Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. . - Changing Diets and Remarking Food Systems - book review

Whole Earth,  Spring, 2002  

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Eric Schlosser 2001; 356 pp. $13.95 Houghton Mifflin Company

If you are feeling hungry for some fast food info before you pick up Fast Food Nation, you'll feel stuffed after putting it down. It's a better wakeup call than food poisoning. Schlosser doesn't rant or preach. He just presents fact after fact--comprehensively, intelligently, and meticulously researched--about the history, politics, economics, and culture of the fast food industry.

Schlosser gets out of the way and leaves room for voices and stories that are seldom heard--high-school dropouts who started fast food empires with a hamburger cart and a couple of dollars, immigrant meatpackers working in horrifying conditions; sophisticated flavorists whose secret potions create the flavors of fast food; the dying breed of old-time cattle ranchers and potato farmers being bought out by multinational corporations; the children who are running restaurants while working long hours with minimum pay and little training. Schlosser reveals how a culture is created and then reflected by the food it eats. --EP

"An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald's. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonald's is the nation's largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes--and the second largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald's Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent.

"On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It's one strange image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler.... Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, if I want to go any further. This is where some people get sick. I feel fine, determined to see the whole process, the world that's been deliberately hidden. The kill floor is hot and humid. It stinks of manure. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so fast along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you and throw you onto the bloody concrete floor. It happens to workers all the time.

"In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year--and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries. Ninety percent of those fries are purchased at fast food restaurants.... Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at a fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes.

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