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INSIGHT

Global Spread of Fast Food

Aired June 1, 2006 - 18:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: Country's around the world are abandoning their favorite traditional foods, turning to faster and foreign fare.
Hello and welcome.

What did you eat today? Is it anything like what your parents would have had or their parents? Our world is changing and our food is changing along with it. Some foods are gaining ground and, as a result, some foods are giving way.

On our program today, not like mother used to make.

We begin with Atika Shubert.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Koichiro Hayashi's family has been farming rice for centuries. His wife works the fields with him and no one in his family could imagine life without rice.

"Rice is necessary in order to live," he says. "It's the food of our childhood."

The Japanese word for rice, gohan, also means meal, and it used to be eaten three times a day, but now Japanese are now eating less and less of this traditional staple.

Japanese consumption of rice has plummeted nearly 50 percent in three decades. What used to be three bowls of rice a day is down to one, but meat consumption has nearly doubled.

Blame it on the fattening of the Japanese wallet. As people got richer, they ate more meat and developed a taste for foreign foods, like the all American hamburger.

Fast food chain Mossburger (ph) is one of the largest franchises in Japan, second only to McDonald's. It offers American fast food with a Japanese twist. Try the teriyaki burger with a green tea shake. But even Mossburger (ph) is concerned about the decline of Japan's favorite grain.

(on camera): Mossburger (ph) was so concerned that Japanese weren't eating enough rice that they developed the rice burger, substituting two grilled patties of rice instead of bread. In fact, one of these has about the equivalent of one small bowl of rice.

(voice-over): Still, rice burgers make up less than 10 percent of sales. Mossburger (ph) is undeterred. Part of a team trying to create a new rice menu is (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

"I think rice will come back. Besides rice burgers, we're now testing rice soup," he says. "There are a lot more choices now. I think that Japanese eating habits and food culture from the past have faded."

But rice is unlikely to disappear from the Japanese menu completely. Even younger diners say they still eat some rice at least once a day.

"I don't think I would be happy if I couldn't eat rice for dinner. I couldn't imagine eating bread for dinner, for example," this diner says. "I suppose rice is the heart of the Japanese people."

Proving there is still a market for new ways to cook an old favorite.

Atika Shubert, CNN, Tokyo.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: In Korea too an old recipe is getting a new look. The traditional dish called kimchi has been served up for centuries, but not like this. There is a new take on an old favorite that is bringing out more wine than dine in younger eaters.

Sohn Jie Ae has a look at that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SOHN JIE AE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Moon Sung-Shil is cooking a popular dish with her three-year-old twins. Spaghetti, with a twist. The main ingredient is chopped kimchi, the hot and spicy dish most closely associated with Korean cuisine. The pungent taste of pickled vegetables doused in a red paste of peppers and garlic and left to ferment for days or even weeks used to be almost an addiction for most Koreans.

The dish is so much of a tradition, there is even a kimchi museum in Seoul. Visitors can learn about the history of kimchi that some say date back thousands of years and reflect on how much the dish has changed.

(on camera): In the days of old Korea, which this manequin clearly represents, all Korean mothers hd to do was make the kimchi and feed it to their children and their kids would eat it. Not the case today.

(Voice-over): Moon Sung-Shil writes cookbooks and runs an interview site that helps mothers entice young kids hooked on hamburgers and pizzas to even try kimchi.

Even as Moon's boys enjoy their kimchi spaghetti, we asked them which they would rather eat: kimchi or sausages.

"Sausages," Po Young (ph) whispers.

Moon says part of the problem is that many of today's housewives work outside the home and have a different approach to kimchi.

"Making kimchi requires a lot of time and effort," she says. "There are many ingredients and the process is complicated, so many young people don't think they need to make it anymore."

Even Moon, a traditionalist, buys her kimchi off the supermarket shelf when she travels. A typical market may carry as many as a dozen different kinds of kimchi.

At this popular kimchi stew restaurant, Korea's changing taste buds are taken into account.

"People today want a clean taste," the owner says. "They don't like spicy, salty food so much anymore."

A milder, gentler kimchi is brewed in a seafood broth and eaten with noodles, or chopped up into egg rolls. As a kimchi purist, Moon's mother- in-law finds all the fuss about kimchi amusing.

"When we were young, we would eat rice with just a bowl of kimchi," she says.

But that would be unthinkable for her grandchildren, who find even kimchi hidden in spaghetti too hot to handle.

