OTHELLO, Wash. -- More than 30 years ago, the king of fast-food hamburgers and the patriarch of potatoes came together for a meeting that would change the American meal and create a new breed of corporate farmer.
Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's nationwide restaurant chain, and J. R. Simplot, the food processing and chemical magnate in Idaho, forged a deal to make perfect french-fried potatoes -- upright, bright, cheap and free of molds.
They would look the same whether they were sold on the Jersey shore or in a drive-through in Idaho.
The potatoes would grow in the dry, volcanic soil of the inland Pacific Northwest, then be washed, sliced, cooked and frozen in factories in this region before being shipped to fast-food outlets from sea to shining sea.
The combination of cheap federal hydroelectric power and irrigation water made this desert region perfect for the operation, and by the mid-1980s, more than 6 billion pounds of potatoes were being processed by 10 big factories owned by different companies in the Columbia River Basin, providing the United States with most of its french fries.
But the process of making one fry look exactly like another has come at a big cost, according to a new report on the potato processing industry.
The demand for uniformity has created an industry that relies heavily on chemicals, wastes half of every potato it processes and pollutes underground water supplies, according to the Columbia Basin Institute, a research group in Portland, Ore.
Its study was financed in part by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute and the Bullitt Foundation of Seattle, which is concerned with environmental issues in the Northwest.
"If you want to produce most of America's french fries this way, you should have to pay the costs -- social, environmental and other," says Bill Bean, the founder of the institute and co-author of the study. "We've got a uniform french fry, but it came with a lot of hidden costs."
Industry leaders say much of the criticism is wrong or misleading. They say they have cleaned up many of the water problems, investing millions of dollars to better dispose of the water used to wash and cook a perfect fry.
They say they provide more than 4,000 year-round jobs, among the best-paying in the low-skill farm sector, mainly to Mexican immigrants.
And they say they have kept alive rural communities that otherwise might have had severe unemployment and a declining tax base.
