Synopsis
Fast food in global society
A journey into the America of hamburgers and fries. From Texas to Illinois, the social, cultural and health price you pay for producing and eating fast is very high. And it doesn't appear on the menu.
Today, Americans spend more on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, software, or cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videotapes, and music, all combined. Every day, about one in four American adults visits a fast food restaurant. But behind the colorful shop window, the clean appearance of the chains and the affordable price of the food there is a very different reality. "When I tell what happened to me," Michael Glover told me, "people's first reaction is 'but how can they do this' and the second is 'but this is America, but how can they do this?'" Glover is 55 years old, but he looks eighty. He is disabled: he had a very serious accident at work in the gigantic industrial slaughterhouse of IBP in Amarillo, Texas. And the company he worked for for 23 years made sure he quit his job without compensation or a pension. Today, it survives only thanks to social assistance. It was one of the most touching encounters of this work. And we have encountered several stories similar to Glover's on this American trip. But what do accidents at work in a slaughterhouse have to do with hamburgers, fries and happy meals? This is what this investigation - which observes the process from cow to table - tries to tell. Over the past thirty years, the emergence and establishment of the fast food industry in American society has transformed it in many ways. It has not only changed the way of eating, but also industrial and trade union relations, the way of doing business - with the expansion of chains and franchising - urban planning, agriculture, the meat slaughtering industry , food hygiene, youth work, the popular culture of children. The fast food industry, with the need to produce large quantities of food that tasted the same everywhere, wanted and favored industrial concentration in its suppliers, who became increasingly large and powerful.
Today, four major slaughterhouses control about 80 percent of the U.S. cattle market. Their strength and power are overwhelming. One of these is the IBP, for which Michael Glover worked in Amarillo. That terrifies its workers, who are often Latin American immigrants, prevents them from having a real union, from protecting their rights, from being compensated in the event of an accident. And that's not all. The money of the industries and their power to pressure politics, prevents serious controls on the safety and hygiene of meat. Five thousand people die every year in the United States from diseases related to poor food hygiene , and industry lobbies prevent thorough controls, for example on minced meat. The documentary tells the story of six-year-old Alex Donley, who died in 1993 from a contaminated hamburger . And his mother Nancy, who dedicates her life to fighting for stricter food controls in the United States, and stories like her son's not to be repeated. Many silences and many no's characterized this documentary: it was impossible to meet institutional representatives of the big meat industries, impossible to talk to someone from McDonald's, or to dialogue with the professors of Hamburger University, where the international cadres of the fast food multinational are trained. While fast food is becoming more and more established in Europe and Italy, we have found a wall of silence and silence in trying to talk to the people in charge of this industry in the country where it was born: America. Thanks to some strong and determined people, who helped us, we were able to peek behind this wall. And we didn't like what we saw.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
"In Texas, you breathe a constant air of violence. ERIC SCHLOSSER's emblematic phrase, "welcome to the Texas", underlined by the music I used, haunting and suspended, deliberately "insisted" throughout the documentary, inevitably sounds like, "welcome to hell". And indeed it is hell. Whether it's just fast-food hell, I honestly can't say. But everything that revolves around one of the world's biggest businesses, made up of horror and abuses of the most elementary human rights – and, as far as it is legitimate to think that in a civilization of carnivores they may have, animals – is supported by a single logic: money, power, racism. So what seems like the normal journey of a cow, towards a destiny that is now inevitable - as it has been repeated for centuries, albeit with disconcerting variations - becomes, in addition to the journey of the animal itself, the journey of another animal, more lucid perhaps, more conscious, but often also more ruthless, more violent, more cynical, certainly even more alone; the journey of an animal called man, in a land without protection, without justice and without freedom." (Maria Martinelli)
Credits
Direction Maria Martinelli
Subject Jacopo Zanchini
Script Maria Martinelli and Jacopo Zanchini
Photography Fabrizio La Palombara
Montage Roberto Paoletti