Sohn Jie Ae, CNN, Seoul.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Of course, it's not just Asia. We're going to take a break. When we come back, a different continent that is also slowly abandoning its own cuisine.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: Food fight. Farm activist Jose Bove (ph) may be the most famous champion of traditionalist food. He vandalized a McDonalds in the south of France, became a local hero and ultimately an international activist, fighting agribusiness, globalization and genetically modified foods. Bove (ph) is currently considering a run for the French presidency.

Welcome back.

Jose Bovey (ph), with his oversized moustache and a personality to match, may be expressing something a little more vigorously than the rest of us, but aren't there days when you wish your kids were growing up with the same foods that you did? In Spain, that would be what's called the Mediterranean diet, a wholesome menu of fresh produce, beans, cereal, olive oil, fish or meat. But it's losing out, and Spanish youth are now among the most overweight in Europe.

Al Goodman reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AL GOODMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Cleaning sardines hands on, call it fish appreciation class, not needed in the past in fish-loving Spain, but experts say kids here are eating less fish and other wholesome foods and getting fatter.

FRANCISCO GONZALEZ, FISH VENDOR (through translator): We are very worried by this trend. That's why we have these classes.

GOODMAN: At this gourmet food fair, workshops for kids on the Mediterranean diet, Spain's traditional combination of fresh produce, cereals, olive oil, meat and fish. But what do Spanish kids really like to eat?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hamburgers.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pizza.

GOODMAN: And what about this Mediterranean food served on a spoon to make it more appetizing for kids.

Dr. Basilio Moreno studies Spain's lifestyle change and the fast food boom, and he advises the government on battling the costly rise in obesity. Spaniards are increasingly overweight, especially children, who know rank among the most obese in Europe thanks to diet change and not enough exercise.

DR. BASILIO MORENO, OBESITY STUDY GROUP: We're known in Spain for developing a diet that distinguished us from northern Europe in the 1960s, the Mediterranean diet. But in recent years, we've twisted it. We know how to use it, but we don't.

GOODMAN: Burger King and McDonalds have opened nearly 800 restaurants here in the past three decades. Their executives declined interviews on camera, but a spokeswoman said McDonalds is promoting salads and cooperating with the government to fight obesity.

Yet with the lure of fast food and sweets, experts say fewer kids are eating Spain's traditional after school snack, a sandwich of ham or cheese or sausage.

Natalia Alvarez is a doctor who says she's fighting to keep her son on a healthy diet, against the odds.

NATALIA ALVAREZ-BARON, PHYSICIAN AND MOTHER: No, no. We are losing the battle. I am completely convinced.

GOODMAN: Like a growing number of working Spanish women, she doesn't have much time to prepare a Mediterranean diet the way mothers once did.

ALVAREZ: If I didn't work -- if I didn't.

GOODMAN (on camera): (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

ALVAREZ: I'm sure he might eat the easiest thing that he might find, like chips.

GOODMAN (voice-over): Spain's traditional markets have all the ingredients of the Mediterranean diet, but are struggling to retain clients, another indication that Spaniards are straying from their roots.

ANGEL CASTRO, PRODUCE DEALER (through translator): One day we're going to regret not eating enough fruit and vegetable.

GOODMAN: Back at the food fair, Gasper Perez (ph) has an answer. The Mediterranean diet in a bag, precut and peeled, ready to cook.

(on camera): Somebody at home could do this.

GASPER PEREZ (ph), FOOD VENDOR: That's it.

GOODMAN: What is this?

PEREZ (ph): This is a piece of fish with an orange.

GOODMAN: This is edible?

PEREZ (ph): Try it.

GOODMAN (voice-over): Salmon on a spoon. He and others trying to put some sizzle into the Mediterranean diet and regain lost ground.

Al Goodman, CNN, Madrid.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: You are what you eat, but there is more to it than that. Your world is what you eat too. Your food choices influence the economy and politics where you live and ultimately the economy and politics worldwide. Some people are trying to do their part in the kitchen, fighting fast food with slow food.

Joining us now to talk about that is Erika Lesser, executive director of Slow Food USA.

Thanks so much for being with us.

What is the slow food movement?

ERIKA LESSER, SLOW FOOD USA: Well, slow food was originally founded as a protest, but our goal is educational. We were protesting the first McDonalds that was opened in Italy, in front of the Spanish steps in Rome. So in a way you could say that slow food is everything that fast food is not.

