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July 30, 2014

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Scandal should prompt reflection on what fast food is doing to Chinese diets, culture

IN Chuang Tzu, there was mentioned the feat of “turning something foul and rotten into the rare and ethereal.”

In the wake of the Husi food scandal, I think we can safely credit that fast-food supplier with that transmuting art.

In a small way, the scandal has been helpful to me. In the days just before the expose, I had been under increasing pressure to take my son to another Happy Meal. The incident dealt him a setback probably no less severe than Husi’s absentee owners in America.

I can never fully understand why our children can be so willingly led to the unhealthy trough of junk. In the case of my son, he has been brought up on typical Chinese food prepared by my in-laws, who strictly follow the Confucian injunction about “eating no rice but is of the finest quality, nor meat but is finely minced.”

Their culinary art is widely admired among relatives, but that means little to their grandchildren. More aggravating, in my in-laws’ neighborhood in suburban Shanghai has recently sprung up a cluster of fast-food franchises.

A couple of days ago, my son, who is enthusiastic about the military, gave me a precise rundown of the military ranks from recruits to the general. When he came to colonel, he digressed and made a passing mention of “colonel’s recipe chicken.” I guess rolling these words off his tongue can give him a sort of satisfaction unknown to me.

According to a report last week, the parent company for KFC and Pizza Hut had opened 6,387 outlets in China so far. But that figure probably needs updating everyday given the speed at which burgers, fries and sodas continue to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the Middle Kingdom.

These Golden Arches and other brands have proved irresistible in conquering our national appetite and blighting our landscape. There have been many indictments against the likes of Husi, but I am rather puzzled by their uncanny appeal for kids, or former kids. I am sure that the scandal will put them off burgers and fries for a while, but not long.

The scandal will be much wasted if we fail to see this as a natural outcome of a larger, insidious intent on the part of capitalists to homogenize our life for the sake of profits. With fast food, the real kitchen is Husi’s assembly line, where taste is manufactured, and then delivered to the restaurant already frozen, canned, or dehydrated. The fast-food franchise is where food is heated and provided at short notice.

At Husi, the feat to turn something rotten into cutting-edge is achieved by technology, where chemists and flavorists conspire to conjure up the illusion of perfect taste, with liberal use of additives, frying, and flash freezing.

Homogenizing influence

Thus fast-food chains have grown dependent on Husi. When Shanghai Husi is in trouble, McDonald’s simply turns to Husi in Henan. It will take time for non-Husi entities to master the art.

With the fast-food business now at the vanguard of globalization, it would be limiting to examine the fallout from a single accident while refraining from giving a multi-faceted examination that goes beyond its nutritional facts.

As our landscape is being homogenized, franchised and chained, our next generation is embracing something quintessentially American — call it globalization, or Disneyfication. They have the same, powerful corporate sponsor behind them — the capital.

In the West, fast food giants have been familiar with frequent accusations about their ruthless exploitation of cheap labor, appalling working conditions, or the waste of enormous stretches of range and cropland to supply them.

In China, the indictment rarely goes beyond its nutritional deficiencies. It is high time for us to reflect on failed regulation against the unchecked power of multinational corporations, the false promise of globalization, and the future of China, which depends on the health of our kids.

Industrialization and assembly line cannot but represent a dehumanizing way to feed us. Globalized fast food involves operators and businesses from different countries, where the only thing that brings them together is profit. It is hard to imagine why profit-seekers should resist the temptation to save a cent on a pound of pork or potatoes when they can. In the cutthroat competition, only the most ruthless and most reckless would stay afloat.

Therefore a thorough-going dissection of the fast food industry must necessarily include the threat of fast food to our culture, the spread of obesity on a global scale, and the demise of slow and fine cooking that used to be Chinese.




 

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