Social Theory & Health, 2008, 6, (309–322) r 2008 Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved. 1477-8211/08

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Fast Cars/Fast Foods: Hyperconsumption and its Health and Environmental Consequences PETER FREUND & GEORGE MARTIN Sociology Department, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. E-mail: [email protected] The historical and structural connections between auto-centered transport and fast food franchising are analyzed as comprising a synergistic contemporary mode of consumption. It is a mode that is rooted in individualized, private convenience, and it is implicated in a number of growing public health and environmental problems, including obesity and climate change. Emerging in the US after World War I, this mode of consumption, ‘fast cars/fast foods,’ developed rapidly after World War II, based on the application of mass production techniques to food, and in the development of the Interstate highway system. The analysis suggests that this mode of consumption is associated with a particular socio-material landscape, motorized urban sprawl, and that both promote hyperconsumption. Social Theory & Health (2008) 6, 309–322. doi:10.1057/sth.2008.10

Keywords: hyperconsumption; mode of consumption; consumption practices; unhealthy environments; social ecology of risk; social organization of space

INTRODUCTION Our purpose is to examine some relationships among consumption, public health, and the environment. In contrast to postmodern takes on consumption, which focus on symbolic meanings, we emphasize its socio-material aspects (Lodziak, 2002). Contemporary capitalism promotes an intensified level of highly individualized consumption–a hyperconsumption. Two sectors of this hyperconsumption in daily life are our focus: transport and eating, or ‘fast cars/fast foods.’ In transport, mass automobilization fosters over-driving and more geographic sprawl in the built environments of human settlements. In

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cuisine, the mass marketing of fast foods and super-sized meals promotes over-eating. Of course, fast foods have been common around the world for a long time; the local ‘street foods’ of cities are an example. Cars also have been commonplace for a good while, as the traffic on city streets indicates. What is relatively new and is becoming universal is mass-produced, corporate-based fast food (which has come to represent all fast food in the public imagination) and the synergy it has with the auto-centered transport systems of sprawling suburbs and exurbs in the developed world, especially in the US. The hyperconsumption of cars and foods adds significantly to the ecological impact of human activity, and contributes to naturalizing a way of life whose products include both unhealthy environments and people. Unhealthy environments are reflected in the fouling of the ambient air, the loss of green space, and the threat of global climate change. Public health problems are reflected in roadway injuries and fatalities, increasing levels of obesity, and toxic emissions. The hyperconsumption of cars and fast foods interact to reduce physical activity, and at the same time, to increase food intake. Sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and super-sized meals, linked through the facility of drive-in and drive-through restaurants, are the US icons of this hyperconsumption. Increasingly, personal car transport systems and franchised convenience food chains characterize developed nations and they are becoming global. One author discovered a tiny McDonald’s franchise in one of Rio de Janeiro’s notoriously poor favelas, Rocinho, in 2004. This globalization is analyzed in Freund and Martin (1996) and Martin (2005). The purpose of this essay is to analyze fast cars/fast foods as part of a mode of consumption in developed countries and to theorize its relationship to the social organization of space and time, on the one hand, and to environmental integrity and public health, on the other.

MODE OF CONSUMPTION The literature on consumption can be sorted among four perspectives: conventional economic, political economic, biological/evolutionary, and cultural (Jackson, 2003). In the latter perspective, consumption is seen in terms of its symbolic meaning and it is a key feature of postmodernist studies of identity. Here, we are interested in the role that transport and foodfranchising systems play in shaping the social ecology of daily life, as well as the role they play in political economies. Additionally, rather than focusing on individual consumers, our emphasis is on consumption practices – how they Social Theory & Health

