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!

Wendy's Training Video from the 80s

Over at Dr. McCormick's "Eat, Read, Write" blog, she has posted a Wendy's training video that makes truly embarrassing/hilarious use of rap music and dated MTV-style special effects to explain how to flip burgers. Not to be missed!

Sometimes I feel sorry for the 80s.

"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.

Scientific Management and the "Deskilling" of the Fast Food Worker

During today's class discussion, several students raised the point that the fast food industry promises teenagers "work experience" but doesn't provide any training, skills, or knowledge that can be used outside of the fast food industry itself. To paraphrase Claude, the industry can give teens a line on their resume, but it doesn't give them the opportunity to develop new skills that they can take forward to the next job -- let alone challenging them to develop as people. Fast food workers don't even learn to cook!

We're going to talk more on Tuesday about the industry's assembly-line model of food production, but in light of today's discussion I dug up the following reference to the work of the labor sociologist Harry Braverman. Braverman's pioneering work in "labor sociology" was one of the first examinations of the effects of assembly-line labor on the workers who are subjected to it. As Martin Slattery explains in Key Ideas in Sociology:

The purpose of new technology, however, argues Braverman, is not only to increase productivity, but to increase management's control of the work force... The traditional craftsman of the early Industrial Revolution was, in a sense, self-employed and independent. He owned his own tools and place of work, bought his own materials and sold the finished product directly to the consumer. He alone possessed the necessary skill and knowledge required for the whole production process, from conception through to execution. He had a certain status and power in relation to the employer... Scientific management, argued Braverman, deskilled the industrial worker and left him helpless, powerless, and skill-less, controlled from above by factory managers and reduced on the shop floor to simply a unit of production. The epitome of scientific management was Henry Ford's giant assembly lines and the mass production of the early Ford motorcar (98).

You can read the rest of Slattery's chapter summarizing Harry Braverman's critique of scientific management and the "deskilling" of the worker in modern industrial labor at Google Books.

Assignment: Response #2

Your assignment for Response #2 follows directly from our group presentations this afternoon. However, you should not feel bound by your group work: if you want to make a different point than the one your group presented to the class, feel free to do so. Even if you are making the same point that your group made, you will need to discuss it in a more formal and more developed way in order to produce a sophisticated piece of writing.

Due: March 22 by noon

Response #2 is a highly structured, three-paragraph response paper in which you:

* State and explain one point that you want to make in response to Schlosser's chapter "Behind the Counter." This should be your idea, not a paraphrase of Schlosser. Refine and define your point, walking the reader through it step by step so that that your reader has the opportunity to understand it thoroughly. Good development and clear, specific language are key to this step. (Paragraph 1, 5+ sentences)

* Choose a quotation from Schlosser to illustrate your point. In no less than four sentences, explain the quotation and how it relates to your point. Introduce your quotation by giving the author's name and the title of the chapter or the book you are quoting from; give the page number so that your reader can find the passage you are quoting. As you discuss the quotation, consider the information it contains and the author's particular choice of words. Why does he use the language that he does? Is that the language you would choose, or that people usually use to discuss the same idea? What attitude or information does the author convey in his choice of words? (Paragraph 2, 5-8 sentences)

* Describe a personal experience that illustrates your point. Your description should be detailed, and it should employ clear and specific language, so that the reader is able to imagine the situation or event you are describing. In no less than four sentences, explain how this personal experience relates to your point.

This response is due on your blog by Monday at noon. Don't forget to label it "response" so that it will be easy to find later.

Blog Check + Notes on Titles

I've set up a list of blogs from the "Ethics of Food" cluster to the lower right. The list is sorted so that the most recently updated blogs will always float to the top. Each entry lists the title of the blog, the title of the most recent post, and the time of that post relative to the present (for example, "7 hours ago"). If you don't see your blog in the list, that means I do not have the address of your blog, and no one in the class can read it right now. If you see the title of your blog, but not the title of your most recent post or the time of that post, that means you haven't posted anything yet! In either case, you've missed the due date of your first homework since both of these things were supposed to be done by midnight. Uh oh.

Now let's notice a few things:

1. Some of the blogs have titles that don't tell the reader anything about the theme of the blog. Remember, the title of a piece of writing has two jobs to do: first, to give the reader a sense of what to expect from the work, and second, to attract her attention so that she'll want to read your work. Because you're publishing your writing for this class in the real world, we're playing by real world rules: an ineffective title can mean the difference between someone choosing to click on your blog or going elsewhere. With this in mind, some of you may want to think about changing the title of your blog to something more effective and intriguing. (To change your title, click on "Customize" at the top of the page, then "Settings.") You can use any phrase that fits the theme of the course. Be creative!

2. Similarly, we need to work on giving our posts descriptive titles. Look at the titles of your classmates posts: Which of them sound interesting? Which of them are you likely to read when you give comments on Tuesday morning? By thinking about what makes these titles attractive, you can learn to title your own posts more effectively.

In both cases, we're dealing with titles. It's easy to ignore them or to lose sight of their purpose in a classroom situation, where among other things you learn to take it for granted that the teacher is always going to read your work. But in the real world, the title is one of the most important parts of a piece of writing. It can make or break you. If you think about your own reading habits, both online and in print, you'll probably see that this is true: Who wants to read a magazine article or a web page (or go see a movie or play a video game) with a boring or obscure title?

Let's make that our first big writing lesson: Work on your titles!

Homework for Tuesday 3/16

1. By midnight tonight: mail me (my address is on the syllabus) your name, the email address you actually use, and your blog address

2. By midnight tonight: post Response #1 to your blog

3. Before class tomorrow: use the links on the right hand side of my blog to visit a few of your classmates' blogs; post a comment in response to at least one other person's post