Fast Food Nation

by Eric Schlosser
Reviewed by Robyn Seydel

While I was standing at the cash register paying for this book, at one of the few remaining locally owned and operated bookstores left in town, the cashier warned "read that book and you'll never eat fast food again."

"Probably not," I smiled, thinking, like lots of Co-op members, I could count the times in the last two decades that I have eaten at a fast food chain on one hand.

Why then, read the book?

Aside from the information it provides on the production and content of fast food, (which is horrifying at best) it is the most lucid and illuminated writing done on the corporate takeover of American culture that I have read in a long time.

Moving seamlessly from boardrooms and corporate offices, to the effects on the teenagers behind the grill, out to the farms and into the slaughterhouse, the book is a sociological milestone in understanding the roots of many of modern America's problems.

Tracing the beginnings of fast food to the rise of the car culture in California in the early thirties to its first boom after WWII, it spread rapidly between 1960 and the mid-seventies.

Today there is hardly a developed or developing nation that does not have an American fast food chain restaurant.

Author Eric Schlosser, while eating at a McDonalds near Dachau concentration camp, was struck by the fact that "millions of other people at that very moment were standing at the same counter, ordering the same foods from the same menu, food that tasted the same everywhere."

Although Upton Sinclair-esque chapters on slaughterhouse conditions have earned him the well deserved honor of a comparison, the most telling sections for me were those that spoke to the violence that these enormous corporations continue to foster.

Controlling every aspect in the revolutionary application of Henry Ford's mass production model to the restaurant business, enables the fast food giants to hire unskilled laborers; mainly teenagers, (200,000 of whom will sustain injuries on the job each year), who will work for lower pay than adults and whose "youthful inexperience makes them easier to control" immigrants and the poor.

Sections on union busting activities and the industry's repeatedly successful bids to derail efforts to improve minimum wage are the story of a brutality to the whole fabric of society.

Schlosser writes, "Crime and fast food have become so ubiquitous in American society that their frequent combination usually goes unnoticed." Noting that fast food restaurants are now "more attractive to armed robbers than convenience stores, gas stations or banks," many teen workers become the victims.

"Roughly four or five fast food workers are now murdered on the job every month. In 1998 more restaurant workers were murdered on the job in the U.S. than police officers."

In the mid- 1990's, noting that homicide had become the leading cause of workplace fatalities among women, OSHA tried to issue fairly innocuous and voluntary guidelines.

Opposing the guidelines, the industry called on over 100 members of Congress for help, many of whom, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, had received donations from the National Restaurant Association and other industry groups.
And there is the violence to our health.

The ultimate processed food, providing high caloric intake without substantial nutritional benefit and laden with chemicals that dupe the senses into believing one is eating real food, fast food products have changed the nature of agriculture as well as our appetites.

According to Schlosser, "The rate of obesity among American adults is twice as high today as it was in the early 1960s.

The rate of obesity among American children is twice as high as it was in the late 1970s. Today, 44 million American adults are obese.

An additional 6 million are super-obese." And, he points out, obesity is spreading worldwide, like a plague, along with the fast food empire.

The generations involved are those targeted since childhood by fast foods sophisticated marketing ploys that utilize emotional and psychological means to create "heavy users" beginning in early childhood.

"The low price of a fast food hamburger does not reflect its real cost-and should. The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by the losses imposed on the rest of society."

Eric Schlosser couldn't be more right. This book is informational, entertaining and visionary.

If you are concerned about corporate globalization, if you care about family farmers and the quality of the food supply and if you read only one book this summer, make Fast Food Nation that book.

No matter what you think of the Golden Arches, you will never see them in the same way again.