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are socially organized and ‘how moments of consumption are conjoined’ (Jackson, 2004, 173). We use the concept, mode of consumption, to capture both the sociomaterial organization of consumption and its particular consumption practices. The mode of consumption is analyzed in terms of two commodities, cars and food. Use of the personal car and fast food are widespread and growing consumption practices in developed nations. Autocentered transport and fast-food franchising systems structure these practices through a coherent mode of consumption, which is highly individualized and privatized, and reflects the contemporary speed-up in the social organization of space and time (see Harvey, 1989). Once it is developed, a mode of consumption ensures a continuity of consumer demand, aided by the marketing of commodity obsolescence and status niches. One function of this mode of consumption, once sedimented, is to assure its own reproduction by fostering a consumer dependence on it, a dependence that is created at both the social and material levels. Aglietta (1979) posits that modes of consumption and the consumption norms they materialize serve as the means of regulating the capitalist economy. In essence, this is regulation through a stimulation of consumption that is crystallized in the socio-material forms of specific commodities and practices. For Aglietta, the dominant consumption items in the contemporary capitalist economy are the single-family home and the personal car, the two largest expenditures in household budgets. Based on the 20th century development of Fordist production techniques, these commodities remain dominant today and their consumption continues to grow. They have become prime drivers in the development of motorized urban sprawl and auto social formations in the US (Martin, 2002). Here, we focus on fast cars/fast foods and leave the subject of single-family housing to others (see Rome, 2001). We view hyperconsumption of fast cars/fast foods as a leitmotif of the mode of consumption in the US today. The rise of automobility fostered the development of fast food, through the facility of roadside drive-in and drive-through eating establishments (Jakle and Scully, 1999). Historically, the diffusion of the car led to the emergence of the first drive-in restaurants between the World Wars in the US. By the late 1940s and 1950s both use of the car and fast food establishments began to proliferate (Agger, 2004, 12). By 1968, McDonalds alone operated 1,000 restaurants in the US; in 2000, it had over 28,000 restaurants worldwide (Schlosser, 2001, 14). The post-World War II application of Fordist assembly line techniques to the restaurant business led to the development of franchised drive-in and drive-through fast foods. These techniques included the mass production of Social Theory & Health

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pre-assembled, standardized food modules (ie hamburgers) for subsequent cooking or warming on site. This technique is reminiscent of the massproduced pre-fabricated houses that appeared in the US in the same era. Today, fast cars and fast foods are linked in many ways; it could be said that when one coughs, the other gets a cold. For example, the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent shockwaves not only through the automotive industry in the US, but also through the fast food industry as well. While fast food franchises are now sited on city sidewalks on a walk-in basis, the great majority remain drive-in and drive-through facilities. Fast cars/fast foods have become consumption norms. In the US, driving a car and eating fast food have become for many people a practical reality, if not a necessity. One author has driven through settlements in the US where the only dining establishments are fast-food franchises; in a Kansas town on Interstate 70, the major crossroads had on each of its four corners a McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, and Taco Bell. The normalization and routinization of fast cars and fast foods have been incorporated into the habitus of everyday life (Bourdieu, 1977). The personal car has come to be experienced as the dominant, indeed the only available, form of transport as its use has eclipsed alternatives and shaped sociomaterial space and temporal rhythms (Freund and Martin, 1993). In similar fashion, fast-food outlets have become ubiquitous in the US, often forcing local restaurants out of business on the strength of their mass marketing and economies of scale. As the consumption norms of fast cars/fast foods are realized, a socially organized system of space and time becomes embedded. Thus, in the US recent generations of consumers have developed a habitus. Early food memories (along with generous helpings of fat and sugar) have helped to sediment it and, in turn, it shapes food preferences. This habitus, along with a ‘McDonaldized’ landscape, helps to drive to the hyperconsumption of fast food (Ritzer, 2000).

