Fast Food Nation
To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar Amerca. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of 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 the California subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. He hangs out with the teenagers who make the restaurants run and communes with those unlucky enough to hold America's most dangerous job -- meatpacker. He travels to Las Vegas for a giddily surreal franchisers' convention where Mikhail Gorbachev delivers the keynote address. He even ventures to England and Germany to clock the rate at which those countries are becoming fast food nations. Along the way, Schlosser 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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35mentions
33people
2008–2026years
51% recommend46% neutral3% critical
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What Hacker News says
- You don't know much about the advertising or food businesses, I take it.
Suggest Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It'll open your eyes.
- Reminded me of the book Fast Food Nation where they describe the artificial flavor industry (Chapter 5), and visit labs in New Jersey where fast food tastes are created by "flavorists". Most of the taste comes from smell, via gas molecules released in the mouth.
The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)
Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
- I started reducing meat for health reasons, then cut back even more after reading Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation. While I don't condone animal cruelty, I was even more affected by the human suffering involved in producing American meat at industrial scale.
Like many, I'm not an absolutist, and still use things like bacon essentially as a seasoning.
If you're considering this, I think you should consider it like any lifestyle intervention: every little bit helps towards your goal, and you need to find a way to make it sustainable and enjoyable, and not a chore you have to continue for the rest of your life.
- I did not want to suggest "ask you to go cold on your heating and kill your industry " ...maybe you're overreacting.... I suggested giving Germans some time out to extend their Easter celebrations... why not italy or austria or Switzerland? someone needs to show the way and Germany has a wealthy economy with gas reserves that would last apparently at current consumption rates till the summer so who knows how long they could last in reality...... but as one young man remarked when I met him in 2019 in Hamburg on a Saturday among 100 000 other demonstrators wanting the government to do something about climate change... Germans don't really want change, they're too comfortable... I think that goes for much of the western world, covid was an opportunity , this war is one too, for us to rethink our economics into terms more caring and sharing rather than people being run around like well paid slaves by companies whose end effect is? producing more ICE cars, fertilizers for the wheat/meat industry (Fast food Nation is an enlightening book-film as is Demain or Tomorrow a french film...)
I'm sorry if I hurt your patriotism, but I do appreciate very much your and the other comments contributing to helping me flesh out an idea.. as one commentator mentioned rebuilding Ukraine...and helping break Putin's teeth on the Ukrainian rock go hand in hand...
- That is one of the premises of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097.Fast_Food_Nation , you won't want to eat US processed meat after reading this. (Good book, BTW)
- Yes and no. They made $30/hr in Des Moines or Chicago or other cities. There were profitable union slaughterhosues in New York into the 80s. Slaughterhouses were moved out to the country to break the unions, period. “Saving money” by being closer to farms is a contrived argument. A good place to start is the book “Fast Food Nation”.
Illegals are a symptom. The problems are industrial facilities with heavy manpower requirements, high turnover, designed to operate in a way that guarantees chronic medical problems with workers, placed in places with no people.
The big waves of Mexicans chose to move to places like rural Iowa in the 90s not out of a desire to break their bodies hacking at meat at high speed, but because trade policy flooded cheap corn into the market and exploded the Mexican agricultural economy.
Rural communities have been conned hook line and sinker. Their death began when the alliance between western resource barons and southern democrats (ie segregationists) began with Nixon. Trade policy, financial sector consolidation, offshoring of industrial economy dug the grave.
I grew up in a beautiful northeast rural community. It’s a shell of what it was when I was a child. All of the dairy operations are gone, and most of the full time farms will cease operations when the owners retire. The economy runs on social security, public assistance, government workers commuting up to 90 miles away, and a couple of small industrial operations. Nobody with any ability will stick around, and that has nothing to do with people trying to escape life in Central America.
