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Whistle Stopper - Fast Food Nation
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $5.00
Your Save: $ 9.95 ( 67% )
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Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.10973
EAN: 9780060838584
ISBN: 0060838582
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2005-07-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2005-07-05
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good info, still eating McDonalds though
Comment: Well we all know more or less the content but I am still eating fast food. If you change what you are eating you are just fooling yourself. We all know fast food is bad, but tastes good.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Informative & Entertaining, But A Little Off-Target
Comment: According to this book, slaughterhouses are unpleasant places to work, and often injury-prone. Eric Schlosser relates some anecdotes and statistical data to back this observation up, among others of similar obviousness.
It's interesting, to read about the meat packing industry, or the development of mass-produced frozen french fries. I'm glad I did. But what all of this does *not* amount to is a savage, or well-developed, indictment of the fast food industry.
Instead, Schlosser presents a world with almost an endless supply of villains, only a few of which are actually a Wendy's, Subway, or Burger King. The meat-packers promote line-speed over the safety of their workers; agri-business colludes to keep the prices down of their growers; scientists design food-additives with unpronounceable (and, therefore, scary) names; advertising agencies target our children; machinists design equipment that increase efficiency, making work more and more unskilled; governments work in collusion with private industry, opening up our schools to advertisements; etc. Perhaps the meat-packing industry has developed in the way it has to take advantage of the fast food industry's explosive popularity and subsequent demands. And, yes, Schlosser makes the point that fast food execs could "insist on changes" in their supplier industries (and, in fact, sometimes they do). But on the whole, the problems that Schlosser finds in these industries are general problems that can be found throughout nearly all large industries, and the world over.
He finds a young, un-unionized work-force. He finds robberies and crime. He finds unsanitary working conditions. He finds communities changing, and losing their one-time local identities. He finds workplace injuries. He finds the threat of disease. He finds poverty. He finds incompetent government bureaucracies. He finds greedy executives, and children swayed by targeted advertising.
But these are not problems of fast food alone, and they cannot all be laid at the doorstep of Ray Kroc. Indeed, often fast food comes out more of the hero in this book than not; it provides higher quality meat than our school's cafeterias and employs the young and minority workers who might not otherwise be able to find jobs. The fast food companies, themselves, wind up curbing the worst excesses of the industries that market to them. And because they are so sensitive to market pressures, we find that McDonalds spearheads efforts to "go green," or eliminate genetically modified food, even when not prompted by social campaigns or legislation (even if Schlosser never feels that they go far enough).
I'm sad to hear of the rancher who commits suicide due to market pressures working against independent cattlemen such as himself. But the connection between that rancher's depression, and Carl Karcher's decision to expand from Hot Dog carts to restaurants is... slender, at best, and probably, actually, non-existent. In the end, the litany of problems that Schlosser identifies in this book are often horrible, I'll agree, but they are problems that are endemic to large-scale human organization, in both the public and private sector, and the reality of modern-day economics. (And some of the "problems" aren't even really problems, such as the racial integration of Colorado Springs and other mid-west communities, brought about by the low-skill job opportunities presented by McDonalds, et al.; Schlosser links such immigration to rises in crime, etc., but that seems to me to be a fairly close-minded attitude, and close to bigotry.)
This is a well-written and fascinating book, filled with tid-bits of history that I wouldn't have learned otherwise, and I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars. But, as an "expose" on the fast food industry, it falls short, and cannot reach to the fifth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but read carefully
Comment: This is an interesting in depth analyses of how the fast food industry has infiltrated every aspect of our society. However, read it carefully. The author mixes various economic supply chain efficiencies with unethical business practices and bunches them all together in one big scornful shame. The fact that this particular industry has reduced friction of the supply chain through standardization, economies of scale, automation and high tech systems seems problematic to him. He intermingles these things with the lack of government regulation in the industry and how these corporations exploit the uneducated masses. He seems very pro-government and anti-business in many cases, but not always.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nearly Delicious
Comment: Eric Schlosser is an investigator and a journalist. In Fast Food Nation, he explains to the readers both how the fast food industry came to be, and how fast food has badly affected the American culture and those of countries overseas.
Schlosser writes as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. In Fast Food Nation, he takes the viewpoint of a jounalist, naturally. Schlosser sheds light on the problems behind the fast food industry: cheap labor, unsafe conditions, and obesity, to name a few. His book contains two sections, one on its history and one on its effects. Section 1 covers the histories of various fast food companies, while Section 2 mainly focuses on the truth behind what you are eating (that is, the meat and potatoes), but also on the global effects of fast food.
Schlosser does an almost excellent job at showing everything the American people need to know, but there are a few small problems. He uses shocking statistics, terrible situations, and horrifying truths to make each and every reader remember exactly what he or she has just read. With all this schocking information, Schlosser somewhat, at times, loses his viewpoint a little bit. In between giving his harsh statistics, he has many smaller stories. Some explain a man's history. Others explain a rural town and its history. All of this history becomes a little bit tedious. A few times, I felt more as if I were reading a school textbook than an astounding book on fast food.
In Fast Food Nation, the statistics are simply unbelieveable. In the back of the book is its sources, so I felt better trusting the information. On the down side, the writing occasionally tends to soften; but on the plus side, the solid, factual, and extremely shocking information in this book is ultimately the only aspect that one would remember after reading this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Frequenty and Severely Drifts Off Target
Comment: I've taught this book for several years, and over time have realized that the title is quite misleading. Or the content is. Consider: the book is ostensibly a critique of the history/influence/fallout of the fast-food industry in the US. However, much of the book has little to do with this.
For example, one large section focuses on the coloring/flavoring industry, which can be seen, the author notes, in every supermarket. This is a characteristic of the entire food and cosmetics and toiletries industry, not just fast food.
The sections on meatpacking plants are harrowing, indeed. But then I realized this applies to the entire supermarket/restaurant industry, not just fast food. So what's it doing here?
Similarly, the sections on agribusiness, disheartening though they may be, reflect the business practices of this entire section of the US economy, not simply those parts used by fast food. So the detailed discussion of this, though it is fascinating, does not uniquely illuminate fast food.
There are other examples, but you get the idea. Overall, there's a lot of interesting research, well-presented, but rather than calling is Fast Food Nation, it would be more accurate to title it simply Food Nation.
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Editorial Reviews:
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On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat. Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed
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