THE HYPERCONSUMPTION OF CARS AND FOODS Hyperconsumption exists on two related levels: There is speeded-up consumption (a matter of pace) and there is greater consumption (a matter of intensity). In the case of transport it takes the form of hyperautomobility (see Martin, 1999). In the case of fast food, it takes the form of hypereating, based on the saturation of the space and time of settlements with generic establishments that promote super-sized and often un-nutritious meals. Hyperautomobility is reflected in accelerating individualized car use in the US. This car use is both extensive (in that it spreads across motorized Social Theory & Health

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urban sprawl) and intensive (in that larger vehicles are driven more miles with fewer occupants). Thus, while the number of vehicles per household in the US increased by a modest 6% between 1983 and 1995, the number of trips increased by 56%, the average length of trips by 15%, and the average number of occupants declined by 9% (USDP, 1995). Hyperautomobility has developed on a socio-material platform – the vast Interstate highway system that was built in the US after the 1950s (see Lewis, 1997). In addition to heightened motoring, there has been a substantial increase in US food consumption. Much of this increase is in the form of fast foods. A little more than a generation ago, three quarters of the money used to buy food was used to prepare meals at home. Today about half that money is spent eating out, mainly in fast food establishments (Schlosser, 2001, 4). There have been concurrent increases in food intake and fast food intake in the last decade. Americans eat 200 calories more food energy per day than they did 10 years ago. On any given day, 30% of American children aged 4 to 19 eat fast food. Overall, 7% of the US population visits McDonald’s each day, and 20%–25% eat in some kind of fast food establishment (Borger, 2005, 3).

There are many kinds of fast food establishments. Jakle and Scully (1999), for instance, studied hamburger, ice cream, sandwich, pizza, taco, chicken, steak, and breakfast places. These sites saturate landscapes, seeping into the capillaries of space and time. Thriving in auto-centered space, they are in harmony with the age of car convenience. The nexus of fast cars and fast foods has been reproduced in many spaces in the US. Its social organization of space and time is best illustrated in the development of a generic low-density urbanized settlement sprawl, and nowhere is this more evident to the eye than in the landscapes of Los Angeles (LA) and the rest of Southern California (SoCal). LA, or SoCal, has become a prototype of landscapes and space-time rhythms shaped by fast cars/fast foods consumption practices. It is not where super-sized highways and meals began but it is where they have reached their greatest intensity and scale. SoCal’s roadside retail food stands are a central motif of its vernacular art and culture; indeed, it has come to be known as a ‘car culture.’ Advertising has played a role in the ascendance of the fast cars/fast foods mode of consumption. Gudis (2004, 1) notes that ‘the highway has become the buyway’ in her analysis of the development of billboards, in which SoCal plays a prominent role. Schlosser (2001, 60) observes the region’s homogenized signage and landscapes: Every few miles, clusters of fast food joints seem to repeat themselves, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, Subways, Pizza Huts, and Taco Bells, they Social Theory & Health

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keep appearing along the road, the same buildings and signage replaying like a tape loop. You can drive for twenty minutes, pass another fast food cluster, and feel like you’ve gotten nowhere.

Agger (2004, 112) comments on the synergy that developed between fast cars and fast foods consumption in SoCal: Why fast food? From the establishment of the McDonald’s chain, which began as a single restaurant in the San Bernardino Valley during the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was an inextricable link between fast food and fast cars. There was also a link between working and eating. Henry Ford made affordable automobiles available to Americans, and President Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the development of an interstate highway system. By the late 1940s, Americans had begun to use cars to fill leisure time, as well as for commuting.

While SoCal may remain the archetype of this kind of landscape, it is replicated in many parts of the US, especially in the sprawling suburbs and exurbs of its Sunbelt (south and west), and in small towns that lie beside major highways. Such spaces are car and franchised food saturated.

THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF FAST CARS/FAST FOODS Hyperconsumption of cars and fast foods intensifies the ecological footprint of human activity. The ecological footprint is an accounting device to measure consumption relative to productive land (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). Thus, for the average Canadian in 1991, the per capita footprint of the energy required for car driving was 8.6 times that required for powering public transport. The key factors in the intensified ecological footprint of fast cars/fast foods are the high levels of energy and land consumption of both. The level of energy consumption of cars in the US is, frankly, astounding. They account for about one-third of its total energy use. ‘The total distance traveled by Americans exceeds that of all other industrial nations combined – not only because the country is larger, but also because Americans opt to drive when others bike or walk’ (Sawin, 2004, 28). Fast food is also transport energy intensive. A hidden ecological cost of contemporary food production and consumption is calculated in ‘food miles.’ Thus according to one estimate, consumers in Britain average 898 miles per year; 95% of fruit and 50% of vegetables come from abroad (Guardian Weekly, 2005). Fast food consumption is predicated on the transport of food Social Theory & Health

