by Bryant Simon
Still, well into the 1990s parents continued to think, based on news reports and advertising about the evils of red meat, that the chicken in nuggets and tenders made them a healthier choice than hamburgers or steak. With cost, convenience, and the well-being of their kids in mind, mothers and fathers fed cheap chicken(ish) products to their children. As they did, they unknowingly provided their sons and daughters with a kind of gateway drug to a life of fast food and meals built on a pleasant mouth feel, explosive flavors, and immediate satisfaction. After that first bite through the crust and the crunch, the fat and salt in the nuggets took over, and that’s why kids, teens, and grown-ups came back to them again and again. “Salt, sugar, and fat are what psychologists call reinforcers,” explains the food researcher and journalist Mark Schatzker. “They trigger bursts of potent neurotransmitters and activate the same brain circuitry as heroin and cocaine.” Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, a neuroscientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, wasn’t surprised about the similar effects of junk food consumption and drug use. “We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he remarked. “We purify [it]. Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”26
When the Imperial plant caught fire in 1991, it had been four years since that watershed moment in American eating when chicken passed beef as the nation’s number one source for meat-based protein. By then, the nugget had triumphed within the world of poultry capitalism. Half of all the chicken eaten in the United States in 1991 resembled the addictive and intensely adulterated foods that Schatzker and Wang commented on. Kind of like crack, they were ubiquitous, cheap, further processed, and hard to give up. The larger transition from home-prepared chicken to industrial-made fried chicken products marked what the historian Steve Striffler has called the “dangerous transformation of America’s favorite food.”27
Richmond County, North Carolina, witnessed the same sort of weight gain as the rest of the country did. In 2001, the obesity rate for the towns, crossroads, and small cities surrounding Hamlet had jumped up above 33 percent, almost 3 points higher than the state average and 12 percent higher than the rate registered in Orange County, home to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and statistically the thinnest county in the state.28 Over the next few years, the numbers would continue to rise, along with poverty rates. A 2006 study of public health in North Carolina reported that between 60 and 65 percent of Richmond Country residents were either overweight or obese.29
One week after the Imperial plant caught fire, the Richmond County Daily Journal ran a national story on its back pages about childhood obesity. The article contained the usual data on the costs of weight gain and the usual list of recommendations to solve the problem. The experts interviewed for the piece asserted that Americans needed to get far fewer of their calories from fat, especially saturated fats. They needed to consume less sodium and exercise more. They suggested fewer fast food meals and more home-cooked dinners. They urged people to add more whole grains and additional servings of leafy green and dark yellow vegetables to their diets. Parents needed to find out more about what their kids ate for school lunch and afterschool snacks. All of this was sound advice, but most of the choices outlined in the paper stood outside the reach of the poor and working poor who had labored on the line at Imperial and in other low-wage positions in the county.30
Knowing exactly what was in a chicken nugget or on a school lunch tray wasn’t easy or convenient. “Ultimately,” writes Ann Vileisis, in her book Kitchen Literacy, “we have ended up in the absurd situation today that most of us, as consumers, know very little about what we eat; and, sensing a ‘dark side’ to our foods’ production, many of us don’t even want to know.”31 This “covenant of ignorance,” as Vileisis calls it, allowed chicken producers, just like it did beef and pork processors, to hide much of the story of how cheap chicken tenders made their way from the farms to the slaughterhouse to the Imperial plant and onto Shoney’s tables and into the school cafeterias. Pictures on the menus didn’t, of course, depict the suffering of spindly-legged broilers. There were no glossy images of urine pouring down on birds or of stunned animals getting dragged through vats of fecal soup. There were no snapshots of workers trying to shake off the pains in their wrists and fingers. Food labels were almost as hard to find as these kinds of disturbing images were. When Imperial exploded, most lunchrooms didn’t have breakdowns of the caloric, salt, and fat content of their menu items. Supermarket labels weren’t much better, with unrealistic portion sizes and vague ingredient lists. Most eaters, as Vileisis sensed, rarely volunteered to learn this information. Knowing was a lot of work, and in the short term it wasn’t likely to change what an underpaid worker making $5.50 an hour fed her son or daughter or whether they signed up for the school lunch program or not.
