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SITE OF THE WEEK

Excuse me. Having just read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, I’m a little off my feed this week. Fast food, Schlosser says, is destroying us, not just in body, but in soul, and I’m inclined to agree. If the violent film industry and the raging economy and the terrorists don’t get us, the burgers will.

THE NUTS & BOLTS

Schlosser tours a killing factory where thousands of beef cattle are slaughtered daily and tracks the origin of deadly E-coli virus now at the center of the Mad Cow scare. He demonstrates how fast food corporations have consistently prevented unionization of workers, avoided healthcare benefits and kept workers at minimum wage. He shows how schools, to prop up fading revenues, have welcomed fast food items and advertising into classrooms. He shows how marketing companies consistently target advertising to children as young as two by offering toys and on-site playgrounds. He explains how fast food restaurants have become more dangerous than banks as the site of deadly and frequent robberies. He explains that, while taking government deductions of up to $2,400 per employee for training, fast food chains rarely train anyone in a field where workers turn over every three to six months.

It’s a pretty grim picture in a world where sedentary Americans have become the fattest, least healthy nation on the planet. And while beef cows are producing 50 pounds of dung daily at gigantic industrial growing plants, family farms are rapidly dying out. Now we are spreading this American dream system around the world, annihilating local cultures and assimilating the earth to a single fast, unhealthy, economically stifling, polluting, sterile blandness.

Okay, we’re all doomed, but have you seen their web sites? Fast food chains are employing the most advanced web design technology on the Internet. Apparently this is where the money goes that your server is not getting. If you made the same 1200 percent profit that fast food stores make on soda, you could have a killer web site too. Actually you can learn a lot from a quick tour of the top fast food sites. Schlosser never discusses web pages, so I thought I’d check out a few.

Burger King
Opens with a pulsing guitar and bass riff with movie-quality graphics, very appealing. This week BK is promoting a Chicken Caesar Club. It looks so good I wanted to lick the screen. The rest of the homepage teases a rang of tie-ins from Little Tike toys for children to Harlem Globetrotter tickets for dad. The Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle toys sound almost like health food – "They’re lean, they’re green." And the web site reminds us all to "Get Out and Get Active!" To it’s credit, the "Nutrition" info on this site is easy to find and easy to read.

Wendy’s
Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas may have been a great businessman and a nice guy, but his appeal as a spokesman always eluded me. Following his death to cancer in 2002, the company has worked to establish him, like the Kentucky Fried Colonel, as a company icon, posting his image in thousands of stores. The web site offers a detailed tribute – Father, Founder , Friend – to the man who created the square gray hamburger, and we see little Dave in the arms of his Aunt Minnie. You’ll learn a lot more about your own longevity by downloading their PDF file filled with To nutritional info. To Wendy’s credit they offer a 99 cent baked potato, one of nature’s healthiest meals if you skip the topping.

McDonald’s
The homepage opens with a glorious photo of little kids saying proudly, "I’m going to McDonalds." Then come the ads for toys, large and animated so even the youngest mind can follow the action. This month the kiddie toy is a Lilo and Stitch Play-Doh Happy Meal. Nutrition facts come in a 7-page downloadable format with tiny print. Putting this data on the web site, but making it still hard to read is a brilliant tactic. The site also offers ways you can stay on track with your diet while eating at Micky D’s. According to the site McDonald’s now offers 30,000 restaurants in 119 countries serving 47 million customers each day. You can click to see the site in Romania, Yugoslavia, and on and on. You can even find a McDonald’s within walking distance when touring a German concentration camp museum.

Dominos
If your doorbell rings when you hit this homepage, it’s the web site making the sound. The nutritional data is a little harder to find here, but it is there if you dig. If you eat more than two slices, don’t forget to multiply the calorie and fat stats. Pizza, if you stay away from meat and heavy cheese toppings, is among the best of the junk foods. This site uised to have some funny stuff, but this week it was a sleeper.

KFC
When it comes to nuggets, nobody has bigger ones than the Colonel. Consumer critics have been up in arms over KFC’s recent advertising campaign that practically calls friend chicken a health food. The web site, in a warm yellow and red, offers what looks like a nifty nutrition calculator. But the thing requires so many steps and is so clunky, that it is all but impossible to use. Meanwhile, the "Calling all Parents" section teaches readers how to become better moms by signing a "pact" to feed their kids portable KFC lunch meals. It’s shameless, but it’s legal.

Taco Bell
Did you know that Taco Bell is part of the YUM family of brands? Neither did I. The Yum family also includes Long John Silvers, A&W Root Beer, Pizza Hut and KFC. Exploring the "Corporate" button on these fast food sites often reveals just how huge the companies are. Then why can’t they make the calorie counters work?

Subway
The subway site seems more interested in selling you a franchise than a sandwich. That’s because the chain seems to be getting the only positive press meted out to the fast food industry. By making health the focus of their marketing, Subway now has 20,442 stores in 72 countries, according to the counter at the top of the web page. Good food, but a dull site – no toys, no clowns, no dancing french fries here.

THE UP SHOT

You can eat a large double BK cheeseburger with fries and a Coke if you like, as long as you don’t take in one additional calorie that day. My wife and I have given up ground beef altogether. Why risk the danger on food that stops your heart? We bought a rice cooker and we’re trying to eat more fish. We’re trying too, with some success, to stay out of all the really big chain eateries. Those who believe the new "healthy" options are viable should check the nutrition data more carefully. Many of those crunchy salads with all those tasty fixins’ have more fat and more calories than a burger and fries.

Muckraking journalist Eric Schlosser advocates that we all eat locally produced foods, stay out of chains and enact a total a total national ban on advertising to children. A movement to ban such ads got off the ground long ago, but was crushed by fast food lobbyists.

In case you’re still hungry, here are a few more facts gleaned directly from Schlosser’s book via his publisher’s web page:

• This year Americans will spend over $110 billion on fast food — more than they'll spend on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined.

• Every day about one quarter of the U.S. population eats fast food.

• The golden arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

• Children often recognize the McDonald's logo before they recognize their own name.

• A typical fast food hamburger contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of cattle.

• Because fast food is so highly processed, much of its flavor is destroyed, so the tastes of most fast food are manufactured at a series of special chemical plants in New Jersey..

• Every day about one quarter of the U.S. population eats fast food.

• The typical teenage boy in the United States now gets about 10 percent of his daily calories from soda.

• The rate of obesity among American children has doubled since the late 1970s.