If you live in the suburbs long enough, you’re going to regret eating fast
food.
No, I’m not talking about those times when you inhaled a quick
burger at 10 p.m. and then had your cramping stomach wake you about six hours
later and force you to make an ape-like dash toward the commode.
I’m not even talking about how your teenaged daughter affirms
that certain of her male friends really do whiz in the lemonade when they get
really hacked off at management for, like, making them mop up and all, you
know?
No. The regret I’m talking about is altogether more profound.
This regret will slap you in the face when you read Fast Food Nation, a
recent bestseller by Eric Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic
Monthly, and a book that will not merely activate your gag reflex but will
inform you of the ways our cultural worship of expedience and haste has
frazzled our souls and endangered our well-being.
Subtitled “The Dark Side of the All-American Meal,” you
pretty much know what you’re letting yourself in for when you crack Fast
Food Nation‘s covers. The book is divided into two main sections, the
first of which details the etiology of the fast-food epidemic. More on this in
a moment.
By far more intense, though, is the second section of the book.
It’s the section that examines …
Unfortunately I can’t tell you what it examines, because I
couldn’t read beyond page 150 or so, where Schlosser starts looking at just
how the food is grown, processed, prepared, and distributed.
Artificial flavorings, megatons of potatoes, grease, cows, pigs,
chickens, growth hormones, slaughterhouses. Oh, my God, the slaughterhouses.
Schlosser goes behind the doors at one modern “meat processing
plant” and describes the efficiency with which animals are dispatched and
transformed into food. This productivity is echoed in the job titles along the
processing line: Knocker, Sticker, Shackler, Rumper, First-Legger, Knuckle-
Dropper, Navel-Boner, Feed Kill Chain.
It gets worse. I’m not talking about rumored ingredients like cow
nostrils or pig scrotums that are purported to be in modern fast food. I’m
talking about little killers like E. coli and salmonella, to name just
a couple of the microorganisms that are widely spread by high-volume meat
processing. Schlosser devotes a whole chapter to these pathogens, noting that
“the federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective
toaster oven or stuffed animal — but still lacks the power to recall tons of
contaminated, potentially lethal meat.”
As a die-hard suburbanite, I have an obligation to eat fast food.
It’s in my blood, literally, floating around in there on glops of cholesterol.
True, fast food is ubiquitous as all get-out, but it’s still a suburban
stepchild, and those of us who live in Burbland share a common ancestry and a
spiritual kinship with all foods and beverages that are bestowed upon us via a
transaction at a drive-thru window.
And I’m mighty grateful to Schlosser for helping to define this
bond, for tracing the development of the fast-food phenomenon, which he does
admirably in Part One, the section of the book that I actually could read
without my face turning the color of guacamole.
Here, Schlosser covers the beginnings of fast food, and notes
that the postwar “car culture” of the late 1940s gave rise to fast-
food franchises like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Kentucky
Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut — the whole mess of them. This nascent car culture,
spurred by Eisenhower’s development of the interstate highway system, led also
to suburbia, motels, malls, smog, and all manner of other modern afflictions.
A perfect synergy was thus established: We now had a culture with no time to
stop and eat, fed by an industry that practically required that its customers
eat without stopping.
Fast Food Nation looks at the industry’s transient work
force, most of it made up of teenagers or minorities who work for minimum wage
or less. And the author addresses “branding” and marketing schemes
that begin catering to customers barely old enough to chew solid food.
But Schlosser’s main contribution is to point out the many ways
that fast-food culture has become American culture — and vice versa. As a
logical extension of fast food’s marketing prowess, Schlosser suggests that
spreading the gospel of fast food around the world has almost single-handedly
created what we have come to call “globalization.”
As Schlosser is quick to remind us, we are indeed what we eat.
I’d like to add that we are also, to a large extent, what we read. Give
Fast Food Nation a thorough scan, but please remember what I said at
the beginning: You will regret it.
Now, somebody please pass me that squeezy thing of ketchup, will
you?
You can e-mail David Dawson at letters@memphisflyer.com.
