Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
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Book Reviews of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Book Review: Appetite for Destruction
Summary: 5 Stars
In this best seller, Eric Schlosser uses the kaleidoscopic history of the evolution of the Fast Food industry in an attempt to portray the methodical process of losing individuality in American society. He tries to answer the questions related to the root causes of the crumbling ethical standards in American business practices and the ways they impact the fabric of American society.
Schlosser's main purpose is to expose profit driven business practices of the fast food industry that grossly undermines consumer health and interest. He attempts to jump-start the everyday consumer's rational thinking. He re-traces American business history of the last few decades. Schlosser also takes the opportunity to explore the cultural effects of these businesses. His case study is America's Fast Food Industry. The underlying message in his book expands beyond the scope of the Fast Food Industry. Schlosser tries to render the true nature of capitalism without checks and balances that take full advantage of exploitation, oppression and social hierarchies in human societies.
Schlosser's tone is mostly critical. He presents himself as a culture critic. Even though his tone is often slightly glazed with hyperbole, he doesn't seem to portray himself as a lone crusader or an angry jihadist against the big bad American fast food corporations. His arguments are rational and wisely backed up by intelligently written premises filled with factual and historical phenomenon.
The recipe of the enormous success of the fast food industry throughout the postwar era was the idea of homogenization process of the consumer's appetite. Through some of the revolutionary marketing and business practices, the founding fathers of the fast food industry successfully assimilated American consumers into their business process. Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" unearths the untold American cultural history where conformity reigned and individualism slowly diminished. I remember being fascinated as a young boy by the popular TV series Star Trek's Borg collective and their bone-chilling sermon, "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile". As a grown up now I find myself living in a consumer society where the fast food industry has successfully manufactured a brand of consumerism that exploits our appetite, stimulates the growing disparity between and the haves and have nots and indirectly promotes American cultural imperialism throughout the globe. Interestingly enough, I find striking parallel between the fast food industry and the biological and technological terror known as the Borg Collective that made its television debut through a fictional backdrop into my childhood fantasy world.
Ray Kroc, one of the founders of McDonalds corporation, envisioned an American culture through uniformity and conformity by saying "We have found out.. that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists.... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization." (Schlosser 5). Ray Kroc's vision became reality through the success of the McDonald Corporation. But the ideas of uniformity and conformity escaped the realm of fast food industry and penetrated the fabric of our society. Communities throughout the American landscape have been assimilated into the idea of conformity. The success of the fast food industry stimulated enormous growth of other industries whose paths to success was to undermine American individualism. Many of the founding fathers of the fast food industry who chose the path of consumer conformity were originally the iconoclasts. That's the irony of this particular brand of Americanism. The revolutionary ideas of fast food franchise spawned across the nooks and crannies of our society. Eric Schlosser attempts to draw a parallel between the cultural changes of an all American Community Colorado Springs and the path to success of the fast food industry.
Both the military industrial complex and the faith based institutions have strong roots in the Colorado Spring. Both of these institutions have been influenced by the very same idea of conformity. These trends have a large negative impact on American culture, landscape and workforce. McDonald's slogan, "One Taste Worldwide," is indicative of the corporations' and most of the industry's food and workplace values -- conformity and uniformity. These values have contributed to the production of unhealthy food and shaped terrible working conditions for slaughterhouse employees, including low pay, high turnover rates and unthinkable injuries. Racism and class prejudices are also at the heart of many fast food corporations'. The fast-food giants have pioneered many of the business methods that have become mainstays of the contemporary service economy: minimizing job skills to make workers maximally expendable; almost exclusively hiring immigrants, teens and the elderly, all of whom are unlikely to complain about working conditions; juggling employee hours so no one works enough to claim benefits; lobbying fiercely against hikes in the minimum wage and the enforcement of workplace-safety rules.