In his book Cooked, the food writer Michael Pollan cited a 2003 study by a group of Harvard economists that linked the increase in obesity in America to the decline of home cooking. The Ivy League researchers determined that housekeepers across the nation spent on average just twenty-seven minutes a day fixing their meals. The road back to a thinner and healthier nation, Pollan insisted along with others, ran through the kitchen and the preparation of fresh foods. What Pollan didn’t acknowledge in his book or in his well-paid and attended addresses to college audiences was that poor women, the most statistically vulnerable group to obesity, never really stopped making food and eating at home.32 In fact, North Carolinians earning less than $15,000 a year consumed five times as many meals at home as their wealthier neighbors did. Given what they got paid on the job and collected from public assistance, they couldn’t even afford a few items off the Hardee’s value menu except on special occasions. But at the same time, highly processed fast foods were creeping into their homes and changing their ideas about cooking, especially as already prepared food often cost just about the same as uncooked food. Given the physical and emotional rigors of low-paid factory and service work, these items were hard to pass on, even if they weren’t all that healthy.33
“My hands would swell up,” Imperial worker Ada Blanchard explained years later, sitting in the yard by her trailer outside of Rockingham. “I couldn’t cook for my kids.” Like many of her co-workers, she knew how to make a meal from scratch, and that’s what she did when she had the time and feeling in her fingers, like on the weekends and holidays. But during the week, when another shift was only a few hours away, she made dinners that were quick and easy, things like canned spaghetti and chicken tenders.34 Writer J.D. Vance grew up among the white working class in a small town in Ohio. In high school, he got a job as a supermarket cashier, a position he said turned him into an “amateur sociologist,” closely studying the contents of shopping carts. He quickly learned to recognize the choices made by people like Ada Blanchard. “Some folks,” he noted, “purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce.” “The more harried a customer,” he observed, “the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor.”35
Around the same time that Vance started to study shopping patterns and Blanchard reflected on her cooking, journalist Tracie McMillan went undercover to find out about the “American way of eating.” After a few months cutting garlic in California’s Central Valley and stocking the produce sections of a Walmart store, she started to make the same choices Blanchard made and for the same reasons. Work in the world of cheap was painful and exhausting. “We didn’t cook much,” McMillan wrote about herself and her mostly female co-workers. “We were too busy. All of this—the chore of finding food, the lack of time to do anything with it when we did, the indifference to our meals—was familiar.”36
Over time, the indifference that McMillan documented led to a drop in culinary knowledge that, in turn, heightened families’ dependence on pre-made, further-processed foods. In the past, daughters (and some sons) generally learn
ed how to cook at home from their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. As women, who still were usually in charge of food in most households, worked more hours outside the home and spent less time in the kitchen, children sat through fewer informal lessons on how to make meatloaf or fresh green beans or chicken soup from scratch. Budget cuts, at the same time, led to sharp drops in spending on home economics classes in public schools. Unable to cook for themselves or too busy to learn on their own, many, and especially the working poor, allowed the companies that churned out cheap foods, like Kraft, Campbell’s, General Mills, and Imperial—often companies that they themselves worked for—to do most of cooking for them. Few saw the danger in this kind of voluntary deskilling, at least not at first.37
Even those with the time, knowledge, and inclination to cook would have found it hard to follow the recommendations made in that Richmond County Daily Journal article. Finding fresh, whole-grain foods year-round in Hamlet’s foodscape would not have been easy. At first glance, the town and areas around it didn’t look like food deserts or toxic food environments, but up close and for those with thin paychecks, that’s how they operated. At Hamlet’s mini marts, the racks were filled with chips, pork rinds, Twinkies, and Little Debbie cakes. At the Piggly Wiggly and the Food Lion, there were a few rows of fresh fruits and vegetables. But these sections were never as big or as full as the ones at the Harris Teeter or Kroger’s in the sprawl-lands of Charlotte and Raleigh. No doubt, it wasn’t easy to find brown rice or brown bread in Richmond County in the 1980s. If these health(ier) food items did make it onto the shelves, they were rarely cheap, or cheap enough, not when every penny and every minute counted. If an Imperial worker wanted to treat her family or herself to a break from cooking, the only restaurants in Hamlet or in Rockingham that working people could afford served burgers and fries or chicken nuggets and fries or fried fish and fries, or endless helpings at a steakhouse salad bar loaded with bite-size fried shrimp, fatty cheeses, creamy dressings, salty croutons, bacon bits, syrupy pineapple chunks, and sugary custards. None of this food, of course, was good for you.
Margaret Banks, Sandra McPhaul, and dozens of other Imperial workers commuted on backcountry roads twenty to thirty miles each way to the job. They might have had some land circling their homes, but the long, painful days on the line gave them little time for a garden. As soon as they opened the door after coming home from their shift, hungry kids peppered them with questions: “When are we eating? What’s for dinner?” Many were too tired to plan dinner, or maybe they didn’t know how to prepare fresh vegetables or couldn’t find affordable, healthy options in the supermarket. So, when it came time for dinner, working mothers popped some tenders into the oven or microwave with mac and cheese on the side and turned on the television. Everyone was happy—or quiet, at least. Most mornings during the school year, line ladies on the first shift left the house before the kids were up. That meant, as Annette Zimmerman explained, something quick—knock-off cornflakes, Pop Tarts, or Eggos—for breakfast. All were easy to make and easy to eat, and all had some of the same addictive qualities found in nuggets and tenders.38
Every study on the rise of obesity rates in the United States recommended more exercise. According to the reports, the poor spent far too little of their leisure time walking, running, or doing aerobics. Maybe that was because there weren’t many low-cost gyms or walking trails in Bennettsville, South Carolina, or the North Yard community outside of Hamlet, and there were no plans to build them in the years after 1980 when North Carolina legislators from both parties competed to see who could slash the deepest into the parts of the state budget that had nothing to do with road building or industrial recruitment. There weren’t a lot of gyms open to the public to begin with, and investors weren’t lining up to put a Gold’s Gym in one of Hamlet’s abandoned storefronts or near Rockingham’s housing projects. Not many, if any, Imperial workers had money for a gym membership on $5.50 per hour anyway. Riding a stationary bike while the kids were at home, with piles of laundry on the floor and shopping lists to fill, probably didn’t make much sense to most working women. How would you manage to pay for one of those bikes in the first place when you had a stack of bills, and where would you put it a house filled with kids and relatives?
