Read this and you won't want fries or anything
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
God strike me dead before I consume another fast-food product,
be it pizza, hamburgers or chicken tenders. My culinary fervor results from
reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, who explores how the rise
of McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut ad nauseum has affected the nation's
waistline, children, farmers, meat packers, environment and landscape.
What makes Fast Food Nation so effective is that
Schlosser modulates his outrage, fitting it to his various targets.
Many books that detail the nation's dreadful diet bray
in a tone of strident hysteria about the corporate world's deliberate scheming
to deprive children's brains of vital nutrients.
No, they make this junk because people buy it. Writes Schlosser,
"The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen.
They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They
will sell whatever sells at a profit."
Part of the problem is that parents give in to the convenience
of fast food and to their children's whining. (Judge me guilty.)
Toy companies and Hollywood have forged an alliance with
fast food to enhance children's "pester power."
According to Fast Food Nation, every month
more than 90% of American kids will eat at McDonald's. This is bad, but there
is an element of free will.
People, Schlosser says, need to boycott fast food, and
parents must demand that schools ban fast food, no matter how much corporate
money is offered.
Schlosser escalates his fury when he describes the plight
of poorly paid service workers.
"In 1998, more restaurant workers were murdered on the
job in the United States than police officers," he writes.
The fast-food industry hires the young, the poor and the
disabled because it often gains government subsidies for "training." Schlosser
tells how the industry has fought unions and how they benefit from hiring teenagers,
who are easily cowed. No other industry pays so many employees minimum wage,
Overall, Schlosser says, U.S. teens are injured on the
job at twice the rate of adult workers. Quite simply, the jobs are kept mechanized
because rapidly shuffling bodies through is cheaper than keeping a well-trained
workforce that might demand insurance and higher wages. (Schlosser praises In-N-Out
Burger, a profitable family-owned chain that pays its starting part-time workers
$8 an hour and has reaped excellent reviews over the years.)
Fast Food Nation examines the rise of fast food,
particularly the career of Ray Kroc and others whom he describes as maverick
visionaries. Fast food is convenient, fun and demonstrates trademark American
ingenuity and informality. But as Schlosser makes clear, its global explosion
has had terrible, unplanned consequences.
Schlosser has an excellent chapter on a small town in Saxony,
in which he describes the local McDonald's cheerful warmth in contrast to the
abandoned East German army buildings that the communists left behind. People
like Ronald McDonald for a reason.
But few readers will forget the chapters on the meat-packing
industry. This stuff reads likes Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle.
The blood, the stench, the brutal pace. The workers submit because they have
no other way to support their families. The jobs are often performed by poor
women, the illiterate and illegal aliens, according to Schlosser, and workers
run the risk of terrible injuries.
Schlosser also details the contamination of meat with deadly
bacteria such as E. coli and details the terrible death of a 6-year-old who
ate a tainted hamburger.
Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope
young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies
class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational
corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions.