Fast Food Nation

***** by Eric Schlosser.

This is one of the best pieces of nonfiction I've read. The combination of facts (all exhaustively documented), writing style, pace, and interest make this book undeniably great.

That said, it is extremely disturbing. The fast food industry, and related industries, have had profound effects on our lives. Everyone knows that to one degree or another, but this book will lay it right out for you. Americans now spend more money on fast food than music, movies, cars, computers, books, and magazines combined. That's right, combined. This book is loaded with symptoms, causes, and effects of fast food, meat packing and production, franchising, and globalization; and each page (nearly each paragraph) has at least one sentence that will make your jaw drop. I learned way too much to list here, but here are a few highlights:

• The labor situation is so bad it makes my teeth stand on end. Most of the people working in meatpacking today are extremely poor, often illiterate, and not unionized. As a result, they are treated in positively inhuman ways: having to clean up disease-ridden blood vats without any protection, hosing the floor and machinery down with chlorine with nothing more than a paper mask, crammed nearly shoulder to shoulder cutting the same cut of meat over and over again without any breaks. One company brought workers up to Minneapolis from Mexico promising pay and housing, then tried to house them in a homeless shelter. IBP (a huge beef company recently bought by Tyson, making it the largest meat conglomerate in the world) forces injured workers in Texas to fill out waivers that give them a choice: a) waive all right to sue the company in exchange for maybe getting medical treatment someday (usually they don't, because they quit the company before the benefits come through), or b) lose their job. Of course, few of them work for more than three months at any one company anyway, so benefits are irrelevant, which is exactly what these corporations want.
• Schools are so underfunded that soft drink advertisers are placing ads in the halls of the school, and soda machines everywhere. Schools must reach a sales quota for soda in order to keep the desperately-needed money, and to meet the quota, they are encouraged to let kids drink in class, and to move the machines so they're easier to get to for the students.
• Cows in this country are fed dead cows, dead chickens, dead pigs, dead horses, restaurant waste of all kinds, and other things cows were never meant to eat. Dead does not mean freshly dead, either. These cows eat all kinds of nasty shit because it makes them get fat faster, and more cheaply, than grass and grain alone.
• The meat producers in the US refuse to test for e. coli, mad cow disease, and other deadly pathogens. That's why they are able to say it has never been detected in the US, and we don't need to worry about it. The USDA and FDA, being in the pocket of the meatpacking industry (especially under our current administration), will do nothing to improve matters. Republicans received about $200 million from agribusiness companies (Democrats got about $90 million), so there is little hope for change from our legislators. For fuck's sake, is it so hard to see that we need to get the corporations out of our government? It might be hard to see that, given the Harvard MBA currently running the show, but it is crucial to get campaign finance reform happening.
• Natural and artificial flavors are essentially the same. Natural flavors are chemical extracts derived from natural sources like vegetables, fruit, meat, and so on. However, they are no more or less healthy than artificial flavors. Almost all of both types of flavoring are made in New Jersey.
• McDonald's french fries are not vegetarian in the US, and never were. They use beef tallow.
• Two individuals decided to fight McDonald's in court in England. McD's had charged them, and several other people, with libel. McDonald's lost, and the battle is still going on today.

This book is absolutely a must-read, especially if you eat fast food. I don't, but one point of the book is that it doesn't matter whether you eat the food or not; it still affects your life in a huge way. We need better legislation on food safety, humane treatment for human workers, humane treatment for the animals who are killed and eaten, and just generally to bring the industry back to a human scale. The current trends are unsafe, unsustainable, and inhuman.

Posted by Joe on February 21, 2003 02:01 AM