Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
Is it possible to spoil non-fiction?
As always with this kind of book it is important to read it with a pinch of salt, not because the claims made in the book are likely to be untrue necessarily (after all, very few publishers want to be sued) but because they only portray one side of the story, and usually focus on the most negative aspects of the issue. This is true of this book, but it seems that there are, in fact, a lot of negative aspects about the fast food trade.
In the first part of the book Schlosser describes the early history of the fast food trade, and narrates the rise of a few of the companies: the rapid expansion, the use of assembly line procedures in the kitchen, which reduced the skills needed, and the evolution of just-another-burger-bar, cheap enough that working class families could take their children to a restaurant for a meal, into the corporations we see today. Although he does devote a section of the book to the impact this is having on Americans, it is fairly uncontroversial (fast food is unhealthy, Americans are getting fatter, workers in these restaurants are paid minimum wage and recieve few benefits) although the stories he tells about incidents in the restaurants are quite shocking, and there are some new bits of information: for example, how common robberies of fast food places are, and how often these robberies are carried out by their own staff, and result in one or more deaths.
The main flaw with this book, for those of us not living in the US, is that most of the research he has done cannot be directly applied to other countries. There is a chapter on the increase of fast food outlets in other countries, and some of the possible implications, but it is not clear if the scandals he is recording as happening in the USA are happening elsewhere.
The most critical scandal, is meat processing. The second half of the book focuses on the provenance of the products sold by these chains, and this is the area which Schlosser has real issues with. The raising and slaughter of cattle and poultry and the packing of the meat, in the US at least, is, according to Schlosser, unsafe. Workers are frequently injured, maimed or killed, the animals are treated inhumanely, and the meat produced is frequently not fit for human consumption but is sold anyway.
For more details, read the book of course. It concludes with an epilogure written after the Mad Cow Disease headlines of a few years ago, and over 50 pages of notes and references, so if you are, like good sceptics, wondering how biased he is, you can go have a look and find out.
Copyright: 2002
Read it if: You're interested in what goes on around you and willing to take things with a pinch of salt
Don't if: You're planning to eat a burger any time soon or you have a sensitive stomach
Rating: Very interesting
As always with this kind of book it is important to read it with a pinch of salt, not because the claims made in the book are likely to be untrue necessarily (after all, very few publishers want to be sued) but because they only portray one side of the story, and usually focus on the most negative aspects of the issue. This is true of this book, but it seems that there are, in fact, a lot of negative aspects about the fast food trade.
In the first part of the book Schlosser describes the early history of the fast food trade, and narrates the rise of a few of the companies: the rapid expansion, the use of assembly line procedures in the kitchen, which reduced the skills needed, and the evolution of just-another-burger-bar, cheap enough that working class families could take their children to a restaurant for a meal, into the corporations we see today. Although he does devote a section of the book to the impact this is having on Americans, it is fairly uncontroversial (fast food is unhealthy, Americans are getting fatter, workers in these restaurants are paid minimum wage and recieve few benefits) although the stories he tells about incidents in the restaurants are quite shocking, and there are some new bits of information: for example, how common robberies of fast food places are, and how often these robberies are carried out by their own staff, and result in one or more deaths.
The main flaw with this book, for those of us not living in the US, is that most of the research he has done cannot be directly applied to other countries. There is a chapter on the increase of fast food outlets in other countries, and some of the possible implications, but it is not clear if the scandals he is recording as happening in the USA are happening elsewhere.
The most critical scandal, is meat processing. The second half of the book focuses on the provenance of the products sold by these chains, and this is the area which Schlosser has real issues with. The raising and slaughter of cattle and poultry and the packing of the meat, in the US at least, is, according to Schlosser, unsafe. Workers are frequently injured, maimed or killed, the animals are treated inhumanely, and the meat produced is frequently not fit for human consumption but is sold anyway.
For more details, read the book of course. It concludes with an epilogure written after the Mad Cow Disease headlines of a few years ago, and over 50 pages of notes and references, so if you are, like good sceptics, wondering how biased he is, you can go have a look and find out.
Copyright: 2002
Read it if: You're interested in what goes on around you and willing to take things with a pinch of salt
Don't if: You're planning to eat a burger any time soon or you have a sensitive stomach
Rating: Very interesting