MANN: So, is it cuisine? Is it activism? What do you do?

LESSER: Well, we educate our members. We have 80,000 members worldwide. We're really about educating consumers and advocating for small scale food producers around the world. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is show people that food, just like the traditional foods that you're talking about, traditions are things that withstand the test of time, and convenience foods, we haven't seen improvement that way yet, but traditional foods are good, clean and fair, and they are what ensure the future of our planet. So we're really trying to educate consumers and just get people to reconnect with where their food comes from.

MANN: So, this is beyond nutrition. This is environmentalism of a kind.

LESSER: Absolutely. I mean, if you want to get really philosophical about it, and we are very -- we have some very strong philosophical underpinnings -- it's really about the future of the planet. Not just in terms of the environment, but preserving our cultural identity and understanding that food is the most central thing that we have in our lives. If we don't continue to value it and to recognize its place, then we will be extinct.

MANN: People listening to this are going to think that we're all taking this much too seriously. A cheeseburger is just a cheeseburger. It doesn't really hold the future of the earth between the bun.

LESSER: Well, I mean, it's easy to draw that conclusion, but the fact is that food is what sustains us from the beginning to the end, and the fact that we just don't understand what a cheeseburger is made of and where it comes from shows just how disconnected we are as people and as our society from food, because food is agriculture. It comes from the planet. It's nature transformed so that we can eat it and survive another day.

MANN: So, what would you tell people to actually do? Real people with real lives, how can they make a difference?

LESSER: Well, it's very simple, actually. I think that it starts with asking yourself the question, where does my food come from, and start tracing it back. It comes from going to a farmers' market or asking the question of the manager of your supermarket, where does this produce come from? How many miles did it travel to get here? And once you start attaching a face and a story to the food that you're eating, then people become curious. And I've seen this in people of all ages, kids and adults alike, that once they start learning about their food, then they start to think about the choices they're making, and they think, well, I want to eat something that's local, I want to eat something that's seasonal. Think how good corn and tomatoes are in August and how excited people are for apples in the fall. To reclaim some of that pleasure and that joy from food is in and of itself, I think, very satisfying.

MANN: You mentioned kids, so let me bring us back to the correspondents who have been reporting for us on this program. They showed us adult after adult complaining that the real problem is with their kids. Adults who know how to eat well can't convince their kids to follow them.

LESSER: It's true, you know, and I think that there is an underlying cause there that parents are aware of but they don't -- they haven't yet assigned responsibility for it. But think about what kids are being educated by? It's advertising. It's not the parents anymore, it's not the grandparents cooking at home. It's not an extended family or a tight knit community, even, that's teaching values about food from the beginning.

If anything in this country the only place that good education about food is, where it's happening, is in the school system.

MANN: Erika Lesser, of Slow Food USA, thanks very much.

LESSER: Thank you.

MANN: We take a break. When we come back, back to fast food and its seemingly inexorable advance and more on this country, food in the United States.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MANN: Among the movies making their premiers at the Cannes Film Festival this year was one you may not have heard of. It's called "Fast Food Nation," based on a book of the same name, an exhaustively researched indictment of the American franchise restaurant industry. The industry is already responding with a campaign of its own called "Best Food Nation," taking the threat very seriously.

Welcome back.

The economic and cultural power of American fast food is greatest at home, in the United States. The industry boasts that nearly half of the entire adult population of the United States has worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. More and more restaurant workers, but get this, fewer and fewer cooks. The United States is one of many industrialized countries where the actual skills needed to prepare food in the home are in sharp decline.

The United States is not immune from any of what we've heard about in this program. It is also losing its traditional ways of eating.

We got in touch with Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation," to talk about that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ERIC SCHLOSSER, AUTHOR: Well, I think U.S. eating habits have changed profoundly in the last 30 years, mainly due to the rise of the fast food industry, and the foods that we eat in the United States look very similar to the ones that we've eaten for generations, but they're fundamentally different. They're industrial commodities. And in the same way that the industrialization of food has happened in the United States, we're now exporting this system throughout the world.

MANN: So, it's in fact hidden or you might say more insidious than what we're seeing elsewhere, because on the surface it doesn't look different.

SCHLOSSER: Absolutely. I mean, a hamburger that you get at a fast food restaurant looks much like a hamburger of 20 or 30 years ago, but they're prepared in a completely different way. And when it comes to the french fries, they're prepared in a different way. The kinds of cooking oils, the production methods, the way that livestock are being handled. There's been a real transformation of agriculture in the last 30 years and the portion sizes are bigger, the calorie count, the fat, et cetera, et cetera. We are talking about the advent of a whole new type of industrialized food.

