Book review: Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation (affiliate links: UK, US) is a treasure trove of a book.  A great big, tiny-printed, multi-story, detail-crammed, head-spinning tome that you’ll pick up and read only a few pages of before you need to put it down for a rest.

Don’t eat fast food, it’s bad for you

***

It’s a sprawling work of great ambition, the ambition to chart the course of the rise of fast food in America.  This book covers:

• the business and commercial aspects of fast food,
• how it evolved from sit-down restaurants to drive-ins back to sit-down restaurants again
• the difficulties in sourcing the ingredients,
• the nature of the franchise agreements,
• the anti-unionist nature of its employers,
• the risks of contamination to the food,
• the health risks to the workers and, of course,
• the health risks to the people who eat it…
• not to mention the advertising that gets it into your mouth in the first place.

***

That’s quite a lot for a small book

Yes it is.  It’s quite small print, though, and it’s not like the majority of books I read are in large print or anything.  I mean, it’s not like My Dog Spot is my typical nightly reading.

It’s well-divided into chapters, though, and you can read it in a series of little “bites” over a long period of time.  I pretended I was reading a series of smaller books about a similar subject.  The main elements are:

• The rise of the hamburger- this is a great section that charts the rise of the hamburger from nowhere right through to being the dominant fast food meal in all of America.  This section is more of a history than anything else and talks a great deal about McDonald’s and the other corporations that forged a highway out of nothing.
• Your trusted friends – this section is more of a mish-mash of a variety of themes and discusses the role of the franchises and the corporations in their dealings with employees and the way that they advertise.  Of particular interest is the marketing of soda to children.  Apparently, a 1999 study done reported that in 1978 the average teenage boy in the USA drank 70z of soda (equivalent to one can in the UK) but by 1998 he was drinking nearly three times as much.  What’s more, a significant number of boys were drinking five or more cans per day.
• Artificial flavours – there is a large section about the rise of artificial flavours, which homogenise the taste of the fast food and ensure the same experience for everyone everywhere.
• The most dangerous job – this section reads like a re-run Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle and describes the horrifying working conditions of a meat-packing plant.  From the arduous nature of the manual labour, where a sharp knife can be the difference between getting repetitive strain injury and not, to the “world within a world” mentality of the gigantic, hive-like factory where there are dark corners that are just a little too far away from civilisation, it all seems unreal to those of us who work in the light of day.
• What’s in the meat? – you might not want to read this part while you’re eating.  You can learn about all kinds of horrible beasties in this section and how they get to you, the end consumer.  Let’s just say that just because it comes cleanly wrapped in plastic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s been that way since it came off the cow…
• Errors? – in my edition, there is a section at the end that responds to some of the press coverage when the book was released back in 2002.  It’s an interesting read and clearly quite a few people got their knickers in a twist about it.  What is encouraging in this epilogue, however, is the rise of health standards that have occurred as more of this kind of information comes into the public domain.  In some ways, Upton Sinclair was unable really to finish the Jungle until now.  The modern age of information is the finale to his book.  The information is the key to change.

***

So would I like this book?

You’ll like this book if you love, love, love detail and you’re obsessed about the food you eat.  You’ll gobble it all up and annoy all your friends by quoting sections of it to them for weeks afterwards.

If you’re interested but not obsessed and you’re happy to tackle dense paragraphs of detail then you’ll still enjoy it but at a much slower pace.  Like a couple of months.  If you’re a self-confessed ”big picture” person then you might want to give this a miss…

I write a post every day so don’t forget to subscribe or you’ll miss out