Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation is a book that stays with you for a while. It's a revealing and fascinating look at the restaurant and agricultural practices in A... (show more)

Fast Food Nation is a book that stays with you for a while. It's a revealing and fascinating look at the restaurant and agricultural practices in America, and to some degree, around the world.

You can break down the book into sections, all of which are really interesting - the origins and rise of the fast food restaurant, how advertising targets kids, slaughterhouses, childhood obesity as related to fast food, and then there's a new afterword that hits on mad cow, BSE and vCJD.

While Schlosser does show some deserved respect to the entrepreneurs who kicked off the rise of the fast food industry, it's pretty safe to say that he paints a fairly negative picture. And yeah, deservedly so, in a lot of cases.

Food safety in the US, run by the USDA and FDA does seem to be a joke. Bureaucrats and politicians seem far more beholden to agribusiness and lobbyists than they ever care about the health and safety of the American citizen, the consumer. They're weak, ineffectual and even when they do good work, they're hamstrung by the politicians who run the system. Just like Dick Cheney had the energy CEOs write America's energy policy for the last 8 years, agribusiness all but dictates its regulatory bodies. Inane and systematically dysfunctional. Needing a thorough and complete overhaul.

The targeting of the kid demographic through the various forms of advertising he details in the book is just, well, the banality of evil, actually. In the words of the immortal Bill Hicks -

"...if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you... There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show."

- sorry for the tangent. But it's true. Advertising has long since abandoned the idea of showing you how a good product can fill a meaningful need in your life and has since become a way to target market demographics and figure out a way to manipulate you into buying cheaply made crap you don't need. And FFN shows you many an example, in great detail, of how soulless and screw up that whole process is. And it's targeted in a lot of cases, at kids, those whose brainpans are fully formed enough to know how it is they're being manipulated.

Life in the slaughterhouses seems amazingly screwed up, in terms of worker safety and food quality. Sanitation sounds horrible. Breeding grounds for both disease and for taking advantage of desperate immigrant labor. There's blood, corpses, fecal matter and all sorts of crap that animals were never intended to eat being force fed to them in their "feed" just so they get fattened up all the quicker. Workers health care and worker's comp seems atrocious. You can read one harrowing, depressing story here - the tale of Kenny Dobbins who once worked for the Montfort Beef Company and a few others.

Where I don't quite get on board with the author is that he seems to think that the answer to all these problems are more regulations and more politics. I don't know that I buy that. To some extent, sure. You absolutely need some regulation.

But in one of his own examples in the book, he points out that the most effective and rapid change in safety measures took effect not because of new government regulation, but because the major buyer of ground beef in the US - McDonald's - demanded more stringent requirements from the producers. And McDonald's did so in response to the pressures and demands brought on it by its consumers. It's complex and complicated, but economics seems more effective in a lot of cases than the convenient, feel good, quick fix of a new law on the books.

At the same time, you can't trust the corporations and the "free market" completely. The market, if it were truly free, would make no hesitation to have child labor, 75 hour work weeks and, well, slavery. The screwed up thing is that corporations, by their definition, must maximize profit for shareholders. And as history, and a lot of examples in the book show, they will gladly sacrifice quality, the safety of its workers and customers, and damn near anything else in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. And the legal structure of the corporation let's them make all these decisions while effectively removing any responsibility or culpability. Private profit, amortized and nonexistent risk or responsibility. That's what corporations are designed to do. The system is really screwed up.

In terms of dealing with the omnipresent and insidious advertising, he goes on and on about advertising bans and new regulations preventing the targeting of advertising at kids. See, his heart is in the right place, but... no. Just no. Ignoring the fact that I hate limits on free speech, and I despise abridging freedoms, even of soul-sucking advertising agencies, in the name of "for the children" - the bottom line is that you do not make things better by trying to soften the world, you make it better by making your kids harder. You don't try to smooth out, foam pad and nerf all of existence so your precious and wonderful children can be "safe" from the big, bad world - you teach your kids how to be smarter, brighter, tougher and more savvy than the people who are trying to work them.

Similarly, I found his laying off of obesity on the fast food industry kind of shoddy. I don't care if they've got the most amazing advertising technology in the history of all time on their side, no one buys and shoves cheeseburgers down your throat but you. No one gets your kids a happy meal but you. A little personal responsibility, huh?

And as horrible as some of the sanitation conditions in the slaughterhouses sounds, imho, and it's probably horribly wrong, I tend to think that the greatest determiner of whether you catch some germ or disease is your own immune system. And that you make strong with a good diet and exercise. Again, I tend to think a lot of it is in your own hands.

A lot of the book, and how you take it and read it will depend on your personal value system. Obviously. So when you think of fast food, do you think of "conformity and cheapness" or do you think of "consistency and value"? And what's the difference, exactly?

And the upshot of all of it, especially when I was reading the parts of the book on the development of "natural" and artificial flavors, and how "foods" are processed since the 1950s... it basically confirmed to me that the vast majority of crap frankenfoods we shovel down our throats are simply horrible for us. People decry the fast food industry, and sometimes maybe rightly so, but the same junk foods that are served there are 90% of the same processed, nutritionally devoid crap in the local supermarket.

If you're eating anything but fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, nuts, seeds and some dairy [maybe] - you're eating junk. And even then, if you're eating veggies - organic is better. Grass fed beef, free range eggs and chicken, wild fish - all are better. Anything less and in a lot of ways you're probably compromising your health. If you're drinking anything but water and maybe some types of teas, same thing. Make your compromises if you want - I certainly do - and have some grains or sugars, some alcohol or processed junk, the human body can tolerate almost anything [but imo only thrives on the good stuff] - but do it consciously and choose your vices while being aware of the trade offs. Don't fool yourself and don't lie to yourself.

Anyways, the book is highly recommended. Thought provoking and well written. You are what you eat, after all. (show less)