President Obama's Food Safety Working Group

This opinion piece from the Huffington Post raises some interesting questions about the depth of President Obama's Food Safety Working Group, and particularly whether the group will handle core issues such as the overuse of antibiotics in industrial agriculture and the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. The article contains numerous links to sources on these issues.

Backwards Hamburger

"Backwards Hamburger" is a promotional cartoon that was made for the release of the film "Fast Food Nation." It's short and fun, with good quality Flash animation, but it also introduces a number of the issues around fast food labor, ranching, and the meatpacking industry that are covered in Schlosser's book.

The Invincible Happy Meal 2

Ryan Vera, who is blogging for Dr. McCormick's "Eat, Read, Write" class this semester, passed on a link to this Morgan Spurlock video in a comment on my earlier post. In the video, Spurlock tests the decomposition time of various McDonald's foods against that of a hamburger and fries purchased from a mom-and-pop restaurant. The results are startling, particularly in the case of the french fries, and may give us some insight into the use of preservatives in the fast food industry. These foods are designed to appeal to our senses of taste and smell, so it's easy to forget that they're also designed to fit the needs of industrial production, to sit in warehouses for long periods of time, and to be transported over long distances before they reach the walk-in freezers of local franchises.

You can catch a glimpse of that production process in this post about a McDonald's factory in Russia. Don't miss the McDonald's Bun Guide and Bun Troubleshooting Tool!

The Invincible Happy Meal

"The picture you're looking at above isn't of just any Happy Meal. It's a Happy Meal that's an entire year old. Yup, author Joann Bruso decided to undertake a little experiment with McDonald's most recognizable icon (besides that bizarre man-clown, that is). So she bought a Happy Meal, took out the hamburger, and plopped down in her office. For a year. This is what happened."

You can read the rest of the brief article and find a link to Bruso's web site here. You can read Bruso's "Happy Meal Blog" here, although you may have to try several times: according to the blog, "My Happy Meal posting went viral with multiple blogs and news sites picking it up. The Baby Bites’ site is having a hard time handling all the hits. We are working on this issue. If you experience difficulty on the site or do not see your comment posted, please check back."

It's worth noting that several people who commented on Bruso's post report similar (usually accidental) experiments with other processed foods. One reader tells of an open "Lunchable" that sat unchanged in her kitchen for several months. Another describes how her young daughter left an uneaten Dairy Queen ice cream cone sitting in her closet for two weeks: "I was hanging up some clothes in her room [and] I noticed a perfect looking unmelted ice cream cone." Apparently the so-called ice cream shrank slightly during that time, but there was no melting and none of the foul odor you'd expect from dairy products gone rancid.

Of course none of these are scientific experiments, but they do make me uneasy!

"Flooded McDonald's" Video

"Flooded McDonald's" is a short video in which a "convincing life-size replica" of a McDonald's is gradually filled with water. Prepared food, wrappers, drink cups, toys and trays float through the restaurant; the furniture and trash cans begin to float; the "restaurant's" electrical grid short circuits; "eventually the space becomes completely submerged."

Watching the clip several times, I found myself experiencing a range of feelings -- at some moments it seemed comical and prank-like, at others calming and serene, at still others disturbing. Almost inevitably, it made me think of T.S. Eliot's famous poem "The Wasteland," which treats the "new" landscape of modern life (the poem was written in 1922) as an object of suspicion and despair because it undoes the cultural certainties that supposedly came before it, particularly through the development of "mass" or pop culture that is such an important part of the Modern world. The poem includes a section which describes the river Thames, which runs through London, as one of many featured "waste lands":

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

In contrast to Eliot, "Flooded McDonald's" seems to relocate the river itself inside the landscape of pop culture. The water is both a destructive force and completely contained or controlled by the pop culture environment it's introduced into, since the "restaurant" is sealed. In this sense, the video expresses a desire to destroy this environment and an inability to do so. Of course it's the floating trash that made me think of Eliot, but it also strikes me that to make such an elaborate replica of a restaurant and then flood it and destroy it says something about American "fast food culture" -- the culture of instant gratification and disposable goods that is larger than fast food, but easily represented by it.

Anyway, I came across this piece and thought I'd throw it out there. Whatever you make of the video, it's a strange and interesting response to one of our main topics of discussion this semester.

The video was made by the art collective Superflex in 2009. You can see film and production stills, and read about the project at the Superflex web site.