MANN: Is that a bad thing?

SCHLOSSER: Well, there are some good parts about it. When you think of American fast food, it's inexpensive, it's inconvenient, a lot of it taste very good. But then when you look at the health impacts in the United States, there has been an enormous rise of obesity, particularly among children in the United States. So there is a cost to this food system that doesn't always show up on the menu.

MANN: Is part of what we're seeing -- and you talk about it in industrial terms -- is part of what we're seeing literally a redistribution of labor? The inevitable consequence of the fact that women are not forced to work in the home anymore, many of them are working outside the home, and so more people have to eat outside of the home. And from that perspective, basically an unintended consequence, a good thing, that women can work and live in many more contexts now.

SCHLOSSER: Well, if you look in the United States, when the fast food industry really began to grow in the early 1970s, it was when women were entering the workforce in large numbers for the first time.

Unfortunately, they were entering the workforce not because of feminism, like "Murphy Brown." They were entering the workforce because wages were dropping so much that women had to in order to help support the family.

So the fast food industry stepped in to provide inexpensive and convenient meals, and I've got nothing against food that's inexpensive. It's what the food is. And if you look at the traditional -- the most common fast food meal in the United States, it tends to be very high in calories, high in fat, high in salt, high in sugar, and if you eat a lot of it, it's the perfect food for making you unhealthy.

MANN: Let me try to give this another optimistic spin, which is that somehow, through some kind of alchemy, the U.S. food industry has discovered a kind of food that everyone around the world likes and didn't previously have access to, and that having discovered this wondrous food, all we're seeing now is that people in societies that are growing increasingly affluent find that they have the same tastes that people in traditionally affluent societies have, which is to say people around the world find out that a lot of people like to eat like Americans, not just Americans.

SCHLOSSER: There is no question that this food tastes good. I like the taste of most of this fast food. But this taste comes at a price. And as these countries adopt an American diet, they also develop many of America's diseases. Cardiovascular diseases. There is an obesity epidemic in Japan. There is an obesity epidemic among children in China. I'm talking to you from Great Britain, where the obesity rate has tripled -- tripled in the last 20 years as the diet has changed.

And I don't blame McDonalds for all of this. It's not as simple as that. But when you look at the food that we're exporting and how it's made and how it's processed, I think the food is one of the major contributors.

MANN: Is it just the United States that is exporting its food? Or are there two trends happening at the same time? U.S. cultural expansion, U.S. cuisine expansion, coupled with global cultural exchange, so that we see a lot of Turkish fast food in Germany, we see Indian fast food in England. It's not just the United States, is it?

SCHLOSSER: It's not, and I mean, I'm all in favor of cities having as many different kinds of restaurants as possible. I mean, I grew up in New York City, and it's the diversity of cuisine there that makes it one of the great things about being in that city.

But, still, when we're talking about the major changes in world diet, it is the American diet, which tends to be very meat-based. If you look at the increase in meat production in China, it's just astronomical. And there are all kinds of problems, not just health problems, you know, linked to obesity, but avian influenza absolutely is connected to wide scale poultry production now in Thailand and Vietnam and China that never was going on before.

So, I'm not being simplistically anti-American. I love hamburgers and fries. But when you want to look at the spread of this processed industrial food, it comes as a cost.

MANN: There is a backlash against this in the United States. A lot of Americans, even American restaurant chains, are trying to find healthier ways to feed their customers. A lot of people around the world are quite violently targeting American fast food chains. But when you look long term, is there any stopping this, do you think?

SCHLOSSER: I think there is, and I totally oppose any kind of anti- Americanism that targets these fast food chains. No one is forcing people to go to McDonalds in Shanghai or London, and what needs to happen is there needs to be a greater awareness about food and a greater emphasis on freshly prepared food, more fruits and vegetables, less saturated fats and less of this heavily processed food, and I think as people become more aware of the dangers of a diet that is too dependent on friend chicken or too dependent on hamburgers, there will be changes in the foods that these companies sell.

MANN: Eric Schlosser, the book is "Fast Food Nation," the new movie is "Fast Food Nation." Thanks so much for talking with us.

SCHLOSSER: Thanks for having me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MANN: Fast food, slow food, changing food. That's INSIGHT. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.

END

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