Really, the article in the Richmond County Daily Journal and most of the other reports on obesity in the 1980s and 1990s missed the key issue behind the timing of the tipping of the nation’s scales. More than supersize meals, more than subsidies for corn and soft drinks, more than government cuts in support for recess and healthy school lunches, more than chicken pieces loaded with fat, salt, and sugar, the jump in obesity in poor communities turned on income. In fact, across the country, bodies got bigger as pay envelopes shrunk. This represented a massive, almost schizophrenic, historic shift. For more time than anyone could possibly count, poor people starved. They starved during the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and during Charles Dickens, George Orwell, and Upton Sinclair’s days. Novelists and commentators read their thin, gaunt, and emaciated bodies as sure signs of poverty, just as they read girth, plumpness, and softness as indicators of wealth. All of a sudden, the cultural codes reversed themselves. “Thinness” became a sign of righteousness and success; “fatness” an emblem of poverty and failure.
The American diet was filled with danger long before the spike in obesity in the 1970s. Coke machines appeared at bus stations and crossroads gas stations after World War II. At the same time, boxes of sugary Betty Crocker cake mixes began to line supermarket aisles. McDonald’s opened its first franchises in the mid-1950s, about the same time that Swanson’s began selling TV dinners, followed two decades later by its larger, more caloric and fat-filled Hungry-Man meals. Imperial workers, single moms with jobs, unemployed railroad men, and farm laborers without crops to pick didn’t suddenly choose to eat at Hardee’s—one of Hamlet’s only fast food joints—because they liked the food better than healthier options. Women who pulled pieces of marinated chicken out of vats on Bridges Street all day long didn’t microwave pre-made burgers and sausage biscuits because they thought they were the best food for them and their kids. They didn’t serve fries instead of broccoli because they didn’t know the value of vegetables. They chose foods that tasted good and that their sons and daughters liked because they really didn’t have a choice, even as commentators constantly talked about choices. They ate what they could afford in terms of price and time.
The early 1970s marked a critical turning point not just in foodways and the making of American bodies, but also, more importantly, in the real wages and overall incomes earned by the vast majority of the nation’s workers. Beginning after World War II, laborers and their families saw their take-home pay steadily climb year after year. For most people in the United States and specifically in Hamlet, this rise defined the postwar experience. But beginning in the early years of the 1970s, interest rates and prices for many household items—excluding chicken and other processed foods—started to rise. Double-digit inflation cut into people’s buying power. But some income was better than none. As global competition heated up in the early 1970s, in what should by now be a familiar tale, millions of Americans, especially men in high-paying union positions, lost their jobs. Nationally, unemployment nearly doubled from 1973 to 1975, reaching 8.3 percent, before it fell back and then peaked again at 9.5 percent in 1982. For manufacturing workers, the numbers were worse. From Maine to California, hundreds of factories closed and thousands of jobs disappeared. To track the era’s economic devastation, statisticians combined the rates of unemployment and inflation to come up with what they called the Misery Index. According to this grim yardstick, 17 percent of the nation lived in economic agony in the mid-1970s. The number jumped to 21 percent in 1980.39
For many, the mobilization of more family members, especially women, blunted the decline in real wages and buying power. By swelling the labor market, however, the new entrants into the workforce put downward pressure on wages. None of this helped sing
le moms in small towns or cities. They still had to take care of everything at home on one paycheck—one that was shrinking because of rising inflation and job competition. That made cheap necessities more valuable than ever before.
Workers in small-town North Carolina faced their own additional miseries in the 1980s. Governor Jim Hunt and his successors’ efforts at industrial recruitment had paid off and brought thousands of new positions to the state. The Tar Heel economy did especially well in attracting to its rural counties industrial bottom feeders looking for the cheapest labor available anywhere. Not many of these jobs, located far from the highways, paid well. As a result, while incomes in all of the southeastern states rose by two percentage points in the late 1970s to 86 percent of the national average, North Carolina’s rate of pay fell two points behind the rest of the region.40 By the middle of the 1970s, the state ranked dead last in the country in industrial wages. Each week, North Carolina laborers made $52.53 less on average than their counterparts made in other parts of the United States.41