AMERICAN FRY.

Fast food is as American as deep-fried rectangular apple pie, but there's another side to the all-American meal you may not know about

FOCUS: Fast Food Is Everywhere, But It May Be More Dangerous Than Teens Know

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand the growing concerns about fast food, specifically that it contributes to obesity and that it poses more-dangerous health risks to those who consume it regularly.

Discussion Questions:

* What did you learn from reading this article that most surprised or disturbed you?

* Would you consider cutting back on your consumption of fast food?

* Do fast-food restaurants take unfair advantage of teen workers, or offer them an easy way to earn spending money?

* Is the sameness of chain fast-food restaurants good or bad?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Debate: Discuss the evidence that fast food contains high levels of fat and sodium, and sometimes dangerous bacteria. Remind students about nutritional labels on packaged foods. Debate this question: Should fast-food restaurants be required to list the ingredients in their products? (Some chains do this already, but the effect on customers' orders isn't clear. McDonald's once sold a "McLean" burger as a healthy choice. But even though blind taste tests found it to be more flavorful, consumers didn't bite.)

Research/Cooperative Learning: Discuss fast-food ads. (McDonald's annual ad budget is estimated at $1.5 billion.) Students might videotape TV ads for fast-food restaurants. What points do the ads make--and avoid? How accurate are they? What points do the images suggest?

Next, discuss cost. Have students research the cost of a fast-food hamburger, fries, and soft drink. How much would a similar serving cost at home, if they bought the ingredients at a supermarket?

Students might argue that convenience is worth the cost. But the experiment should dispel myths about economy. If any students are attending a Memorial Day picnic, have them calculate the cost of the food if they bought it at a fast-food restaurant.

Critical Thinking/Writing: Solicit opinions on government's inability to fine meat packers. Does government have a responsibility to make sure food is safe? Students can write their opinions in a letter to their representatives in Congress and to their local newspaper.

at Montgomery Mall in suburban Bethesda, Maryland, crowds from nearby high schools flood the food court, piling their trays high with burgers, fries, pizza slices, and chicken nuggets.

For Adam Specter, 18, chowing with a group of friends, this is lunch--nearly every day. The reason is simple. "Fast food," he says, "is everywhere."

In urban Pittsburgh, J.J. Stanko, 17, calls McDonald's or Burger King "the last-ditch choice" among a cornucopia of ethnic restaurants. Yet he finds himself sneaking into McDonald's regularly after the mom and pop restaurants in his neighborhood are shuttered for the night.

In rural Milton, North Carolina, Joseph Dawson, 15, has to drive two towns over to find a fast-food joint. Yet television ads invade his living room, lifting him out of his chair and onto the road for a burger. "They'll be showing that flaming burger," he says, "and you just sort of want to go on and get up and get you one."

From city to suburb to wide-open rural countryside, fast food has become a common denominator of teen life, circa 2001. The equation runs like this: fast-paced life plus fast-food outlets equal teens packing away burgers and fries or some other fast food at an average rate of three times a week. With annual earnings of $110 billion in the U.S. alone--nearly a third more than Americans spend on higher education--the fast-food industry quite simply has planted its arches and brilliantly glowing signs in every corner of America. Yet few Americans have any idea how those prepackaged burgers and chicken tenders wind up on the tray in front of them, or what dangers to their health might be lurking there.

UNHAPPY MEALS

That blissful ignorance may be coming to an end. With the publication this spring of his best-selling book, Fast Food Nation, journalist Eric Schlosser has systematically peeled the pop-top off the nation's fast-food industry for a peek inside. Schlosser warns that a lack of safety standards exposes Americans to the risk of serious illnesses from contaminated food. He says that high-calorie fast-food meals are turning Americans into a tribe of overweight doughboys and doughgirls. And he says that fast-food companies are targeting teens, luring them with ads inside and outside school to eat ever more fast food, while hiring them by the thousands to work in unsafe conditions for minimum wage in fast-food outlets.