The real cost of a fast food happy meal is the loss of our individualism. In order to preserve the fundamental individualistic American way of life, business practices like the fast food industry should be surveyed under the microscope. Checks and balances in a free market capitalist system is absolutely necessary to prevent profit driven agendas from devouring out fundamental humane values.
Book Review: OMG, my grandma was right, I am what I eat !
Summary: 5 Stars
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"
Book Review: Eye-opening report that will make you think twice about eating out again
Summary: 5 Stars
Not just a great book, but a life-changing book. It's been several years since I've read it, but I still cannot bring myself to eat at a McDonald's-type fast food place, for health as well as moral reasons.
Schlosser describes in great detail just what it is you support every time you give your money to a corrupt company as influential as McDonald's. They engage in a number of unhealthy and unethical practices to keep their profits at record highs. I don't want to name all of the bad policies facilitated by the fast food industry, but here are a some of the most important ones we contribute to every time we eat fast food:
* The unhygienic and inhumane treatment of cows and chickens - Animals kept in tight, enclosed spaces don't get the exercise or fresh air they need to be healthy. The natural food source of cattle is grass, yet they are fed a low quality corn meal mixed with hooves, horns, stomach lining and other cattle remains from previous slaughters. Similarly, chickens get fed some grain and the stuff left at the bottom of the cages of earlier chickens (shredded newspaper and feces) mixed with feathers, claws, beaks and other unused chicken parts. Schlosser notes that feeding animals feces and the remains of other animals have been linked to the spread of diseases like Mad Cow Disease and E. Coli.
* A substandard quality of food - Animals eating the trash mentioned above plus being pumped full of anti-biotics and hormones (to create the semblance of health) creates low quality food eaten by millions of Americans, which contributes to poor health, food poisoning and spread of disease. Not to mention that random tests at fast food places found that there are feces in your hamburger.
* Dangerous and unsanitary working conditions at meat factories and slaughterhouses - The safety standards and worker's benefits are very low at the factories where meat is processed, creating an environment with a high number of work-related injuries and little help for the injured employees. A number of meat factories bus illegal immigrants in from Mexico to work in these factories, who are provided with even fewer benefits and compensation than American workers. These unskilled laborers are frequently injured and contribute to the contamination of meat because of their low training.
* Pressure from food corporations on Congress to keep worker wages down, and consequently, profits high - Fast food companies seek to make food preparation more and more automated, to be able to hire workers and train them as little as possible. This creates an "expendable worker" and nearly unlimited supply of employees who can be easily and cheaply replaced.
Reading this book made me realize how much damage I was causing in supporting fast food restaurants and the infrastructure that uses poor people and forces low-quality and unhealthy food on us. McDonald's and the like will never get another dollar of my cash to damage this country further.
I haven't given up on meat by any means, I just make sure that I'm eating animals that were treated well, fed real food, not pumped full of antibiotics, and handled properly when slaughtered to avoid contamination. To eat any other way is just too scary to comprehend.
[Disclosure: This review also appears on FingerFlow.com, a site for review and discussion of creative works.]
Book Review: Entertaining Investigative Bestseller About the Industry
Summary: 5 Stars
When I bought this bestseller I thought it was mainly about McDonalds since it has a pictures of some McDonalds fries on the book cover, but this is not a book just about McDonald's per se, but about the industry as a whole including economics, food supplies, and the labor problems and working conditions at the restaurants and at the suppliers. The author Eric Schlosser is a journalist, an excellent writer, and does a good job at keeping our attention. Each chapter is entertaining, almost a page-turner, and he follows the 270 page main text with 100 pages of notes and comments.
There are some things that are a bit unfair about the book. I think the author goes into many issues in great detail that are only marginally related to fast food. The author uses Colorado as a case study and for example the decline of small ranches in the western plains and the economics of beef producing is only marginally tied to fast food as is the issue of mad cow disease. Similarly the author takes us step by step through a cattle slaughter house and describes possible injuries to workers, and that has almost no relationship to fast food - in my opinion - but is a general problem of the meat industry.
