Fast Food Nation

Synopsis
Fast food has revolutionized the way Americans eat and work—and not in a good way.

My thoughts
Is it bad that more than anything else I just wanted to eat the fries on the cover?

There was a lot of buzz around this book when it was first published 14 years ago, and I think I simply came too late to the party to be outraged by this book. The indictments of the fast food industry seem stale now. Big business discourages unions?! Well ... duh. Fast food chains use unskilled teenage workers?! Have you ever been to a McDonald's? They market their evil, anti-nutrition agenda directly to innocent, unsuspecting children?! Yeah, Happy Meals were certainly a part of my all-American childhood and I turned out okay.

Fourteen years is a long time and the world is a different place now—perhaps in part because of this book. There's a trend toward healthy fast food and away from putting Burger Kings in schools. Small, independent farms are certainly still an endangered species, but it's become trendy to eat locally raised food that comes directly from the source. If this book contributed to the recent focus on healthy eating and increased physical activity, especially for children, then I'm glad people have taken Eric Schlosser's message to heart. And Schlosser does raise some very important points about workplace safety and food safety that have not been addressed. Government oversight of the way our food is raised, prepared, and sold is hopelessly underfunded and ineffective. But I can't raise my own food and I have to eat something. So I will simply continue to do what I've always done—keeping my kitchen clean, washing my hands frequently, washing fruits and veggies carefully, and limiting the utensils that come into contact with raw meat. This book didn't scare me away from fast food, either. I don't eat it very often—just a few times a year—and that won't change.

Something about the way the book was written rubbed me the wrong way. The tone was very sensational—look at the downtrodden fast food worker! the victim of horrific food poisoning! the immigrant working in perilous conditions in a meat packing plant!—yet I was unable to connect to any of them emotionally. And that meant I wasn't able to get all worked up over the issues that were raised in the book. This was a heavily researched product, but I felt at times that Schlosser picked and chose his data and stats to make his conclusions seem more damning.

Bottom line
Underwhelming.

Fine print
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
Genre: current events
Photo from Goodreads
I owned this book.