“Fast food nation" by Eric Schlosser



“Fast food nation" by Eric Schlosser

Introduction

People might think of fast food as a benign convenience of modern times. The food is good, cheap, plentiful, easily accessible, filling, and the restaurants are clean. Reading Eric Schlosser's groundbreaking study Fast Food Nation, one learns that just about everything is. Schlosser uncovers a history of corruption, greed, and disregard for the welfare of workers and customers in franchises such as McDonald's, Burger King, and Jack in the Box, to name a few. Since the fast food industry is such an omnipresent force in people's lives, not only in the United States but, increasingly, all across the globe, Schlosser's study is a timely exposé revealing a highly manipulative industry motivated by greed and a Faustian urge for world domination of the market (Wilson, 2006).

Discussion

Schlosser focuses specifically on the techniques that McDonald's uses to market Happy Meals to children. Schlosser unearths confidential documents in which McDonald's executives discuss how all of their advertising should emphasize the corporation as a “trusted friend,” even though warnings on the memos against unauthorized use betrays a more paranoid relationship between the company and the customer. Moreover, McDonald's pours so much money into advertising, expanding its franchise across the United States, that its message becomes ubiquitous and increasingly hard to ignore. In an interview, Schlosser says that he associates McDonald's with the Kremlin because of the way the chain consistently refuses to answer his calls and e-mails. Schlosser also uncovers a long history of purposeful disenfranchisement of workers (The New York Times, 2001).

Schlosser often begins a chapter with a panoramic description of a place that emblematizes points in his argument, allowing the reader to make connections between the landscape and his polemic. He consistently returns to Colorado, because the white flight of Californians there give the state its “land of the future” quality. He begins the book with a description of a top-secret combat operations center located underneath the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado that allows fast food delivery into a zone protected from nuclear strike. In other chapters he describes the crime-ridden urban blight of slaughterhouse towns such as Greeley, Colorado. Colorado works well for Schlosser in two ways: first, because it holds large parts of the fast food agribusiness, and secondly, because recent housing developments show the effects of the expansion of fast food franchises on the prairie landscape.

Sometimes Schlosser will use a ...