Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Comment: I bought this book one day at the Cookeville, Tennessee Goodwill store. The cover art was what caught my eye and I flipped through it. It's one of those books that you can't put down if you've ever worked at a restaurant or a grocery store and really wondered where the food comes from and how it gets there.

Very interesting history of the t.v. dinner and frozen foods in here (I'm not joking!) If you are easily grossed out this is not for you but this is not a gross out kind of book either. It's very well researched. A whole lot of stuff about McDonald's in here.

After reading this book I will never eat one of those cheap cherry pies you see in the grocery stores. I used to love those! I can never eat one again after I found out how they made that artificial cherry flavor smell and taste.

I didn't need to eat anymore cheap cherry pies for the rest of my life anyway so I'd like to thank Eric Schlosser for writing Fast Food Nation. I'd also like to ask him to never investigate, report on or write anything about Shoney's Hot Fudge Cake.

Comment: I finally have learned what I am really eating! This book is as relevant today as it was when it was published back in 2002, probably more so! Fast Food Nation traces the history of the fast food industry from hotdog stands to the multi-billion burgers sold as corporate America spreads its gospel of a quick-and-easy (and cheap) "western diet" around the globe. To promote mass production and profits, the industry has to keep labor and material costs low. "Flavorists" in laboratories along the New Jersey turnpike concoct the "natural flavors" found in almost every processed food product. To witness the gruesome business of meat-processing, Schlosser visited slaughterhouses. What he discovered was both repugnant and hazardous. Every day more than 200,000 Americans are made sick by contaminated food AND over 300,000 are hospitalized for a food-borne illneess. Kudos to Eric Schlosser for jump starting our awareness of cheap food vs. safe food and the large corporate producers who virtually monopolize the food system. If you want to better educate yourself about how the fast food culture has undermined our health over the past 30 years and is slowly but surely shortening our life span, start with this book. After you're done reading Fast Food Nation, pick up a Michael Pollan book if you want updated evidence that the "western diet" is making this nation sick with multiple diseases. Please don't rely on most MDs to figure it out for you, think for yourself, you may be amazed to find out that your grandma was right, you are what you eat.

Below is an excerpt from a 2010 Michael Pollan article (May 20, 2010 New York Review of bookss)
"But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs--to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture--and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people's eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production. Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle's Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.
Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as "Fordism": instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.
But perhaps the food movement's strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized"

Comment: Though it's clear where his loyalties lie, Schlosser does a fabulous job of presenting the facts as objectively as possible in this wry commentary on the Fast Food industry: its origins, culture, and effects.

Comment: The book explains what happens when faceless corporations take care of the food business. The independent producers are forced out of business, the nature is manipulated and workers are exploited.
The worst aspect is that the children are one of the main target of these companies that craft their ads and products to appear attractive to youngsters.
They package all their junk full of fats, chemical and unhealthy products together with little colored gadgets of famous animation characters. This makes wonders in luring the toddlers ( and their parents ).
The book does a good job in describing these disgusting strategies.

One section that I found very interesting was the one dedicate to flavors, complex chemicals that give actual taste to the food. They are formulated with hundreds of different compounds mixed in the right proportions to trick our mouth.
Do you have an idea of what lies behind the common " strawberry aroma " ? Prepare yourself to be shocked.

Comment: A very insightful book it was. After reading it I confirmed for myself that I had been doing the right thing all along in avoiding beef, pizza joints were illegals work, and the big fast food chains. Such action is very easy and yet so hard for others to do. We have so much power, so we don't have to be such an idiot nation. If you stop eating this stuff, so much improvement would come about. We would become healthier, health care costs will go down, even illegal immigration would finish. Something tells me that in the end, our guts will prevail over our brains.