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from production sites to distribution sites and then on to retail outlets, as well as on individual patrons driving their cars. Virtually all of this food transport is by road. Because of the enormous travel of both consumers and their food, the per capita energy uptake of this mode of consumption leaves a very large footprint. In addition, the industrial agriculture used in the supply chains of fast food corporations is resource and energy intensive. Finally, there are addons to the fast foods ecological footprint, such as its heavy use of packaging materials. A salient impact of the fast cars/fast foods mode of consumption on the Earth’s resources is on land space, which it devours in large portions. The car is a greedy user of land. Its operation requires multiple and dedicated sites (Martin, 2002). This means that a car demands several allocated spaces – at home, at work, at malls, and, of course, at fast food establishments – that are not compatible with other uses. Cars use more land than other forms of mobility by large multiples. The per capita land take for car travel is 10 times that by bus, 13 times that by bicycle, 17 times that by train, and 60 times that by foot. In cities with high sprawl the auto commands the bulk of available land. In LA, over 60% of land space is devoted to moving, storing, servicing, supplying, selling, and trashing the car. Drive-in and drive-through fast food franchises are a key element in this intensive land consumption, in the space used by thousands of establishments and their car lots. The ecological footprints of fast cars/fast foods reflect a monoculture that is based on a particular mode of transport and of food consumption. It is through these consumer practices and their social organization of time and space that we can view their impacts on environmental integrity and public health.

UNHEALTHY ENVIRONMENTS AND PEOPLE In addition to environmental impacts such as pollution, hyperautomobility has specific negative impacts for sub-groups within society, including the very young and very old, and people with disabilities. This is the social ecological deficit of hyperautomobility, and it is generally referred to in terms of environmental injustice or transport injustice (see Bullard and Johnson, 1997). The social ecology of risk means that individual vulnerabilities are related to spatial and social inequalities. Residence, as well as social class, gender, race-ethnicity, age, and disability status, factor into determining risk. Thus, while mass motorization has led to greater mobility for many people it has also created accessibility problems for others. Social Theory & Health

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Of course, the direst and most immediate public health impact of auto mobility is through deaths and injuries from roadway accidents. In the US, the annual death toll ranges from 30,000 to 40,000 lives. Worldwide deaths due to roadway mishaps are currently put at somewhat over a million persons per year. While deaths have stabilized (at unacceptable levels) in developed nations, they are rising in developing nations (WHO, 2003). None of the health issues associated with a fast cars/fast foods mode of consumption is more topical than the recent emergence of obesity as a major public health problem. Obesity is a prime example of ‘diseases of consumption,’ which have grown in recent decades (see Gardner et al., 2004, 17). The diseases flowing from smoking are another example. Reidpath et al. (2002) suggest that there are identifiable milieus that are associated with obesity. These are obesogenic environments, which encourage food consumption and discourage physical activity. We suggest that the environments of fast cars/fast foods are prime examples. Auto-hegemonic spaces discourage walking and cycling. In recent years, concurrent with the rise of hyperautomobility, there has been a further decrease of walking in the US. The time squeeze experienced by many workers today (Schor, 1992) has further disengaged fitness-enhancing use of the body from its sensual and organic integument. Increasingly, physical exercise is confined to workouts in specialized facilities. The time available for everyday exercise and for playful uses of the body has shrunk. The decline of walking is about the lack of space in which to walk, but it is also about the lack of time y the disappearance of that musing, unstructured space in which so much thinking, courting, daydreaming, and seeing has transpired (Solnit, 2002, 259)

