Fast Food Nation: Chapter 5: Why the Fries Taste Good Summary & Analysis

Schlosser traces the life story of another figure, one of the most famous and richest men in the state of Idaho—J. R. Simplot, whose potato empire would go on to change the ways potatoes were consumed in the US. Simplot was born in Iowa in 1909, and as a young man worked for a landlord named Lindsay Maggart, and the two of them, in 1928, purchased what was then a new invention, an “electric potato sorter” capable of sifting through vast numbers of potatoes at one time, arranging them by size, and ensuring more even and efficient slicing and packaging of potatoes. Simplot and Maggart purchased the machine together, and when they decided to part ways in business, they were unable to purchase another expensive sorter, so that each could have one. Thus, they decided to have a coin flip for the electric sorter—which Simplot won, a first instance of good luck that was to follow him throughout his career.

The J. R. Simplot Company went on to also develop, just before the Second World War, a “method for drying potatoes,” and these dehydrated potatoes became essential to army rations throughout the campaigns in the Pacific and in Europe. In 1953, Simplot “began selling frozen, pre-cut french fries” directly to consumers, and by the 1960s, Ray Kroc began buying Simplot’s frozen fries, since they tasted nearly similar to the fresh-cut variety in stores, and were vastly cheaper and “more uniform.” Simplot became a multibillionaire, though he “still ate at McDonald’s,” and his company grew—influencing American eating habits along the way. Simplot diversified his company into ranching and related concerns, without abandoning his core business in potatoes.

Today, three potato companies—Simplot, Lamb Weston, and McCain—“control about 80 percent of the American market for frozen french fries, having eliminated or acquired most of their small rivals.” Although farm groups like the Potato Growers of Idaho (PGI) do their best to represent the interests of small farmers, even as those farms are often bought up and managed by the conglomerates, Schlosser notes that, at the time of his writing, there are only 1,100 independent potato farmers remaining in Idaho, despite that state’s reliance on the crop as the bedrock of its economy.

Schlosser believes that potato farmers in Idaho, who hope to sell their crops to one of the large potato corporations, have fallen under the sway of what he terms “the fallacy of composition,” “a mistaken belief that what seems good for an individual will still be good when others do the same thing.” This fallacy has encouraged growers to spend enormously on every new invention and efficiency technology they can. However, when other farmers do the same, everyone produces more potatoes and the profit margin for potatoes goes down even more—thus making it even more difficult to generate enough income to sustain a living farming the crop.

Schlosser writes that McDonald’s fries used to be made in beef tallow, giving them a taste that many customers raved about. But since1990 the fries have been made in less expensive “pure vegetable oil.” To maintain their characteristic flavor, they are then treated with “natural flavors,” which themselves are chemicals made in laboratories (most of them in New Jersey) specializing in developing flavors and scents used across the US food industry.

Schlosser visits several plants where flavors and scents are made, and reports on what he sees. One company, International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), has, like others at the top of the field, reduced the science of tasting and aroma to the “smell of gases being released by the chemicals you’ve just put in your mouth.” IFF researchers help to create the characteristic tastes—sweet, spicy, fatty, salty—that “enhance” many of the foods we consume—although flavor companies (themselves a field valued at over 1 billion dollars) are not required to “disclose the ingredients of their additives . . . as long as they are ‘Generally Regarded as Safe.’” This means, in practice, that flavor companies like IFF have wide latitude over what they put in the natural flavorings that go into the foods many Americans eat.

Schlosser notes, with some irony, that the line between “artificial” and “natural” flavors can often be quite thin—or, even, impossible to see. As Schlosser explains, in theory, “artificial” flavors are those synthesized in a lab—built “from scratch” by combining different molecules and arriving at a certain taste and smell. “Natural” flavors, again in theory, are those organic compounds derived from the breaking-down or recombining of other compounds already found in a given “natural” or organic product—such as an apricot. In practice, however, a flavor is always a combination of chemicals—and whether that combination is synthesized in a lab or derived from an apricot makes no difference at all, biologically or scientifically. Despite this, because “natural” flavors sound better to consumers—and healthier, although they are exactly the same as “artificial” counterparts—agribusinesses try to include as many natural flavors as possible in their food products.

Schlosser closes the chapter with his description of a tour of a potato factory in American Falls, Idaho, which is one of the “biggest fry factories in the world” and a supplier for McDonald’s. Schlosser notes that, even though he understands and has seen the complex machine processes that sort, cut, and place the fries, flash frozen, and ready for consumption, in a warehouse, he nevertheless marvels at the delicious taste of the fries—which a worker guiding him through the plant provides him, at the end of his visit, on a plate with salt and ketchup. Although Schlosser writes that the fries seem “wildly out of place in this laboratory setting, this surreal food factory with its computer screens, digital readouts, and shiny steel platforms...,” he notes that the fries “were delicious,” and that he “asked for more.”