rest

aura

nt c

hain

to c

ompl

etel

y re

mov

ehy

drog

enat

ed fa

ts fr

om o

ur e

ntire

men

u

• Our

cur

rent

ble

nd o

f coo

king

oil

(rap

esee

d an

d su

nflo

wer

) was

car

eful

lyde

velo

ped

to re

duce

the

leve

l of T

rans

Fat

ty A

cids

to th

e lo

wes

t pos

sibl

ele

vel o

f les

s th

an 2

% (n

atur

al T

FA m

eans

it is

not

pos

sibl

e to

reac

h 0

%)

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have

sig

ned

up to

the

Tran

s Fa

t ple

dge

as p

art o

f the

Gov

ernm

ent’s

Resp

onsi

bilit

y D

eal*

.

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ave

rage

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py M

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old

in 2

012

con

tain

ed 4

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ss s

alt t

han

in 2

00

0

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cken

McN

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ts c

onta

in 3

6% le

ss s

alt t

han

in 2

00

3

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tom

ers

have

the

choi

ce to

ask

for t

heir

frie

s to

be

unsa

lted.

SUG

AR

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ave

rage

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py M

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old

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con

tain

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ss s

ugar

than

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00

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PPY

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enu

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e cl

assi

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ot h

igh

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t, s

alt

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ugar

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ordi

ng to

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ernm

ent’s

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filin

g M

odel

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1

The 21st century gingerbread houseHow companies are marketing junk food to children online

The advertising rules

The Advertising Standards Authority is a self-regulatory body set up by the advertising industry to regulate the content of UK advertisements, sales promotions and direct marketing, and to ensure the industry adheres to the advertising codes. It is also responsible for investigating complaints against specific advertisements. The Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) oversee the UK’s advertising codes.

Broadcast advertising

The broadcasting code regulates food and drink advertising on television by identifying products high in fat, sugar and salt (HFSS).11 Products which do not meet specific nutritional criteria cannot be advertised during programmes or television channels made specifically for children, or during programmes of particular appeal to children under 16.

The code also provides guidance to identify unhealthy brands and works to prevent the advertising of HFSS brands to children. Product placement for HFSS foods and drinks is prohibited in all broadcast advertising.

Online advertising

In 2011 the Advertising Standard Authority’s remit extended to include online advertising on paid for and non-paid for space, including company websites and social networking platforms.12

Unlike the television regulations, the non-broadcast code does not distinguish between healthy and unhealthy food. Instead it exists to ensure that advertising is ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’, rather than to protect and promote health. Consequently, when it does touch on health issues, the wording of the code is vague. For example, it states that ‘marketing communications should not condone or encourage poor nutritional habits or an unhealthy lifestyle in children’ but what constitutes ‘condoning and encouraging’ or ‘poor habits’ is left open to interpretation.13

This means that companies can market HFSS products to children online which cannot be advertised during children’s television programmes.

As well as promoting specific products, companies use advertising to build up relationships between their brands and young people. Whilst advertising of brands associated with HFSS products is prevented during children’s television shows, it is not similarly regulated online.14

Although the code defines children as under the age of 16, some marketing techniques are only prohibited in advertising to children of pre-school or primary school age. The use of equity-brand characters – characters created by advertisers – is not restricted by the regulations at all.

In addition, there is the potential for conflicts of interest to arise as the code is effectively written and maintained by advertisers through their membership of the Committee of Advertising Practice. The Advertising Standards Authority, which monitors adherence and enforces the code, is funded by voluntary financial contributions from the advertising industry.

Voluntary pledges

A number of food and drink companies and licensing bodies have developed their own policies on marketing to children, or signed up collectively to national, regional or global pledges.

Voluntary pledges vary in their definition of the nutritional profile of products which can be marketed to children, and in the marketing techniques they cover. A number of key marketing techniques are either completely, or mainly, unrestricted. This includes advertiser owned websites, equity brand characters, viral marketing, and brand marketing.15

There are inconsistencies in the ways in which a media audience is defined as consisting of a significant proportion of children, as well as in the age of children offered protection across the pledges. The majority of multi-company pledges set age restrictions at under 12 years, although Ofcom and CAP define a child as anyone below the age of 16.