Unstructured time has been compressed into the tiny lacunae of free time: time that is not saturated by production or consumption disciplines. This time squeeze is aggravated by car-hegemonic organizations of movement and eating space, particularly in their tendency to disperse and to sever activity sites (Freund and Martin, 2004). The decline in walking and the rise in motoring may be having a significant impact upon public health. Between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, the share of children in the US who were overweight grew from 6% to 14%, as the proportion of their trips by foot declined from 16% to 10%. The connection between decreasing walking and increasing weight is supported by a study that found fewer people were overweight in local places where people walked more, a relationship that stood after controlling for age, race, and income (STPP, 2000, 18). Social Theory & Health

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A critical socio-spatial link between lack of walking (and cycling) and obesity is motorized urban sprawl, in which the car is the only viable means of daily transport. A national study in the US confirmed this link: Regardless of gender, age, education levels, and smoking and eating habits, the odds of being obese were higher in more sprawling counties. The odds that a county resident will be obese rises ten percent with every 50-point increase in the degree of sprawl (McCann and Ewing, 2003, 15).

Car-friendly sprawl discourages physical exercise. Denser settlements provide easier access to community recreational facilities as well as walkerfriendly neighborhoods that are associated with high activity levels (King et al., 2003, 74). The fast cars/fast foods mode of consumption, a socio-material construct, has biological implications. The biological bases of increased obesity are grounded in changed energy ratios, in which more calories are put into less active bodies (Crossley, 2004). Schlosser (2001, 240) has commented on the obesity-lifestyle connection in the US: Although the current rise in obesity has a number of complex causes, genetics is not one of them. The American gene pool has not changed radically in the past few decades. What has changed is the nation’s way of eating and living. In simple terms: when people eat more and move less, they get fat. In the United States, people have become increasingly sedentary – driving to work instead of walking, performing little manual labor, driving to do errands, watching television, playing video games, and using a computer instead of exercising.

The fast cars/fast foods/obesity connection has become part of professional discourses. Thus, the American Medical Association attributes increased obesity rates to people eating more and walking less, noting that car trips have replaced many trips that used to be made on foot or bicycle (Koplan and Dietz, 1999, 1,579). While the ‘obesity epidemic’ (and its associated moral panic) is identified with the US, there is some indication that it is appearing in other developed nations with high levels of car and fast food use. For example, the proportion of obese Britons rose from 7% in 1980 to 20% in 1999. A study by the British Heart Foundation found that between 1986 and 1996 the proportion of children walking to school fell from 59% to 49%, while car trips to school almost doubled, to 30%. In the same period, there were noticeable increases in sedentary time for children, and increases in their obesity levels (BHF, 2000). Social Theory & Health

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There is an implicit assumption in health promotion and obesity discourses that health behavior is an individual affair determined by personal choice and knowledge. Structural factors are, at best, background factors. We argue that the spatial and temporal consequences of the fast cars/foods mode of consumption are significant on a general level in society. Moreover, they also have specific social ecological implications. Thus, one study has found that eating habits are influenced by such factors as access to supermarkets. In the US, only 8% of African–American neighborhoods have ready access to at least one supermarket, while 31% of white neighborhoods do. Others have written about how class and race influence neighborhood characteristics, including how much access there is to healthy food (Duenwald, 2002). Lappe´ (2003, 89) argues that part of understanding patterns of food consumption is a consideration of their spatial dimensions. Access to healthy food is mediated by the socio-economics and politics of space. Poor communities, proportionally, have fewer supermarkets and health food stores, but more liquor stores and fast-food outlets. Time constraints and access limitations combine to encourage the use of what is convenient, fast, and proximal. Fast food is labor saving for its consumers and, for most, it is affordable. Like the car, it helps to compress time and distance. Thus, the demand for fast food is particularly high in double income families where home cooking is a luxury, given the scarce time resources of working parents (Crossley, 2004). Changes in the social organization of space-time, such as the dispersal of activity sites, require car use that reduces the available time for food growing, shopping, and cooking, all of which makes driving to a fast food outlet a practical choice for many families.

