The Lowdown
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We all hear about how fast food is "bad" for you and all that, but never much about the process behind it. This books gives a well documented and detailed account on how the industry started and the factors around it that transformed this industry into the beast that it is today. From the potatoes, to the beef and those that are exploited to produce the food that so commonly eaten by all, Schlosser delivers a great book loaded with insight into fast food and its influence on society - not just in America, but globally. A definite must read if you have ever had a french fry.
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Worth Reading
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I will not going into details about why I found this book was worth reading. There are hundred of reviews which all state similar reasons why I found this book was a 'must read'.
Kevin
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Caveat Emptor for fast food lovers
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While some have compared it to Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle, Schlosser is more a chronicler of popular culture than a muckraker like Sinclair. That is not to say the book doesn't open your eyes on the fast food industry, particularly in the areas of food safety and targeting of advertising on children to eat unhealthy foods.
Shlosser proposes many reforms of the fast food business and the supporting infrastructure, indeed too many in my view. That said, he hits the mark in some areas. As he notes,
"The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. Many of America's greatest accomplishments stand in defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labour, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money."
Simply put, free markets only work to the benefit of society within a rule of law that reflects that society's preferences. In other words, rule of law protects us not only from government, but also from corporations, and more generally, from the excesses and/or failures of the market.
Schlosser's most important policy recommendation is that Congress should immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote foods high in fat and sugar. As Schlosser notes.
"A ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening."
Some will argue the market is only responding to what people want. But if that logic were true, then marijuana and cocaine would be legal, tobacco advertising would be legal on radio and television, unfettered sex market would flourish more than it already does.
Still, the lobby of the fast food giants must have some influence. Schlosser's book was published in 2001. The fast food diet hasn't improved. U.S. restaurants continue to promote extreme eating. According to Reuters, February 26, 2007, Ruby Tuesday's offers an entree called Fresh Chicken & Broccoli Pasta so loaded with cheese and other stuff that it tipped the scales at 2,060 calories and 128 grams of fat, he said. Jacobson dubbed it "Angioplasta," alluding to angioplasty, a medical procedure to open clogged arteries.
Meanwhile, all of us have an accountability to fend for ourselves and our children.
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Not so tasty
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Compared th Sinclair's THE JUNGLE, FAST FOOD NATION is one disturbing and enlightening book. Schlosser's investigation into the world of fast food is more than just his commentary on "you are what you eat," it's an in depth look at everything involved in selling us what we eat--from meat packing plants and their lack of judgement, to marketing and promotion.
Let me just say this: If you read this book, you won't ever eat from a fast food restaurant again. As someone has said, "Forget about cholesterol, there is literally feces in the meat you're eating. Sound disgusting? It is, but it's also the truth.
Schlosser is an award winning journalist and he opens up his book with a seemingly innocuous foray into the way the McDonald brothers and Harlan Sanders applied their assembly line ways to food preparation. But he, the author, quickly turns to where the food comes from and how it's treated.
We get to see what goes on behind the counter--the working conditions, the pay, the carelessness, the unsanitary practices--truly this alone is enough to turn your stomach.
But, do not dispair, for the author not only rips the industry, but also offers some remedies for the problems. He also places the blame squarely on the shoulders of those who have caused this problem--the high-level corporate executives who are bent on making a buck. I recently read another book that reminded me of this, though it was fiction and quite funny, titled "Katzenjammer" by McCrae. In it, he lampoons the publishing industry and how it got that way. Certainly not the in-depth look at food, but a good, funny read that will open your eyes to why you get to read the books you do---like this one.
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Consequences of industrial agribusiness, intended & otherwise
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Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), is both a history of the rise of industrial agribusiness and a documentary of our society's moral and ethical transformation. To read his book is to hold a mirror uncomfortably close to oneself. We are what we eat, and what we eat is a product of what we do.