Whilst the potential power of voluntary pledges lies in their international reach, the inconsistencies and gaps outlined above show that current voluntary efforts do not go far enough.

The 21st century gingerbread house How companies are marketing junk food to children online 5

Wha

t we

foun

d

We

foun

d cl

ear e

vide

nce

of

HFS

S pr

oduc

ts b

eing

hea

vily

m

arke

ted

to c

hild

ren

onlin

e, w

ith

web

sites

em

ploy

ing

a va

riety

of

tech

niqu

es to

incr

ease

thei

r ap

peal

to a

you

ng a

udie

nce.

Thi

s re

port

hig

hlig

hts j

ust a

few

of t

he

exam

ples

we

foun

d to

illu

stra

te

the

kind

s of o

nlin

e pr

omot

ions

an

d H

FSS

mar

ketin

g m

ater

ials

that

dire

ctly

targ

et, o

r app

eal t

o ch

ildre

n. T

he e

xam

ples

in th

is re

port

are

all

prod

ucts

whi

ch

cann

ot b

e ad

vert

ised

durin

g ch

ildre

n’s t

elev

ision

pro

gram

mes

.

Ove

r 75

per c

ent o

f the

web

sites

car

ryin

g H

FSS

prod

ucts

lin

ked

to a

cor

resp

ondi

ng p

rodu

ct o

r bra

nd p

age

on a

so

cial

net

wor

king

site

, with

Fac

eboo

k an

d Tw

itter

bei

ng

the

mos

t com

mon

. Fac

eboo

k pa

ges a

llow

you

ng p

eopl

e to

‘lik

e’ a

pro

duct

or b

rand

. Thi

s int

erac

tion

then

allo

ws

com

pani

es to

pos

t inf

orm

atio

n on

that

per

son’

s ‘ne

ws

feed

’, and

the

indi

vidu

al’s

Face

book

frie

nds w

ill b

e no

tified

of

thei

r int

erac

tions

with

the

bran

d. W

e fo

und

exam

ples

of

com

pani

es p

ostin

g up

date

s a c

oupl

e of

tim

es a

wee

k.

For e

xam

ple,

a p

ost o

n th

e N

esqu

ik U

K Fa

cebo

ok p

age 16

sa

id, “

Brrr,

it’s

cold

toda

y. Ha

s any

one

tried

drin

king

ch

ocol

ate

flavo

ured

Nes

quik

with

war

m m

ilk?”

In a

noth

er

exam

ple,

‘Che

wie

the

Chew

itsau

rus’

of th

e U

K Ch

ewits

Fa

cebo

ok p

age,

17 po

sted

the

follo

win

g to

pro

mot

e fre

e sw

eets

in a

chi

ldre

n’s m

agaz

ine,

“The

late

st is

sue

of To

xic m

ag is

out

now

! Ple

nty c

ool s

tuff

and

incl

udes

al

l you

r fav

es, n

ot to

men

tion

som

e ab

soul

tely

gre

at

FREE

gift

s – so

me

brill

iant

bla

ckcu

rrant

flav

our C

hew

its

burs

ting

with

flav

our.

Get y

our c

law

s on

a co

py to

day!

’

Whe

n so

meo

ne in

tera

cts w

ith c

ompa

ny p

ages

, by

shar

ing

or ‘l

ikin

g’ n

ews f

eeds

, writ

ing

on th

e co

mpa

ny’s

‘wal

l’, or

upl

oadi

ng a

‘tag

ged’

pho

to fo

r exa

mpl

e –

thei

r Fac

eboo

k fri

ends

can

then

see

an u

pdat

e ab

out

this

on th

eir r

espe

ctiv

e ne

ws f

eeds

. In

this

way

, soc

ial

netw

orki

ng w

ebsit

es e

ffect

ivel

y off

er c

ompa

nies

eas

y an

d ch

eap

acce

ss to

a fo

rm o

f pee

r-to-

peer

mar

ketin

g

Soci

al n

etw

orki

ng w

ebsit

es, l

ike

Face

book

, are

esp

ecia

lly

popu

lar a

mon

gst c

hild

ren

and

youn

g pe

ople

, 28

per

cent

of 8

–11

year

old

s and

75

per c

ent o

f 12–

15 y

ear

olds

hav

e an

act

ive

soci

al n

etw

orki

ng si

te p

rofil

e.