Schlosser says he didn't set out to take on the fast-food industry--especially since his favorite meal is the hamburger. "I'd eaten an enormous amount of fast food," he says. "And I have two kids and they've eaten their share of Happy Meals. I didn't set out to write something about the dark side of the all-American meal." But he says the dangers he uncovered in his research have caused him to swear off fast food for life.

The fast-food industry responds that by staying away from fast-food restaurants, Schlosser will miss out on some of the safest and most nutritious food in America. Janet Riley of the American Meat Institute in Washington, D.C., which represents the meatpacking industry, says that he has "vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair."

Walt Riker, a McDonald's spokesman, issued a press release: "[Schlosser's] opinion," it reads, "is outvoted 45 million to 1 every single day, because that's how many customers around the world choose to come to McDonald's for our menu of variety, value, and quality."

Industry officials say that food poisoning linked to fast-food meals is rare, with only three cases attracting national attention in the last two decades--one at McDonald's restaurants in Michigan and Oregon in 1982, another at Jack in the Box outlets in Western states in 1993, and one at Sizzler restaurants in Wisconsin last summer.

But critics say food poisonings, which can be caused by a long list of organisms, often don't get linked to a particular restaurant because they can take days to develop. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency that monitors national health issues, says that 200,000 Americans come down with a food-borne illness each day, 900 of them requiring hospitalization. Of those, 14 die. More than a quarter of the American population comes down with a food-related ailment at one time or another every year.

Some food poisoning in fast-food restaurants has led to deaths and serious illness. In the 1993 Jack in the Box case, 700 people became ill and 4 died, including a 6-year-old girl, after eating Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted with a tiny but deadly microbe known as E. coli 0157:H7. In Milwaukee last summer, a 3-year-old girl died in a similar outbreak that sickened 500 patrons of Sizzler restaurants.

The little bug, a variation of bacteria that we all have in our intestines to help digest food, can cause brain damage or death. In his book, Schlosser describes the 1993 death of one 6-year-old boy who came down with cramps after eating tainted hamburger meat. As the toxin liquefied his brain, doctors had to drill holes in his skull to relieve the pressure. He died five days later.

IMPROVED METHODS

After the 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, many fast-food chains began testing meat used in their restaurants more frequently and improved food-preparation methods to prevent the spread of germs. For instance, simply making sure burgers are cooked at 160 degrees will kill dangerous bacteria.

But Schlosser and other critics say not enough is being done to keep deadly microbes out of meat to begin with. They say these bacteria contaminate beef on fast-moving assembly lines when underpaid, poorly trained workers--who often kill, gut, and butcher several cattle per minute--inadvertently spill feces from cows' intestines onto the meat destined for human consumption.

And critics contend that through political contributions to members of Congress, the meatpacking industry has avoided the imposition of any serious penalties against plants that produce tainted meat.

"The fact of the matter," Schlosser says, "is that the federal government can order the recall of a stuffed animal that has a glass eye that comes loose, but it doesn't have the power to recall tons of contaminated meat. The government can't fine meatpacking companies that sell contaminated meat."

The meat industry, however, blames the food-poisoning outbreaks on poor food handling in restaurants and insufficient cooking. Federal regulation, they argue, would only drive up costs by imposing needless testing. Schlosser, in response, says that the entire safety program of Jack in the Box, put in place after the 1993 poisonings, adds only 1 cent per pound to the cost of the company's ground beef.

But concern about beef safety is mounting. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease this spring in Great Britain, France, and Belgium made headlines, although the virus that causes the disorder has no effect on humans. But another epidemic, mad cow disease, has killed 95 people in Great Britain over the last decade. The disease, which attacks the brain and is always fatal, entered the food chain when cattle were fed the ground-up brains and spinal cords of slaughtered sheep and other animals contaminated with the disease. The U.S. has banned such feed practices, and so far, no cases of mad cow disease have been discovered in the U.S. But critics say current regulations still permit dead horses, pigs, and even poultry to be cut up and fed to cattle--a practice they say could lead to mad cow cases here.

PILING IT ON

Fast food's bad rap doesn't end with fears of beef contamination. Critics also tag all those sacks of burgers and fries with helping to worsen another serious health problem: obesity. Currently, about 44 million American adults are obese; another 6 million are considered "super-obese"--more than 100 pounds overweight. The CDC found that in 1991, only 4 states had obesity rates higher than 15 percent, but by last year the number had increased to 37 states. In every state, obesity was increasing in all age categories. And today's teens, the agency says, are three times more likely to be overweight than teens in the 1960s (see "How Bad Is It?" opposite page).

Though no study has yet established a definitive link between fast food and obesity rates, the expansion of fast-food chains seems to be accompanied by rising waves of fat. In China, the number of overweight teens tripled in the last decade--during a time when fast food went on its own expansion binge. At the same time, similar weight increases occurred in Japan and Great Britain as fast-food chains expanded in those countries.

Fast food promotes weight gain, critics say, because it lures people away from lower-fat diets through its constant advertising messages. In addition, fast-food restaurants have been serving increasingly large portions of high-calorie food. A large Coke in 1960 was 8 ounces; today it's 32. Today's Super Size Fries at McDonald's are three times the large size of a generation ago.

DANGERS OF MCJOBS

Teens in a fast-food world are affected in another way: Without inexpensive teen labor, fast-food restaurants as we know them could hardly exist (see "Burger Shame," below).

Besides low pay and poor working conditions, where minor injuries abound, Schlosser says he found an unexpected source of more serious danger for teens working behind the counter: armed robbery. No national statistics on fast-food robberies exist, but Schlosser says statistics in Los Angeles and Omaha, Nebraska, reveal that fast-food restaurants have become as popular a target for robbery as convenience stores. What are the times when danger is highest? "Kids should be aware that the early-morning hours and late night puts you at risk," he says.

TARGET: YOU

And teens suffer another kind of fast-food assault. In recent years, school districts strapped for cash have made millions of dollars by allowing advertising by fast-food places inside schools. In some schools, the lunchroom has become a fast-food court, with McDonald's and other companies selling food to students. In one case, when Coca-Cola sales fell below those required in a contract with the Colorado Springs school system, a school administrator there sent a memo to principals, urging them to allow students to drink Coke in class.

Criticism of such practices, though, may be making its point. Coca-Cola recently announced that it was scaling back its marketing plans in schools and would start to include milk, juice, and water in school vending machines (see "Bought Milk?" page 7).

So will teens take heed of the perils of fast food? At Montgomery Mall on a recent lunch break, Nicole Greenbaum, 17, says she's fully aware of fast food's pitfalls, yet she and her friends would have a hard time changing their habits. "You don't get a lot of time for lunch," she says, "and it's fast, it's good, and it's cheap."

RELATED ARTICLE: Hold the Mayo, Just the Facts

* A typical fast-food hamburger may contain meat from hundreds of different cattle.

* The meatpacking plants made famous by Upton Sinclair's 1906 expose of their horrid conditions (see page 18) slaughtered 50 cattle an hour. The slaughterhouses that supply beef to McDonald's today kill up to 400 cattle an hour.

* Because intensive processing renders most fast food tasteless, fast-food chains must add chemicals to reflavor it. A million-dollar industry of chemical plants in New Jersey creates these flavors.

* Federal regulations allow ground beef to contain up to 30 percent fat.

* Federal law requires slaughterhouses to treat animals humanely and stun them before they're killed. But animals often beaten, dragged, scalded in boiling water, skinned, and cut apart--all while still alive and conscious.

* The golden arches are more widely recognized than the Christian cross. Children often recognize the McDonald's logo before they recognize their own names.

* To prevent them from pecking each other to death in severely overcrowded conditions, many chickens destined for fast-food restaurants have their beaks clipped off with a hot blade while they're alive and conscious.

* Every day, one out of every four Americans--about 67 million people--eats fast food. The typical American eats approximately three hamburgers and four orders of fries per week.

* The typical teenage boy in the U.S. now gets about 10 percent of his daily calories from soda.

* A fast-food soda that sells for $1.29 costs the restaurant about 10 cents, a markup of about 1,200 percent.

* The rate of obesity among American children has doubled since the late 19070s.

* American children now get about one quarter of their total vegetable servings in the form of potato chips or french fries.

