Fast Food Nation
The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
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Price:
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$18.99
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On Sale:
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23/06/2005
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Formats:
Trade PB
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Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled 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 California's subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he 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.
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Author Extras
Reading Guides:
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Critical Praise for
Fast Food Nation
"The rise of the junk-food culture that has overwhelmed the U.S. and is now taking over the world is an astonishing tale - a saga of incredible business acumen, canny marketing and sheer home-grown American ingenuity. The amazing history of the Big Mac and all the other culinary abominations is told in Eric Schlosser's startling new book, Fast Food Nation.
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“Far from a strident vegan screed, Fast Food Nation is a thoughtful and balanced piece of journalism.”
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“A fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist.”
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New York Times Book Review
“Eric Schlosser may be the Upton Sincair for thsi age of mad-cow disease. . . . A flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of statling facts. . . . Fast Food Nation points the way but, to resurrect an old fast-food slogan, the choice is yours.”
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Los Angeles Times
“His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare. This is John McPhee behind the counter.”
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Washington Post
“A passionately argued, incendiary polemic. . . . Schlosser may be the Upton Sinclair for this age of mad-cow disease. With a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts, Schlosser’s tale of starch and fury ranges from the strategic defense enclave of NORAD to the grim interiors of meat packing plants.”
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Los Angeles Times Book Review
“God strike me dead before I consume another fast food product…This stuff reads like Upton Sinclair’s 1906 classic, The Jungle.”
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Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
“This year, Americans will spend more money on fast food than on higher education…Schlosser shows how the fast food industry conquered both appetite and landscape.”
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The New Yorker
“An exemplary blend of polemic and journalism…A tale full of sound, fury, and popping grease.”
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Kirkus Review (starred review)
‘An elegaic expose of how burger, fries and sodas came to symbolize America…[Schlosser] gives enough gruesome details to titillate the casual reader, but he has a far bigger bone to pick with the whole industry of instant gratification.’
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New York Times Book Review
"All children who can read should be issued a copy of Eric Schloser's Fast Food Nation. Also all adults, so that makes just about everybody. Here is an in-depth, hard-hitting work of investigative journalism that carries the seeds of social change. If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book if for you...now put down this paper and go by the book."
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Globe & Mail
"...Schlosser revives the best of the muckraking tradition"
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Columbia Journalism Review
"God strike me dead before I consume another fast-fod product, be it pizza, hamburgers or chicken tenders. My culinary fervor results from reading Fast Food Nation...What makes Fast Food Nation so effective is that Schlosser modulates his outrage, fitting it to his various targets...Many books that detail the nation's dreadful diet bray in a tone of strident hysteria about the corporate world's deliberate scheming to deprive children's brains of vital nutrients...Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need of government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions."
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Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
"[Fast Food Nation is] an engrossing look into this segment of the victuals business...Overall, this disturbing page-turner will almost certainly curb your appetite."
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Business Week
"This is a frightening vision. Schlosser aims to do what the best social criticism has always done: draw connections between the familiar and the unfamiliar,alerting us that much of what we take for granted in out comfortable lives is anything but natural, inevitable and innocuous. Schlosser demands that we think seriously about the consequences of the way we produce and eat food, as other social observers this century have demanded that we scrutinize sex, family, life, education, television or the automobile. This is a book for all of us....Fast Food Nation is quite up to its stated goal: forcing us to stop for a moment and reflect on our own actions.
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In These Times
"Man is everywhere in chains - global franchise chains that will do pretty much anything it takes to save a half cent on a pound of pork or potatoes and toe no line that contradicts cut-throat market forces. Schlosser could do for the fast food industry what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for producers of presticides."
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The Times (London)
"Eric Schlossers book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. Fast Food Nation is witness to rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done."
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The Daily Telegraph, UK
"This is a book every adult consumer needs to read."
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The Daily Oklahoman
"Over the past 30 years, when I haven't been eating, drinking and living to tell the tale, I've been teaching journalism....I find myself wondering if, by the next century, people teaching the same profession I tried to teach will pay homage not upon Upton Sinclair's The Jungle but to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation... Appearing almost a century apart, Schlosser's current best selller and Sinclair's muckraking have a long list of things in common. Both books are fanatically researched (I've always told my students that if their facts were wrong, not a whole lot else can save them). Both books are sweeping in their linkage of aberrant greed to mistreatment of products and, by inevitable extension, animals and people... And finally, both books have a clear and compelling agenda, one that blends a checklist of politicized calls to action with an anguished cry from the heart. That's what separates historical political thought from the tireless droning of politicians...What the author does in these pages is look at the biggest picture imaginable. He tabulates the actual cost to life and culture (food-borne disease, near-global obesity, animal abuse, political corruption, worksite danger) of an all-American industry founded on the premise and promise of cheap. If we should decide as a nation to use Schlosser's math, even the richest people on Earth can't afford that $1.99 combo meal."
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Houston Chronicle
"Fast Food Nation...Enough to make a vegetarian out of Arnold Schwarzenegger."
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Seattle Weekly
"Compelling reading...Schlosser's reserach should give all Americans something tough to chew on."
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--Christian Science Monitor
"A new book - Fast Food Nation , by American journalist Eric Schlosser - has lifted the polystyrene lid on the fast food industry. It is meticulously researched and powerfully argued."