One

third

of 8

–12

year

old

s hav

e a

profi

le o

n sit

es th

at

requ

ire u

sers

to re

gist

er a

s bei

ng a

ged

13 o

r ove

r.18

Cart

oons

, ani

mat

ions

and

bra

nd c

hara

cter

s wer

e th

e m

ost c

omm

only

use

d te

chni

ques

to c

reat

e ch

ild fr

iend

ly w

ebsit

es. A

roun

d ha

lf of

the

web

sites

vi

sited

con

tain

ed a

com

bina

tion

of c

ompe

titio

ns,

prom

otio

ns, g

ames

and

qui

zzes

of a

ppea

l to

child

ren.

We

foun

d th

at c

ompa

nies

are

abl

e to

repe

ated

ly

cont

act c

hild

ren

dire

ctly

via

em

ail,

by re

ques

ting

cont

act d

etai

ls an

d ot

her i

nfor

mat

ion

whe

n th

ey

regi

ster

with

a w

ebsit

e or

take

par

t in

an o

nlin

e ac

tivity

, gam

e or

com

petit

ion.

Som

e w

ebsit

es w

e vi

sited

enc

oura

ged

visit

ors t

o en

ter t

heir

own

pers

onal

de

tails

, or e

nter

thei

r frie

nds’

emai

l add

ress

es to

send

th

em a

n e-

card

or i

nfor

mat

ion

abou

t a g

ame.

Mor

e th

an h

alf o

f the

web

sites

visi

ted

feat

ured

tele

visio

n ad

vert

s for

thei

r pro

duct

s, or

link

ed to

You

Tub

e w

here

pr

omot

iona

l vid

eos c

an b

e vi

ewed

. Thi

s giv

es c

hild

ren

the

oppo

rtun

ity to

vie

w a

dver

ts w

hich

regu

latio

ns

are

desig

ned

to p

reve

nt th

em se

eing

on

tele

visio

n.

Dow

nloa

dabl

e co

nten

t is a

noth

er c

omm

on te

chni

que.

Ch

ildre

n ca

n do

wnl

oad

free

gift

s of s

cree

nsav

ers,

desk

top

wal

lpap

er, p

oste

rs, m

obile

pho

ne a

pplic

atio

ns a

nd ri

ng

tone

s, w

hich

ena

bles

a c

ompa

ny’s

bran

d m

essa

ge to

pe

rsist

eve

n af

ter c

hild

ren

have

left

thei

r web

site.

In a

dditi

on to

thes

e ta

ctic

s to

appe

al to

chi

ldre

n, w

e fo

und

that

com

pani

es a

re ta

rget

ing

mum

s and

dad

s too

, by

offe

ring

activ

ities

, rec

ipes

and

lunc

hbox

idea

s, an

d co

mpe

titio

ns a

nd p

rizes

for p

aren

ts o

r the

who

le fa

mily

.

Onl

y ni

ne o

f the

web

sites

we

audi

ted

cont

aine

d a

form

of

age

ver

ifica

tion

to p

reve

nt y

oung

peo

ple

ente

ring

the

web

site

and

view

ing

its c

onte

nt. W

e fo

und

that

ag

e ve

rifica

tion

syst

ems,

whe

re th

ey d

o ex

ist, a

re e

asily

el

uded

– si

mpl

y en

terin

g a

false

dat

e of

birt

h al

low

s un

der-a

ge c

hild

ren

to e

nter

thes

e sit

es o

r reg

ister

to

rece

ive

mar

ketin

g up

date

s. At

firs

t gla

nce,

thes

e sy

stem

s may

sugg

est t

hat c

ompa

nies

are

mak

ing

effor

ts to

avo

id m

arke

ting

to c

hild

ren,

but

our

rese

arch

sh

ows t

hey

are

not s

uffici

ently

robu

st to

do

so.

The

21st

cen

tury

gin

gerb

read

hou

se

How

com

pani

es a

re m

arke

ting

junk

food

to c

hild

ren

onlin

e 7