Fast Food Nation: Chapter 6: On the Range Summary & Analysis

Schlosser describes his first meeting with Hank, a rancher in Colorado Springs, who takes Schlosser on a tour of his property. The ranch lies “twenty miles south of town,” and near some of the new developments that have sprung up amid the natural beauty of the Front Range. Hank explains to Schlosser some of his “land management” plans, which include taking into account the “grazing patterns” of buffalo and antelope, who have “lived in the area for millennia.” Hank notes the sharp contrast between this method of land management and the artificial and environmentally-unfriendly housing developments that continue to choke the landscape.

Schlosser describes the arc of the meatpacking business over the course of the last century. At first, around the turn of the 20th century, cattle production, like tobacco and other industries, was consolidated into a nearly nationwide “trust,” a means of creating legal monopolies to control prices and keep profits for business owners high. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act had been passed by Congress in 1890, it took decades for the federal government to dismantle the beef industry’s trust, and encourage open competition among ranchers, which improved their businesses and kept prices lower. This marketplace lasted for about fifty years in the middle of the 20th century.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, however, philosophical changes at the federal level—which became enveloped by the term “deregulation,” and were espoused mostly by Republicans—enabled large agricultural and food businesses (agribusinesses) to consolidate once again. Small ranchers now had relatively few places where they could sell their beef—their profits shrank, those of the agribusinesses rose, and the beef marketplace became far more difficult for ranchers, because it was less competitive. Meatpacking agribusinesses now put ranchers like Hank in a very tough position—making them wonder whether ranching is still possible, or profitable, in the US.

Schlosser notes that this consolidation in beef mimics that which happened in the middle and end of the 20th century in the chicken industry—which was defined, in particular, by the invention of a single, ready-to-eat finger food, the chicken nugget. Fred Turner, the chairman of McDonald’s in 1979, asked suppliers to make a bite-sized, fried chicken bit, and suppliers obliged—in 1983, McDonald’s introduced the Chicken McNugget to great fanfare, “changing not only the American diet but also its system for raising and processing poultry.” A vast majority of chickens in the US, after the nugget, were sold not whole but in parts to suppliers, who ground up the flesh to make the fried morsels.

Schlosser shifts back to the meatpacking industry, and notes that other changes have occurred in the past 30 or so years: cattle are now fed hormones and are thus much larger than in the past, and a system called “captive supplies” is used by meatpackers and slaughterhouses—a way of managing the number of cattle slaughtered at any one time, to keep prices steady. This system makes it extremely difficult, however, for ranchers to make a profit per head of cattle, and though ranchers have sued large meatpackers arguing that these agribusinesses have “fixed” the market in order to ensure their own profits, few rancher lawsuits have been successful. Meatpackers, for their part, say they are trying to save the beef industry, since overall meat consumption in the US has gone down since the 1970s, matched with an increase in the consumption of chicken.

Schlosser closes the chapter by noting the impact of disruption in the ranching economy. Colorado, he states, is losing its “ranching and cowboy culture,” and far more ranches are now owned by gentleman farmers, who look over the land as a conservation project—which is good for the land—but ultimately bad for the non-gentleman farmers who have no other source of income, and who farm not as a retirement practice but as a means of feeding a family. In closing the chapter, Schlosser writes that Hank, the rancher whom he interviewed at the beginning of the chapter, wound up taking his own life, in part because of his difficulty in maintaining his ranch in the face of ongoing development outside Colorado Springs. Although Schlosser does not argue that Hank’s death is entirely attributable to changes in the beef industry, he does write that cattle ranchers have a suicide rate that “is now about three times higher than the national average.”