For this reader, the key chapter focussed on Kenny Dobbins. Kenny trusted in the inherent goodness of others; he wanted to believe in something greater than himself, in this case, his former employer, a major American meat packer. His words that close a most disturbing chapter about employee mistreatment are poignant without further commentary; he came to believe that when his employer used him to the point where he had no body parts left to give, they tossed him into the trash can.
One can only wonder about the practices of today's 'business is war' corporate employers and the apathy of Kenny's supervisors. No longer productive, emotionally wounded and permanently embittered, the rest of his life becomes a seeming burden to self, family, and society. One begins to see that the participants in his demise include the fellow line workers who choose to remain oblivious to the welfare and well-being of their colleagues; his immediate supervisors who goad and prod their employees to become evermore productive; their managers, lawyers, and accountants who distort social policies to maximize their immediate quarterly accounting profits regardless of the social and environmental cost; and we, the selfishly myopic consumers ever hungry for the cheapest price. We all contribute to the Kennys who exist in quiet desperation around us.
Schlosser's book demonstrates the importance of good governance in business and legislatively. As Schlosser writes, corruptible and easily intimidated state and federal governments and their subsidiary regulatory agencies facilitate many of the abuses and social ills among us. Schlosser details how our leadership and elites lack the ethics we purport to value in our society. Schlosser's book demonstrates that what we say we value and what we actually value are quite divorced from one anther.
That we all unwittingly choose to make Kennys of ourselves becomes the subtext. Through our choices based on tastes, convenience, and price, we have collectively evolved toward the type of unhealthy and suicidal society that we presently find ourselves in.
Through his careful documentation, Schlosser infers that we essentially live in a fear-based society that struggles to maintain a chimera of freedom of action, yet flees from the sublime truth that everything is interrelated to the one whole and the unity of all. Through his chain of connected actions somewhat reminiscent of James Burke's Connections video series, the insightful reader will recognize that no thought or action occurs outside of its social context. This reviewer recalls St. Paul's teaching that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough or, as Heisenberg realized, that the observer and the observed interact with and are interdependent upon each other.
Eric Schlosser illustrates how the profit drives our society; the bottom line prevails all rational thought and everything is appraised through the filter of its contribution to efficiency and profit. Sociologist Max Weber warned against the slippery moral and ethical slope of rationalizing everything. In our culture's seemingly inexorable craving for cheap and abundant daily meat, perhaps few remember that Winston Churchill warned us that the way in which we treat our animals reflects the way we will treat each other.
A society that sees everything in relative terms where each action and each actor are only small contributions to the whole and not microcosms of the whole itself is a society in which people choose to act with scant regard to the moral consequences of their actions. Our lives become a vain pursuit of commodious consumerism, in which we ascribe value and status to materialist hording. We live empty, meaningless lives in which we see everyone else and our actions toward them as separate and distinct from our own. Perhaps some realize that, as John Denver sang in 'Relatively Speaking', "every action taken is related in the flow." We think that a moral code that requires us to consider the welfare of others before our own disadvantages us somehow, and that we must live predatory and selfish lives in pursuit of in our own desires regardless of how this will impact the basic needs of others. Schlosser's book infers that we should live simply that others might simply live. As contributing members of our community, our actions indicate that we choose to divorce ourselves from the Decalogue's moral code and idolize youth, beauty, wealth, power and status, with little regard or concern for the long-term environmental, social, and karmic consequences of our thoughts and actions.
In our 'it is just business' attitude, we have become clever in disassociating the moral component from our manufactures. We choose to ignore that we each are a heartbeat away from eternity. We forget that this life is a classroom where the important lesson is not how to avoid spilling the milk but rather how to clean it up when it does spill.
Fast Food Nation is a powerful read, a transformative book; it is much more than a history of industrial agribusiness or an indictment of our obsession with the car culture. Our simple choice of fast food is tangible support a socially and environmentally unsustainable culture.
Worthy companion books include John Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002), Ronald Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downer Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1977), and E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (London: Sphere Books, 1974).
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