Book Review: Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Before reading the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, I thought I knew quite a bit about fast food.

I didn't know the half of it.

An award-winning journalist, Schlosser reveals the truth about the politics of the fast food industry. It begins benignly enough, with the story of how fast food got its start from a family man who owned several hot dog carts.

Then Schlosser chronicles the story of Ray Kroc and the McDonald's empire. After reading that section, I started to get the feeling that Mr. Kroc may have cared a wee bit more about money than about customers and employees alike.

The rest of Fast Food Natiion focuses on the impact of the fast food industry on consumers at large. Bottom line...

Fast food is anything but cheap

Each year, Schlosser states, Americans collectively spend more money on fast food than they do on higher education or new cars. That fact alone tells me that you might be spending a lot more on a drive-thru burger than you think.

According to Fast Food Nation, fast food restaurants impact our young people in a number of ways..

• A Taco Bell in Washington State, back in 1997, routinely forced employees to work off the clock so the company wouldn't have to pay them overtime.

• Most fast food companies hire part-time workers at minimum wage so they don't have to provide any benefits.

• McDonald's is notorious for shutting down restaurants in the middle of a union drive.

• The incident of worker injuries is twice that for teenagers—the main staff of fast food restaurants—than for adults.

In short, fast food companies regularly exploit teenage labor.

So, how much does your Happy Meal really cost?

Delicious fries? It has nothing to do with the potatoes

In chapter seven of Fast Food Nation, “Why the Fries Taste Good,” I wondered that any of us who have ever eaten at a fast food restaurant is still alive. The miracle power of the human body to attempt to keep itself alive, I guess.

Fast food has been processed to such an extent that, left alone, it would taste anywhere from bland to repulsive. As a result, entire factories exist whose sole purpose is to mix chemicals to add to food to make it smell and taste better.

Schlosser lists the ingredients of strawberry flavor for a strawberry milkshake as an example. Forty-seven ingredients, and almost all of them with such names as dipropyl ketone, ethyl methylphenylglycidate (say that ten times fast), and solvent.

Excuse me, solvent? No wonder that since Americans started eating fast food, the rate of chronic and degenerative disease has skyrocketed.

So, tell me then, is your Value Meal still a good deal?

A bum deal for animals and people alike

The fast food giants buy tons of beef, pork and chicken every year. In order to keep the menus inexpensive, the meat must be raised on large factory farms. Therefore, small ranchers and farmers struggle to maintain a living, and must often choose between bowing to the status quo or going out of business.

In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser strongly suggests that this is one of the reason that the suicide rate of farmers in the United States is three times higher than in the nation at large.

Was your drive-thru dinner last night worth it?

Once the animals come off the factory farms, they are sent to slaughterhouses. The meatpacking industry is one of the most dangerous to work for. At least one-third of all meatpackers are injured every year, and many of those men are put back to work before they are completely recovered.

Not only that, but the unsanitary filth the workers are forced to live with cause illness and disease. And like the teens staffing the fast food restaurants, worker wages in meatpacking plants are notoriously low.

Fast food might be a little more expensive than we've been led to believe.

Despite being wordy at times, Fast Food Nation is a compelling and easy-to-understand education on the greed and politics involved in the fast food industry. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in pursuing the truth about how Big Food in general is derailing our health and well-being.