Fast Food Nation | Teen Ink

Fast Food Nation

February 6, 2009
By Anonymous

If you like a what-a-burger with cheese everyday for lunch, do not read Fast Food Nation. If you like chicken McNuggets, and somebody has given you Fast Food Nation for your birthday, make like seinfield-regift it. And if you enjoy jack in the box tacos you shouldn't even read this review. Why you ask? Because this book will destroy what you love most.

Eric Schlossers' Fast Food Nation is a stunning success on the fast food industry and our addiction to it. The fast food entrepreneur is, according to Schlosser, a more morally corrupt, greedy and deadly person than any of the worst of the worlds top drug cartel people. These people kill people to make a buck. The founding fathers that started making really good hamburgers and pizzas were in fact just people who made a great product at a great price. There was probably no reason at all for these founding fathers to suspect that the food that they were creating would lead to a plague of obesity, high blood pressure, food poisonings, and other inflictions like diabetes. It also promotes the incredible cruelty to animals. Fast food industries also greatly affect our environment. The raising of enormous population of beef cattle for human consumption creates more carbon emissions than all the worlds petroleum fueled vehicles.
Schlosser also exposes the underbelly of the exportation of near-child slave labor. These industries are the only places that allow theses teens to work enormous amounts of hours, and teens go for this idea because it's the only place that they can get theses many hours. These teens need these future destroying hours in order to support themselves and their families. Because this industry promote this type of 'sweatshop' labor, another generation of teens and young adults are endangered of losing their shot of achieving the American dream because they're being worked to death.
The hardest part to digest, pun intended, is the gruesome attack on our sensibility in the knowing of the nastiness of the industry. The food, the way it's produced, the way it's packaged, the way it's transported, the way it's preserved, the way it's cooked, and the way it's served. The reason for this nastiness to occur is because it increases their profit. It would be substantially more expensive if the meat from each animal was kept separate and not co-mingled with thousands of other individual animals. Just when you thought it was safe to go into burger king, you turn the next page and your confronted with another outlandish example of the lengths that this industry will go to make another dollar.

In the end, Schlosser is making us as almost as sick as the fast food industry is and his motive is the same as theirs-money. His motive is the same as these industries, but the sickness that he makes us feel is not going to harm our health or shorten our lives. His attention to detail is what makes this so hard to swallow, another pun intended.



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