Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

This review was written for oxygen.ie. You can see it there by clicking here

It's not exactly a secret that fast food isn't good for you. Most people know this but eat it anyway. It's handy. It's cheap. It's tasty. That's a hard combination to beat. We know there could be anything in that burger, but it's probabably not going to kill us, so we dig in.

Eric Schlosser's new book Fast Food Nation goes into the gory detail about the American fast food industry. It's not pretty. Schlosser doesn't hold back. There's some scary shit in those burgers. He also details the slaughter of the traditional farming way of life, the invasive marketing techniques of the enormous multinational food companies, and the way Big Food seems to be able do what they like in the name of the free market, while little old you and me don't even notice.

Behind the happy smiley logos and spokesclowns of McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken et al are numbing production lines. The visible one is the sullen pimply youth handing you your meal. There's a few hidden ones as well. There's the one where a guy spends all day hitting cows on the head. The one where the bespectacled guy in the white coat adds just the right amount of amyl butrate, methyl benzoate and butryic acid to make a strawberry milkshake taste like strawberries. And the one where the girl carefully removes the "waste products" from the tasty meat.

Working for McDonalds doesn't sound like fun. But you probably don't work there, so maybe that doesn't worry you too much. But you probably do eat there. The ground beef in your typical fast food burger is the endproduct of a highly efficient system. This system swallows up millions of animals, thousands of illegal un-unionised immigrants, millions in government subsidies, huge quantities of artificial flavour enhancers and tonnes of animal "waste products". It then throws up a society with a big obesity problem, poisoned toddlers, no job security and happy meals.

Don't like the burgers? Have a McChicken sandwich. Sorry, there's beef in that too. Ok, just some fries. Still no good, the fries are coated in beef extract, it's what makes them taste like fries. There's no escaping the shit.

The CEOs and MDs will tell you that this is the fine tuning of a free market, where the customer is the winner. They are not only wrong, they are liars. Schlosser details again and again the power of the huge food conglomerates over the American political process. The US Department of Agriculture is supposed to be policing the fast food industry, but according to Schlosser they might as well be pissing in the wind, because Big Beef has them in it's pocket. The food companies battle every effort to clean up the industry [i.e. save workers lives with safer workplaces and machinery, save consumers lives by not selling ecoli riddled burgers] through their well paid Republican lackeys, sorry through the public representatives of the American people in Washington. According to Schlosser the entire system is rotten to the core.

Schlosser reckons that fast food restaurants have completely changed the way Americans live their lives. It's a heady claim, and not entirely convincing, but the growth of the huge fast food franchises has been a powerful agent in the homogenisation of everything over the last fifty years. McDonalds is the most recognisable symbol in the world. As seen by the prominence of McDonalds restaurants as sites for anti-globalisation protests.

Fast Food Nation reads well as a companion piece to Naomi Klein's No Logo. Both authors seem spot on in their analysis of the way things really are. It's not a pretty sight. If the twentieth century was about the battle against the implementation of mass ideologies like fascism and communism, it could be that the twenty-first will be about the struggle of the ordinary punter against global capitalism. It's not a very fair fight. Anti-capitalist protesters get dirty by hurling chairs through McDonald's windows. Schlosser suggests we start the battle off by not eating at Burger King. I suppose it's a start, but...