Informative & Entertaining, But A Little Off-Target

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	• Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser Harper Perennial, 2005 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 1397 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Informative & Entertaining, But A Little Off-Target

According to this book, slaughterhouses are unpleasant places to work, and often injury-prone. Eric Schlosser relates some anecdotes and statistical data to back this observation up, among others of similar obviousness.

It's interesting, to read about the meat packing industry, or the development of mass-produced frozen french fries. I'm glad I did. But what all of this does *not* amount to is a savage, or well-developed, indictment of the fast food industry.

Instead, Schlosser presents a world with almost an endless supply of villains, only a few of which are actually a Wendy's, Subway, or Burger King. The meat-packers promote line-speed over the safety of their workers; agri-business colludes to keep the prices down of their growers; scientists design food-additives with unpronounceable (and, therefore, scary) names; advertising agencies target our children; machinists design equipment that increase efficiency, making work more and more unskilled; governments work in collusion with private industry, opening up our schools to advertisements; etc. Perhaps the meat-packing industry has developed in the way it has to take advantage of the fast food industry's explosive popularity and subsequent demands. And, yes, Schlosser makes the point that fast food execs could "insist on changes" in their supplier industries (and, in fact, sometimes they do). But on the whole, the problems that Schlosser finds in these industries are general problems that can be found throughout nearly all large industries, and the world over.

He finds a young, un-unionized work-force. He finds robberies and crime. He finds unsanitary working conditions. He finds communities changing, and losing their one-time local identities. He finds workplace injuries. He finds the threat of disease. He finds poverty. He finds incompetent government bureaucracies. He finds greedy executives, and children swayed by targeted advertising.

But these are not problems of fast food alone, and they cannot all be laid at the doorstep of Ray Kroc. Indeed, often fast food comes out more of the hero in this book than not; it provides higher quality meat than our school's cafeterias and employs the young and minority workers who might not otherwise be able to find jobs. The fast food companies, themselves, wind up curbing the worst excesses of the industries that market to them. And because they are so sensitive to market pressures, we find that McDonalds spearheads efforts to "go green," or eliminate genetically modified food, even when not prompted by social campaigns or legislation (even if Schlosser never feels that they go far enough).

I'm sad to hear of the rancher who commits suicide due to market pressures working against independent cattlemen such as himself. But the connection between that rancher's depression, and Carl Karcher's decision to expand from Hot Dog carts to restaurants is... slender, at best, and probably, actually, non-existent. In the end, the litany of problems that Schlosser identifies in this book are often horrible, I'll agree, but they are problems that are endemic to large-scale human organization, in both the public and private sector, and the reality of modern-day economics. (And some of the "problems" aren't even really problems, such as the racial integration of Colorado Springs and other mid-west communities, brought about by the low-skill job opportunities presented by McDonalds, et al.; Schlosser links such immigration to rises in crime, etc., but that seems to me to be a fairly close-minded attitude, and close to bigotry.)

This is a well-written and fascinating book, filled with tid-bits of history that I wouldn't have learned otherwise, and I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars. But, as an "expose" on the fast food industry, it falls short, and cannot reach to the fifth.

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Interesting, but read carefully

This is an interesting in depth analyses of how the fast food industry has infiltrated every aspect of our society. However, read it carefully. The author mixes various economic supply chain efficiencies with unethical business practices and bunches them all together in one big scornful shame. The fact that this particular industry has reduced friction of the supply chain through standardization, economies of scale, automation and high tech systems seems problematic to him. He intermingles these things with the lack of government regulation in the industry and how these corporations exploit the uneducated masses. He seems very pro-government and anti-business in many cases, but not always.

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Wait... what's in my burger?

After reading this book, it seems as if the fast food industry is the only industry that was able to slide through the civil rights revolution and the workers' rights campaign back in the 20th century. If you're munching on a burger from a fast food restaurant (or should I say, shack), please put it down for you're own health.

There are several things that might be in there that you wouldn't want to eat. You never know if you got the burger that has the severed remains of a worker's finger/arm/leg. Schlosser writes of how fast the assembly line is moving, putting pressure onto the workers, making them lose accuracy and precision in their jobs that they "trained" for (a few days watching a video). This loss of accuracy can lead to some unpleasant surprises when you bite into your burger.

But burgers aren't the only things that one must look out for; Schlosser also writes of an account in which a whole man fell like a vat of lard taht was still churning. Was the lard reclaimed? No. It was shipped out; the packing companies decided profit was much more valuable than honoring a man and his untimely death.

The disgusting facts don't even start at with the meat-packing industries! In the farms in where the cattle are raised, the calves are fed the remains of cows and other animals. Trash even. The unsanitary conditions also turns stomachs. If you were to take a tour in one of these facilities, the regular person is denied access to the killing level. Schlosser elucidates the scene: knee-deep in blood and feces.

Overall, this was a very well researched book. Even though I'm not an avid fast-food eater, this has still deterred me away from eating it unless I know what's in my food.

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Good info, still eating McDonalds though

Well we all know more or less the content but I am still eating fast food. If you change what you are eating you are just fooling yourself. We all know fast food is bad, but tastes good.

Unexpected, but enjoyable.

I will warn all of you future readers: this is a great book and is rather historical in content. Contrary to my common thought that this whole book was bashing the fast food industry, it really did neither. Instead he really shows how fast food originated, how it affects industry (especially industrial agriculture), and why we love it so much. Fast food infiltrates everyday life for much of the world. Read the book to see why and how this came to be. I thought it was a fantastic book and a big eye opener.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.

Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.

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