Having said that, what the author does with great clarity is to describe fast food operations and how the food is produced. He presents a brief history of the national chains, and discusses (not in this order) franchising, SBA financing, profit margins on things like French fries, the structure of the corporations, marketing to children, television adds aimed at children, market penetration in schools and sports, influencing - believe it or not - the textbooks in the classroom, salaries, teen workers, intentional employer induced employee turnover, migrant labor, bussing in of illegal aliens, ghettoes of illegal workers on the high plains, federal and state government financial subsidies of worker "training", crime and violence in the workplace, child labor, automation and training, standardization, economics of food production, animal wastes, political lobbying and donations to politicians, the minimum wage, and the production problems of potatoes, beef, and chicken. Of course he discusses calories and fat content. There are many interesting passages along with lots of facts and figures on the fast food business. It is all a very worthwhile read and an eye opener with some very dramatic parts.
One of the things that sticks out for myself is the relationship between the franchiser and the franchisee. I had always been under the impression that there was a fair degree of security in the purchase of a national fast food franchise. But apparently, and according to the book, there is a high degree of financial risk involved, many hours of long hard work for the franchisee, and surprisingly a high percentage go bankrupt or lose their franchises. So if you are considering such an undertaking, do your research before entering a franchise contract even with a major national name brand, and do so with some caution. It is not so rosy and your fate is tied to the fate and often the whims of the franchiser. Also, some brand names cannot provide the owner with a living wage with single fast food outlet.
Great book
Book Review: Messing with Our Food
Summary: 5 Stars
Millions of people and many organizations are actively protesting and agitating for better health care coverage and medical treatment. After reading FAST FOOD NATION I began to think that the same effort by the same groups should be castigating our fast food chains for ruining their health and making medical treatment more necessary.
This is not placing blame on the populace, but on the greed and thoughtlessness of most fast food chains and processors.
The author does not write in generalities. He names names and tells the sordid details of the food chain--especially when it comes to meat and poultry.
And food is not the only topic. You will be appalled at the working conditions of fast food workers, too. And how the original suppliers of food--the farmers and ranchers--are being forced into near servitude to the large, economically and politically powerful purveyors of fast food, whether such food is ready to eat or bought at a supermarket.
There are too many well-researched facts in this book, but I will mention a few:
1. In 1970 kids drank twice as much milk as they did soda (with 8-12 teaspoons of sugar per 12 ounces); in 2000, that was reversed.
2. Too many school districts have installed TV in classrooms and require it to be turned on daily for a period of time. The advertisers are fast food chains.
3. None of the workers at 15,000-plus McDonald's in the U.S. is represented by a union--mostly because the typical worker quits or is fired every 3-4 months! And the U.S. government (we tax payers) subsidize the training of new employees; the more they quit, the more the money rolls in.
4. Eleven years ago (what's it like today?) more fast food restaurant workers were murdered on the job in the U.S. than police officers. A great job for young people.
5. At least when this book was written, the farmer got only 2 cents out of $1.50 sale of, for example, french fries. This is basically because buyers of farm produce band together to push down the price. So, many small farmers need a second job.
6. Chicken McNuggets contain twice the fat per ounce as a hamburger--all due to processing and additives.
7. The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the U.S. is three times higher than the national average.
8. The annual cost of obesity (which rose with the popularity of the fast food chains) is now twice as large as the fast food industry's total revenues. So, the low price of fast food does not reflect its real cost (p. 261).
Is there a solution to the choke hold the fast food mentality has on our food growing and distribution system? Yes. Read the book to find out how "people can be fed without being fattened or deceived." According to the author, at least 70 percent of all adult visits to fast food chains are impulsive, not intentional. The solution to the negative effects of fast food? Just say no.
Following in this vein, you might want to see the independent film FOOD, INC. Look it up via a search engine to see when it is showing in your neck of the woods.