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The Observer
"A reasoned attack on the fast-food culture...In the best muckraking tradition. It's hard not to agree with his thesis that the fast-food phenomenon has gone haywire--and that it didn't have to be this way."
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Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek
"Eric Schlosser's compelling new book, "Fast Food Nation," will not only make you think twice before eating your next hamburger, but it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on the American social and cultural landscape: how it has affected practices from ranching and farming to diets and health, from marketing and labor practices to larger economic trends...a fierce indictment of the industry."
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International Herald Tribune
"Fast Food Nation is investigative journalism of a very high order. And the fit between the author's reporting and his narrative style is just about perfect."
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Newsday
"Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser's clinical (and totally readable) dissection of the fast food industry leans a molotov cocktail at the centre of a business which is in the vanguard of globalisation, which has in fact become an icon for the worldwide triumph of capitalism. his case is persuasive because it is based on the thorough reserach and delivered in a measured tone."
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The Straits Times (Singapore)
"The objective of the fast-food industry is to make mindless, repetitive consumers out of us--to reduce our autonomy in eating and cooking--and to a large extent, it has succeeded. In the process, it is denaturing food and increasing out disconnect with the processes by which it is grown, harvested, supplied, and eaten. Fast Food Nation is not the diatribe of yet another health food advocate against the nutritional deiciencies of fast food: it is a multifacited examination of the whole phenomenon....Schlosser documents this process with the meticulous passion of a historian....This book has the potential to turn a couch potato into an activist. Certainly, it will be hard to look at a Happy Meal with much happiness once you've read it.
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The American Prospect
"Sit down for half an hour with Eric Schlosser's treatise, Fast Food Nation, for example, and you will experience the best diet plan ever devised."
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Sunday Herald
"The wide-ranging look at an all-pervasive industry should give readers ample food for thought and send the scouring for alternatives...But there is a lot more to a fast food meal than meets the eye, as Eric Schlosser shows in his riveting look behind the scenes at an industry that makes billions of dollars every day, all over the world and targets children so effectively.
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The Straits Times (Singapore)
"[Fast Food Nation] should be required reading wherever Ronald McDonald makes an appearance."
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The Express
"This illuminating, detailed study of the fast food industry which is just as profound as it is witty, Schlosser has done for the fast food industry what Upton Sinclair did nearly a century ago with his investigation of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle. If you've ever wanted to know
what's really in that burger, or how it got to your table, then Schlosser's book offers answers to these an other questions in this highly informative expose of fast food and the industry."
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Korea Times
"Schlosser makes a compelling argument that it was the burger barons who invented globalization, the branding of commodities that now threatens to turn the world into one big suburb...Schlosser pulls together a thesis guaranteed to make you lose your appetite...Shame on you Ronald.
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The Toronto Star
"Far from a strident vegan creed, Fast Food Nation is a thoughful and balanced piece of journalism."
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LA Weekly
"Fast Food Nation is a must read for any thinking American."
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The Sunday Gazette Mail
"A book like Fast Food Nation is long overdue. Eric Schlosser writes clearly and passionately about appalling working conditions, the waste of enormous stretches of range and crop land, the effects of food-borne illnesses on children, and harsh economic realities in this age of the mega-corporation. Like a modern-day Upton Sinclair (his 1906 classic novel, The Jungle, exposed the horror of the Chicago stockyards), Schlosser's primary concern is people...Perhaps one day we'll be able to look back on this period of history and marvel at how so many of us were led by the nose to feed at the same unhealthy trough. Fast Food Nation may very well bring that day closer."
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The Gazette
"In this well written and thoroighly researched work...there is much more to Schlosser's story than greasy food and the blandly uniform environments where it is prepared and sold. Fast Food Nation identifies the rise of fast food as part of a larger trend--call it Disneyfication, McWorld or the like--in which practically 'every aspect of American life had a corporate sponsor.'"
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The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)
"Powerfull words and [a] persuasive expose of the fast-food industry...a movement to put other priorities before those of the market is--slowly a fitfully--growing. Fast Food Nation, with its package of solid research and engaging narrative, is an invaluable tool for this movement."
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San Diego Union Tibune
"The portrait in Fast Food Nation is clearly of a market out of balance. Much like in the early years of the past century, when Upton Sinclair's The Jungle lef to Theodore Roosevelt's regulatory reforms, "Fast Food Nation" should be another wake-up call, a super-size serving of common sense."
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Atlanta Journal & Constitution
“This is a book about America’s stomach. It is a chronicle of a revolution in the exonomy and gastronomy of the United States that while universally visible has been scantly examined. If you are what you eat, for much of America this book is your anatomical protrait.”
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The Baltimore Sun
“Schlosser is a talented storyteller, and his reportorial skills are considerable....Fast Food Nation will put the most readers off burgers and fries for a good long time, if not forever.”
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Hartford Courant
“During this examination, Schlosser wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word ‘dunce’...economics ignoramus...banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid...health fascist...Fast Food Nation describes the meat industry in terms that make The Jungle read like a puff piece from the National Beef Council. He’s probably right...hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state.”
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National Review
“Superb and wonderfully horrifying....”
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San Francisco Gate
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