I have a friend who grew up in Bengal. When he reached adolescence, instead of sneaking out behind the house to smoke a cigarette, he sneaked out and ate meat. Although his vice was different, the result was the same. He choked and gagged and began to feel ill. Not only that, he was busted. “My mother could tell as soon as I walked in the house,” he said. “She could see it in my face.”
That was almost 30 years ago; this generation of Asian mothers are more accustomed to having their children come home smelling of fried animals. There was an Associated Press photo in the paper a few weeks ago, showing a chubby child in Thailand shoving a hamburger into her mouth with both hands. The wire story said all across Asia, a thousand-year-old tradition of vegetarianism is falling apart, a victim of American fast-food franchises. Overweight kids, stuptified as their stomachs digest all that McDonald’s and KFC stagger through the streets of Bangkok and Bombay.
I’m not a vegetarian, and if anyone, anywhere wants to eat meat, it’s entirely up to them. I’m just sorry for Asia that its primary experience of meat-eating has to be in the guise of fast-food burgers. The reason for all this is the tragedy that drives American corporations: expand or die, keep adding new outlets or your stock takes a plunge.
Consider McDonald’s. McDonald’s has annual sales of $32 billion. It is the world’s largest single buyer of potatoes, chicken and beef and trains more people than the U.S. Army, although the uniforms are equally ugly. They have nearly a thousand restaurants, which they call “stores” in the U.S. alone.
And yet, McDonald’s is in trouble. They’re not growing. Everyone in America is eating all the burgers we can stand, sales are flattening out and mutual fund managers are starting to dump big chunks of McDonald’s stock back onto the market. Expand or die is what drives McDonald’s – and its competitors – but expansion is tough. In the UK, McDonald’s sells 10 million burgers a week in 750 outlets. On the other hand, British beef eaters, in response to mad-cow disease, are becoming vegetarians by the thousand. McDonald’s hurts their own cause in the UK by dispensing two thousand cases of food poisoning annually.
Expand or die drives the junk meal merchants to Asia. Location is everything; put a franchise on every corner so the other guy can’t get there first. The fast food corporations are trekking to Asia on the heels of the tobacco companies, expand or die. The great collaborators in all this are Hollywood and the American dream. Smoking and burger-eating are associated with the west in Asia, with America particularly. It doesn’t matter if the image is a lie; that in reality Americans, like our British cousins, are smoking fewer cigarettes and eating less meat. If anything, those facts only add urgency to the Asian ad campaign.
The model for all this was devised by the British in the early 19th century. British merchants managed a thriving trade in opium, grown in India and sold in China. Chinese officials, as you might expect, were none to happy about foreigners peddling narcotics in their country and England went to war to protect its drug trade.
That was then, this is now. Then it was narcotic opium, now it’s narcotic nicotine and animal fat, which in the long run, may prove more addictive. Things haven’t changed that much at all.
Gastro-Imperialism
I have a friend who grew up in Bengal. When he reached adolescence, instead of sneaking out behind the house to smoke a cigarette, he sneaked out and ate meat. Although his vice was different, the result was the same. He choked and gagged and began to feel ill. Not only that, he was busted. “My mother could tell as soon as I walked in the house,” he said. “She could see it in my face.”
That was almost 30 years ago; this generation of Asian mothers are more accustomed to having their children come home smelling of fried animals. There was an Associated Press photo in the paper a few weeks ago, showing a chubby child in Thailand shoving a hamburger into her mouth with both hands. The wire story said all across Asia, a thousand-year-old tradition of vegetarianism is falling apart, a victim of American fast-food franchises. Overweight kids, stuptified as their stomachs digest all that McDonald’s and KFC stagger through the streets of Bangkok and Bombay.
I’m not a vegetarian, and if anyone, anywhere wants to eat meat, it’s entirely up to them. I’m just sorry for Asia that its primary experience of meat-eating has to be in the guise of fast-food burgers. The reason for all this is the tragedy that drives American corporations: expand or die, keep adding new outlets or your stock takes a plunge.
Consider McDonald’s. McDonald’s has annual sales of $32 billion. It is the world’s largest single buyer of potatoes, chicken and beef and trains more people than the U.S. Army, although the uniforms are equally ugly. They have nearly a thousand restaurants, which they call “stores” in the U.S. alone.
And yet, McDonald’s is in trouble. They’re not growing. Everyone in America is eating all the burgers we can stand, sales are flattening out and mutual fund managers are starting to dump big chunks of McDonald’s stock back onto the market. Expand or die is what drives McDonald’s – and its competitors – but expansion is tough. In the UK, McDonald’s sells 10 million burgers a week in 750 outlets. On the other hand, British beef eaters, in response to mad-cow disease, are becoming vegetarians by the thousand. McDonald’s hurts their own cause in the UK by dispensing two thousand cases of food poisoning annually.
Expand or die drives the junk meal merchants to Asia. Location is everything; put a franchise on every corner so the other guy can’t get there first. The fast food corporations are trekking to Asia on the heels of the tobacco companies, expand or die. The great collaborators in all this are Hollywood and the American dream. Smoking and burger-eating are associated with the west in Asia, with America particularly. It doesn’t matter if the image is a lie; that in reality Americans, like our British cousins, are smoking fewer cigarettes and eating less meat. If anything, those facts only add urgency to the Asian ad campaign.
The model for all this was devised by the British in the early 19th century. British merchants managed a thriving trade in opium, grown in India and sold in China. Chinese officials, as you might expect, were none to happy about foreigners peddling narcotics in their country and England went to war to protect its drug trade.
That was then, this is now. Then it was narcotic opium, now it’s narcotic nicotine and animal fat, which in the long run, may prove more addictive. Things haven’t changed that much at all.
Expand or die. Think about it.