A couple months ago, it was mentioned by WIBIA that he and EatHSE went to go see the documentary “Food, Inc.” and thoroughly enjoyed learning about some of the business practices employed by the food industry. This piqued my interest, so I went to my local library to see if Food, Inc. was an actual book as well as a documentary movie. It’s not (there is a book with a collection of essays on the movie; I’ll review that later), but I did stumble across a book called Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (Schlosser is also a producer of Food, Inc.) After reading this book, I felt that a book review segment would be a nice addition to the blog and after discussing it with WIBIA, here is the site’s first crack at it. I’ve got at least one more review stocked up, so hopefully this will become a continuing series.
Summary
In this book, Mr. Schlosser begins his book by telling about the true spread of fast food and its patriarch Carl Karcher. For those of you that don’t know, Carl Karcher is the founder of Carl’s Jr. From its humble origins in Southern California, Carl turned his company into a national fast food restaurant chain that is now owned by parent company CKE Enterprises. For those of you that don’t know, CKE Enterprises also owns Hardee’s.
From Carl’s beginnings, Schlosser then segues into the birth of McDonald’s and its founder Ray Kroc (he uses McDonald’s as his main villain in the book, which is easy to do since they are the industry leader). While some of you may know that Kroc did not start McDonald’s, he did find a way to market and grow the chain like nothing ever done before. Also, it is interesting to find out that Ray Kroc wasn’t so much interested in the taste of his food as he was the delivery of his food to consumers. He wanted it to be cheap and fast; taste was of secondary concern to him. He only cared that it tasted well enough to get people to come back. His mindset was that McDonald’s should be a food delivery system and not an actual restaurant. Sadly, most fast food chains have taken this approach and while some may taste better than others, the general taste of most fast food is mediocre at best.
After educating the reader on the origins of the fast food industry, Schlosser then takes a tour through how the food used in these “restaurants” (remember, they really are only food delivery systems) in produced and packaged. What he finds is that our food production companies (such as J.R. Simplot, ConAgra, etc.) really are companies staffed by mostly uneducated migrant workers who will take any sort of treatment and/or risk as long as they can send money back home to their families in their native land. Also, Schlosser points out that while these companies may put out a united front saying that food safety and worker safety are very important to them, a lot of issues end up getting swept under the rug in order to keep federal regulators away. Another major point that Schlosser discusses is that the number of regulators has decreased as years have gone past, so now food producers are more and more likely to cut corners in order to produce food both more quickly and more cheaply. He also uses national stats, lawsuits and personal narratives of current/former employees and business owners to show the personal and legal side of these practices. He is quick to point out that while McDonald’s status as the industry leader gives it more sway in terms of cleaning things up, they rarely use this power in order to help the greater good.
While these two topics are the main sources of his material, he finds a way to juxtapose these topics into the growth and development of the state of Colorado and Colorado Springs in particular from a sleepy burb into a typical American city with a fast food joint on three of four corners of every intersection and how this just feeds the general cycle of poverty and substandard qualities of life.
Conclusion
I believe that Schlosser’s main point of this book was to use it as a scare tactic to people that they should start thinking about how they consume often they consume fast food and in his opinion, they really shouldn’t consume it all because all they are doing is supporting huge, multi-national corporations and allowing them to continue their shady business practices of exploiting workers and consumers.
The funny thing is though, this had the exact opposite effect on me. While I certainly was enlightened by the business practices of McDonald’s and other fast food companies and food producers, I was not really horrified. I certainly know what goes into my food now, but I’m not going to stop buying it. The funny thing is that while I was reading this book, all I could think about was how delicious a McDonald’s cheeseburger seemed at that moment and that’s beyond funny to me personally, because I very rarely even eat McDonald’s and don’t have a true affinity for it.
Regardless, I would definitely give this book a thumbs up and recommend it to everyone. You’ll be educated and enlightened by the end and maybe Schlosser’s goal of swaying you from the fast food industry (my interpretation of the book) or at least compelling you to act against the food suppliers will be completed. If not, at least you’ll have something to talk about with your friends the next time you make a fast food run.
-IndianapolisEater
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