* This year, American will spend more than $110 billion on fast food--more than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined.

SOURCES: FAST FOOD NATION, BY ERIC SCHLOSSER; USDA; PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS; AND GAIL EISNITZ, AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE COMPILED BY PATRICIA SMITH.

RELATED ARTICLE: Burger Shame

FAST-FOOD JOBS LOSE THEIR GLAMOUR FOR SUBURBAN TEENS

His friends were at the movies and the mall, or at home playing video games. But Dave Neuzil was at work, piling lettuce and tomatoes on submarine sandwiches. It is a job, he says, that his friends would not be caught dead doing.

"It's not considered cool, working at a fast* food place," says Dave, a lanky 16-year-old from suburban Chicago, dressed in a green Subway shirt. "Their parents just give them everything. But I need to make some money."

In these prosperous times, with young people so keenly aware of status and image, Dave Neuzil has become something of a vanishing breed: a suburban upper-middle-class teenager who is willing to work at a cheap restaurant.

With so many jobs going begging, well-heeled teenagers are turning up their noses at jobs at fast-food restaurants, places that once relied mostly on high school students for help.

"Some kids will give you heat for working in a place like this," says Jim LaRose, 21, a Subway manager in the western suburbs of Chicago. "They'll say, `What are you working at a fast-food place for?' And when they come in to order, some of these kids are very arrogant"

It can be humbling for 8 teenager, outfitted in a franchise uniform, to wait on peers who drive up in fancy cars and give orders. Dave, the son of a police officer and a grammar school principal, says he just shrugs it off. But the hierarchy of jobs is clear to most teenagers, with places like Starbucks or Gap at the top, and franchises like McDonald's and Burger King at the bottom.

"The term `flipping burgers' has entered the popular culture to mean the lowest kind of unskilled work," says Albert Hunter, a sociologist at Northwestern University. "And teenagers are aware of all the negative connotations that go with it."

NO SLACKING ZONE

But the unwillingness of suburban teens to flip burgers does not mean that they're spending their spare time shopping and slacking. On the contrary, school counselors say, many ambitious high school students are so busy studying and doing community service-often to build a resume for college admission--that they simply do not have time for a part-time job.

"There's not a whole lot of lying around going on," says Ray Jamiolkowski, the director of guidance at Naperville (Illinois) Central High School. "If anything, they're doing too much, and they're stressed."

Dani Newcombe, a high school senior in Evanston, Illinois, is among those too busy to work. Her activities? Just soccer, cross country, basketball, the yearbook, and the school newspaper. Sometimes she does not get home from after-school activities until 11 p.m. And then she does her homework.

"I have some friends who are up until 1 a.m. studying almost every night," she says. "I can't do that. I need some sleep."

--Dirk Johnson

RELATED ARTICLE: How Bad Is It?

(PRETTY MISERABLE, ACTUALLY ...)

McDonald's fries may ace most taste tests, but like most fast food they bomb big time when it comes to nutrition.

Fast food--especially, popular items like cheeseburgers, french fries, and fried chicken--tends to be high in calories and loaded with saturated fat, which clogs arteries and may lead to heart disease. The problem isn't just the bad stuff in fast food, but also the good stuff that's missing: fiber, complex carbohydrates, and calcium, which is particularly important for teenagers, who add almost half of their bone mass in those years.

Nutritionists point to another problem: Large portion sizes and special promotions often lead to overeating. Most fast-food portions are two or three times larger than nutritionists advise. A government-recommended serving size of french fries is just 10 fries, but a medium order of McDonald's fries comes with about 60.

"`Can I supersize that for you?' may be a cliche, but it's a big part of the problem," says Jeanne Goldberg, a professor of nutrition and the director of the Center on Nutrition Education at Tufts University.

The good news, nutritionists say, is that fast food won't kill you--as long as you don't eat it all the time. The bad news? Most teens do-more than three times a week on average.

"No one should be eating a Big Mac and fries every day," Goldberg says. "But occasionally, if it's what you really enjoy, is OK. The key to good nutrition is variety."

--Patricia Smith

With reporting by REGINA SCHRAMBLING of The New York Times