They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music - combined. The fast-food industry affected the way people grow food as well because a demand for large quantities of raw products emerged and so it became necessary for the producers to be able to produce as much food as humanly possible. But as compared with what does it taste “pretty good”? “A 50 percent drop in meat and poultry industry injury rates in a single year would be implausible,” the report noted, “but reaching back six years creates an impressive but fictitious improvement in plant safety.”. The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The Question and Answer section for Fast Food Nation is a great Sadly, that is not the case. In the ninth chapter, Schlosser visits a slaughter house and he remains moved by the conditions in which the employees work but also by the way the cattle are treated. Classifieds | A hamburger and french fries became the quintessential American meal in the 1950s, thanks to the promotional efforts of the fast food chains. Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases. It can detect the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that More than a decade has passed since Fast Food Nation was published, and I’d love to report that the book is out of date, that the many problems it describes have been solved, and that the Golden Arches are now the symbol of a fallen empire, like the pyramids at Giza. He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing Aside from the salad greens and tomatoes, most fast food is delivered to the restaurant already Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. In addition to declaring solidarity, the fast-food industry could make changes to protect the health and safety of black employees. The whole experience is transitory and soon forgotten. Schlosser then looks at a young college student working for Little Cesar. Well, taken in moderation, fast food is undoubtedly harmless, and only marginally less healthful than the food served at the family-run diners of old. ConAgra voluntarily recalled almost 19 million pounds of potentially contaminated meat, less than a month’s worth of production at Greeley. The complex has its own underground fitness center, a medical clinic, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, a chapel, and a cafeteria. I certainly didn’t expect that it would still be in print more than a decade later. Sports | A nation’s diet can be more revealing Its generators can produce enough electricity to power a city the size of Tampa, Florida. Schlosser points out that the moment McDonald started targeting children marked the beginning of a new era when businesses saw children as potential buyers and began to advertise excessively to them. Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. The first edition of the novel was published in January 17th 2001, and was written by Eric Schlosser. The extraordinary growth of Colorado Springs neatly parallels that of the fast food industry: during the last few decades, the city’s many American workers enjoyed their first pay raises in a generation, the real value of wages in the restaurant industry continued to fall. Site Index | In middle school, my field hockey team ate at a fast food restaurant after every away game. Nobody wants to eat them. On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of the McDonaldization of America. The Food Network has turned cooking into a form of mass entertainment and transformed people who cook well into celebrities. (which offers one in 15 Americans entrée into the workforce), Schlosser used “fast food” as the basis for a rhetorical assault on capitalism. And by some odd coincidence, the annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic—about $168 billion, as calculated by researchers at Emory University—is the same as the amount of money Americans spent on fast food in 2011. oak, and ponderosa pine. Magdalena, Micola, et al. A few years later the AMI claimed that “recordable injuries” had actually fallen by 70 percent, thanks to the meatpacking industry’s concern for worker safety. Moreover, the extraordinary growth The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization that campaigns on behalf of migrant farm workers in Florida, has persuaded the leading fast-food chains—after years of protests—to help raise the wages and improve the working conditions in the fields there. Ever since the administration of President Richard Nixon, the fast food industry has worked closely with its allies in Congress and the White House to oppose new worker safety, food safety, and minimum wage laws. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center tracks every For Schlosser, there restaurants are partly to blame for the rise in obesity and other disease related with a bad diet. influence on American life. Farmers and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land. Nor does the litany of evils end there. Diversions | One of the nation’s most important military But harassment at McDonald’s appears to be of a different degree. Also around that time, the restaurant owners began to advertise and promote their restaurants to children since they could convince their parents to spend more money in more place than another and they also started to sell small toys with their food. Afterword copyright 2012 by Eric Schlosser. Schlosser starts with McDonalds that for him marks the start of a new era and trend in the food industry and that he noted that the middle-class and the working class are the ones more predisposed to consuming more fast-food. Houghton Mifflin. the organization. The typical teenager sees about five. It took place during a period when the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage declined by about 40 percent, when sophisticated mass In other cases (such as the rise of franchising and the spread of obesity) fast food has played a more central role. Weather | This is a question Schlosser is unequipped to answer, and perhaps even to ask, though it would lead to a much more nuanced and interesting discussion of the pros and cons of a fast-food nation. Services | Fast food is heavily marketed to children and prepared by people who are barely older than children. The number of fast-food ads … Dave was a former NHL player forced to retire after a freak accident. The claim was made in an AMI pamphlet commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Jungle’s publication. officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each; they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. Americans, both as workers and consumers. Fast Food Nation The restaurant industry is now America’s largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages. During the economic boom of the 1990s, when Today it The industry-friendly policies of the Bush administration also reduced government oversight of worker safety. Fast Food Nation is piled high with anecdotes and served with a fat helping of skewed data. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years. “Greed” is the ingredient that gives Fast Food Nation its flavor. In this respect, the fast-food companies represent, for Schlosser, the capitalist system run amok, rendering moot the conventional wisdom of supply and demand and making brainwashed addicts of us all. International | The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteen Fast Food Nation was my first book, and I had no idea whether anyone would care to read it. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is fighting against wage theft, racism, and the abuse of workers in the restaurant industry. Automobiles | Throughout the United States, parents are working to kick fast food, junk food, and soda out of their children’s schools. I do not mean to suggest that fast food is solely responsible for every social problem now haunting the United States. Ten years after his seminal book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser reflects on how little has changed in the production, safety, and consumption in America—but why he’s still hopeful. of a plastic tray full of food wrapped in colored paper and cardboard. Today, argues Schlosser, the fast-food industry is responsible for, or at least symptomatic of, a host of societal ills. The McDonald’s Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. We have found out . McDonald saw an opportunity in this and began buying potatoes from him. What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand. Professional rabble-rousers like Schlosser pretend to care about those poorer than them — just like Schlosser pretends to care about the facts. low-paid and unskilled workforce. Many publications put it on year-end lists of the “best books of 2001” — resulting in renewed interest. The industry is, it seems, largely responsible for obesity, for dangerous levels of contaminants in our meat supply, for failing to maintain workplace safety, and for high rates of suicide among cattle ranchers. It can also satisfy particular cravings for fat, sugar, and salt. demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply. Schlosser says he doesn’t eat “ground beef anymore,” but not because he’s “worried about getting sick from it; I’m pissed off at the corporate greed.” He blasts McDonald’s for reaping in “17 cents in pure profit” on every large Coke it sells, assuming that the sort of people who buy his book (at a profit to the author) will be disgusted by the notion of making money. being replaced by gigantic corporate farms with absentee owners. The only Americans who consistently earn a lower hourly wage are migrant farm workers. The Dark Side of the All-American Meal for this book because the changes that have recently swept through the city are emblematic of those that fast food - and the fast food mentality - have encouraged throughout the United States. It is a pity Schlosser’s mind is so relentlessly preoccupied by politics, and a callow politics at that. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have Elitists have always looked down at fast food, criticizing how it tastes and regarding it as another tacky manifestation of American popular culture. And as fast food spreads beyond these shores and throughout the industrialized world, other nations are rapidly falling prey to the same ills. Starting from that point, the ever-growing population attracted more businesses and fast-food restaurants began to appear along the highways.