CONCLUSION The socio-material patterns of hyperconsumption impact a number of aspects of contemporary life. For example, one analyst identifies time limitations, residential sprawl, and high rates of television viewing as three features of American life that may explain its decline in civic participation. All three can be related to hyperconsumption: time pressure flows from the need to work long hours to support consumer expenses, sprawl is associated with hyperautomobility and larger homes, and TV viewing promotes hyperconsumption through its programming and advertising (see Gardner et al., 2004, 18). Hyperconsumption is rife with contradictions. It produces counter productive consequences such as congestion and pollution. Hypereating carries its own counter productivity, that is, health risks. In their interaction Social Theory & Health

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in motorized urban sprawl, fast cars and fast foods are energy and land inefficient; ubiquitous roadway congestion underscores this inefficiency. Through their hyperconsumption, health is negatively affected by systematically produced casualties, by ontologically insecure public spaces, and by spatio-temporal arrangements that work against physical fitness. Furthermore, vulnerability is enhanced for some sub-groups by social ecological inequalities based on class, race-ethnicity, age, and disability (Frumkin et al., 2004, 221). We have shown how fast cars and fast food share a number of features. For both, the Fordist assembly line was foundational. Both thrive in motorized urban sprawl. Both share an energy and land use intensity, which in recent decades has accelerated. The growing intensity and scale of the fast cars/fast foods mode of consumption is driven by capitalism’s dynamic of accumulation, exemplified by its tendency to overproduction. For example, Nestle (2003, 1) in her book on how the food industries influence health argued: Indeed, the US food supply is so abundant that it contains enough to feed everyone in the country nearly twice over – even after exports are considered. The overly abundant food supply, combined with a society so affluent that most people can afford to buy more food than they need, sets the stage for competition.

This competition catalyzes hyperconsumption in the form of an ‘eat more’ mandate. Super-sized meals can be seen as the culinary equivalent of SUVs. In the spirit of a former General Motors executive who remarked that ‘mini cars make mini profits’ (Freund and Martin, 1993), we ask if mini burgers make mini profits? Whether or not a sustainable variant of capitalism’s hyperconsumption can be developed is a leading political, economic, and environmental question of our time. One approach to sustainable consumption is political consumption. It argues for incorporating political (including social and environmental) contexts into consumer choices, along with price and convenience. Some argue that there is potential for political consumption to become a broader and more effective citizen movement than it currently is (see Micheletti, 2003). Another approach to sustainable consumption is enhanced collective consumption. In transport, this means more use of public transit and car sharing, and less solo motoring. For food, the leading movements in sustainable consumption are organics, local food, and slow food (see Honore, 2004). Our essay emphasizes the socio-material contexts of consumption. ‘Unhealthy’ consumer decisions are not simply the result of advertising or Social Theory & Health

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of individuals buying into consumer culture. They are influenced to some degree by individuals being embedded within auto-dominated landscapes that are saturated by fast food franchises. Consumption norms become embedded not only culturally, but materially as well: Cars become the only option for transport, making fast food sites the most accessible options for eating. Because the social organization of space influences personal choice and experience, advertising and the ideology of a consumer culture may play a smaller role than assumed in individual choice. Status considerations also influence personal transport and diet. People in higher socio-economic positions may be highly auto dependent yet not as obese as those in lower statuses because they have greater access to both higher-priced healthier foods, and to places (and times) in which to exercise. We have suggested a synergistic relationship between fast foods and fast cars, which are the basis for a mode of consumption that contributes to producing unhealthy people and environments. However, we do not suggest that this is a causal relationship. The quality of the environments and the health of the people associated with fast cars/fast foods and motorized urban sprawl comprise an intricate nexus. In order to understand the complex interactions which take place among mobility, diet, landscape, the organization of space and time, and public health, we need to understand them jointly as well as individually. This understanding calls for empirical study and theoretical analysis that better integrates various disciplines, data sets, and discourses. Acknowledgements George Martin acknowledges support from the Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey, Guildford, and the Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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