united states

BR>Schlosser did a fantastic job in this book showing how freeways opened up America and with that came mobile food, fast food.
Then he shows how the growth of fast food changed our eating habits, body fat ratio, advertising, the meat industry, potato farming, the flavor industry and a million other things you'd never think of- and almost all those changes not for the better.
Truly interesting and a little disturbing. Frankly I'm not sure I'll ever eat any fast food again. At least not until changes are made in the industry (mainly the cleanliness) and Schlosser even provides suggestions how we can make a difference.
My favorite part is his impartial attitude and how frank he is on the subject. He doesn't get too preachy and even admits to eating a lot of this food while writing the book. Ok, finding out the fries at Mc D's are not vegetarian was pretty cool too. Man that steamed my buddies girlfriend, HA!
I've passed this onto my fiancée and a friend as well as recommending it to anyone looking for a good, informative read.
Check it out.

I really wanted to like this book; I don't eat fast food, my parents were once (very disatisfied) franchisees of a fast-food chain, and I grew up in Colorado Springs (a city featured prominently in the book).

However, I constantly found myself staring at sentences, thinking, 'what was the point of that?' I noticed that Schlosser consistently inserts "facts" without context or content in order to make the industry appear even more insidious. For instance, in one passage, while citing the negative aspects of corporate/school advertising campaigns, he notes that "The Consumers Union found Pizza Hut's Book It! Program--which awards a free Personal Pan Pizza to children who reach targeted reading levels--to be 'highly commercial.'" That's it. There are some statistics about student participation in the program, but no explanation about what "highly commercial" means, no explanation why this program is bad. It's just name-calling. In addition, it seems that every profile of a fast food chain's founder has the inevitable comment that he is/was a contributor to the Republican party. Is this relevant at all? It's as if he's taking for granted that his audience is liberal, and if he just drops the right "code words," we'll all just nod our heads and say, "Yup, that's evil all right."

It took me a while to figure out what exactly I disliked about this book, but another reviewer here hit it right on the head: Schlosser wants us to think that this is an objective look at the industry, but in reality it's just a diatribe. I wouldn't even mind it being a diatribe if it didn't rely on cheap tricks to get a response.

Since many other reviewers cover the more repulsive details of Schlosser's book, I will stick to pointing out something I think deserves even more attention: one of the themes of the book is that the fast food industry has its tentacles in EVERY aspect of Americans' lives. Changing this goes far, far beyond bypassing a Big Mac...boycotting fast food is not the same thing as boycotting the fast food industry, when industry practices have made the USDA powerless against meatpackers, advertisers target children as consumers, and schools are taking money for corporate sponsorship.

This a fantastic book and it touches on a lot of areas that I don't normally think of relating to fast food, such as the plight of abused migrant workers in the slaughterhouses and the economics of teen labor. Everybody should read it, even if you never eat fast food, because you're affected too.