What’s In Your Burger?

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / December 2006 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

Director Richard Linklater, whose films include “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” has taken the 2001 non-fiction book, “Fast Food Nation,” by Eric Schlosser and, along with Schlosser, turned it into a dramatic film. They felt that this type of film rather than a documentary would reach a larger audience.

Both book and film give readers and audiences a shocking, behind-the-scenes look into what goes into the burgers served by the ubiquitous, multibillion-dollar fast-food industry (I confess I haven’t read the book).

“Fast Food Nation” boasts a stellar cast from Patricia Arquette and Greg Kinnear to Bruce Willis, and others. The film not only makes a statement about the fast food industry; it also goes into the issue of U.S. exploitation of undocumented immigrants.

Early on, there’s a scene of a coyote bringing men and women with children across the border from Mexico through the desert. Later, we see a man who was separated from the group staggering shirtless around the parched land. Towards the end of the film we find a clue to his fate when a boy finds the man’s shoe lying in the desert.

The immigrants end up working for UMP, a meatpacking plant in Cody, Colorado—no questions asked as to their legal status. UMP provides cow meat (actually, end products, scraps) for Mickey’s hamburgers. On the surface, the place looks absolutely pristine, sterile, everything either white or gleaming stainless steel—yet the workers know it is crawling with rats.

Danny Cannavale plays Mike, a sleazy, womanizing assembly-line supervisor who makes out with vulnerable, lonely immigrant women in his pickup truck who have come to him with grievances. They fall in love with him, only to be tossed aside like, well, useless pieces of meat.

Amazingly, Linklater was allowed to film inside a real slaughterhouse (actually in Mexico). His movie doesn’t stint on footage of terrified cattle, eyes bulging with fear, being herded and prodded along narrow chutes. They are electronically stunned, chained, and hoisted by their hind legs.

Workers, dressed in white from head to boots, methodically slit the animal’s throats as they jerk along on the chain. Blood gushes out on to the floor and runs in gutters like rivers. Though grisly, I have to admit I found the process disgustingly fascinating.

An unsettling shot shows a cart full of severed, skinned, dehorned cow heads. What will happen to them? Will they be dumped—or eaten?

The film hinges on Greg Kinnear, who plays Don Anderson, a product-development manager for Mickey’s, a fast food chain that Linklater uses as a not-so-subtle take on McDonald’s. In fact, in some scenes, the “golden arches” of Mickey’s rival are plainly visible in the background.

At a board meeting, a member brings up a rumor that tests of the meat in Mickey’s Big Ones burgers bear traces of cow shit that might contain the e-coli bacteria—which could kill young children and the elderly. Anderson sets out for Cody to investigate.

He stays at a no-frills motel in the middle of the stockyards, crosses the two-lane highway for dinner at a Mickey’s, where Esai Morales plays Tony, the manager. Anderson feels out the counterpersons, Amber (Ashley Johnson) and butter-fingers Brian (Paul Dano)—who drops a frozen patty on the floor, blithely picks it up, and slaps it on the grill. Both figure later as animal activists, and Amber, in a wonderful, stereotypical employee-boss scene with Tony, quits her job.

We meet a grizzled, wealthy cattle baron, Rudy (Kris Kristofferson), who lives in a spacious ranch house. He used to be a manager for UMP and now sells cattle to Mickey’s. Here the film introduces yet another capitalist endeavor besides the globalization of the fast-food industry: urban encroachment and the buying up of private land to build strip malls.

Rudy contends that if he doesn’t sell, he’ll end up like the dead bodies he finds dumped on his land; he rants on that the country is being taken over by machines and science fiction.

Rudy explains plausibly how shit can get into meat, and sends Anderson to Harry (Bruce Willis, unforgettable in a small scene in a Sizzler-like restaurant), who is the “middle-man” supplier of UMP meat to the Mickey’s chain. But Harry brushes off Anderson’s concerns about shit in the burgers, saying, “We all have to eat a little shit from time to time. Cars kill 40,000 people a year.”

Meanwhile, Amber, inspired by her activist, Vietnam vet uncle (Ethan Hawke), and Brian, along with several other young activists, form an informal animal-rights group. All decide to save the cattle from ending up as Mickey’s Big Ones. Their efforts fail not because they didn’t try, but because the cattle wouldn’t cooperate.

Don Anderson goes back to work with nothing to report. We see him in a final scene at a board meeting introducing yet another burger innovation. If the film inspires some theatergoers to become political activists (and/or vegetarians), it’s done its done.