Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Dayton Public Library | 394.10973 SCHLOSSER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Amity Public Library | 394.109 SCHLOSSER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Library | 394.1 SCH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lyons Public Library | 641.01 SCH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 394.12 Schlosser, E. 2001 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sheridan Public Library | 394.1 Schlosser | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Silver Falls Library | 394.109 SCHLOSSER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Are we what we eat?
To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar Amerca. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.
Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from the California subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. He hangs out with the teenagers who make the restaurants run and communes with those unlucky enough to hold America's most dangerous job -- meatpacker. He travels to Las Vegas for a giddily surreal franchisers' convention where Mikhail Gorbachev delivers the keynote address. He even ventures to England and Germany to clock the rate at which those countries are becoming fast food nations.
Along the way, Schlosser unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate. He also uncovers the fast food chains' efforts to reel in the youngest, most susceptible consumers even while they hone their institutionalized exploitation of teenagers and minorities. Schlosser then turns a critical eye toward the hot topic of globalization -- a phenomenon launched by fast food.
FAST FOOD NATION is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.
Author Notes
Eric Schlosser, a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly, won a National Magazine Award for an article he wrote on strawberry picking for that magazine. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A tale full of sound, fury, and popping grease. Fattening up a controversial article published in Rolling Stone in 1999, Schlosser considers all the ways in which fast food has lessened the quality of life in America. His chief objection is not that it tastes badfar from it, he insists, going on to examine, for instance, why McDonalds fries (lauded by the likes of Julia Child and James Beard) are so irresistible. (The beef extract helps. Dont tell your vegetarian friends.) Neither is it the fact that fast food, on which Americans will have spent more than $110 billion in 2000 (as against $6 billion in 1970), has resulted in an appallingly obese population in a country where fresh food is scarce but chemical-laden victuals are easily had. Schlosser rightly decries these developments, which he calls the McDonaldization of the planet (wherever Americas fast food chains go, waistlines start expanding). But what seems to bother him most is the absolute accessibility of fast food hereand, increasingly, throughout the world as well, inasmuch as for every fast-food restaurant that opens in the US, four more open abroad. Fast food, Schlosser writes, is now served at restaurants and drive-throughs, at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even at hospital cafeterias. This ubiquity spreads beyond the eatery: many nonfood businesses, notably The Gap, have thrived by following the fast-food model of simplicity, uniformity, and replicability, so that a storefront in Tuscaloosa is no different from one in Toronto or Taipei. It all ends, Schlosser suggests, in a grim and gray world in which the corporate is triumphant, and quality finds no home. An exemplary blend of polemic and journalism, guaranteed to put you off your lunch. Author tour
Booklist Review
Everyone frets about the nutritional implications of excessive dining at America's fast-food emporia, but few grasp the significance of how fast-food restaurants have fundamentally changed the way Americans eat. Schlosser documents the effects of fast food on America's economy, its youth culture, and allied industries, such as meatpacking, that serve this vast food production empire. Starting with a young woman who makes minimum wage working at a Colorado fast-food restaurant, Schlosser relates the oft-told story of Ray Kroc's founding of McDonald's. The author also tells about the development of the franchise method of business ownership and the health and nutrition implications of fast-food consumption. In a striking chapter, Schlosser gives a glimpse into the little-known world of chemically engineered flavorings, both natural and artificial. The coming together of so many diverse social, scientific, and economic trends in a single industry makes this book a relevant, compelling read and a cautionary tale of the many risks generated by this ubiquitous industry. --Mark Knoblauch
Library Journal Review
You will never want to eat a fast-food meal again after reading this groundbreaking work about the fast-food industry, from its beginnings to the present day. It assesses how the food is processed and the lack of food safety overall. (LJ 2/1/01) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
I The American Way | |
1 The Founding Fathers | p. 13 |
2 Your Trusted Friends | p. 31 |
3 Behind the Counter | p. 59 |
4 Success | p. 91 |
II Meat and Potatoes | |
5 Why the Fries Taste Good | p. 111 |
6 On the Range | p. 133 |
7 Cogs in the Great Machine | p. 149 |
8 The Most Dangerous Job | p. 169 |
9 What's in the Meat | p. 193 |
10 Global Realization | p. 225 |
Epilogue: Have It Your Way | p. 255 |
Afterword: The Meaning of Mad Cow | p. 271 |