Introduction

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser that investigates the business practices of the American fast food industry and the associated agricultural industries that supply it. Following the precedent of Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 work The Jungle, Schlosser provides readers with a glimpse into the questionable ethics of these large food corporations. Schlosser likewise provides brief historical accounts of fast food’s origins and traces the exponential growth of the industry from its humble beginnings to its vastly powerful position in modern culture.

During his research for the book, Schlosser visited many different places across the country and the world, and he portrays these places as victims of the fast food conquest. Places such as Colorado Springs, Colorado, where suburban sprawl creates the same kind of homogeneity found in fast food restaurants, to Plauen, Germany, where Americana has supplanted the local culture, reveal the breadth and reach of the fast food industry. Schlosser also provides gruesome details of the operations of a modern slaughterhouse, where production speed takes priority over safety, and in so doing, follows in Sinclair’s muckraking footsteps.

Fast Food Nation inspired the fictional 2006 film directed by Richard Linklater. The book was also converted into a young readers’ version in 2006 entitled Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food.

The edition used for this guide is the Kindle Edition published in 2012.

Content Warning: The book contains graphic descriptions of how animals are processed into meat, including inhumane treatment not only of the animals but also of the people who work in meatpacking plants.

Summary

Schlosser’s introduction to the book sets the tone for the rest of it. He cites multiple studies and statistics that show just how influential the fast food industry is. The evidence is truly eye-opening, and it establishes first that the industry reaches almost all Americans in some way, shape, or form.

Once the reader is situated within the topic, Schlosser breaks the book down into two parts: “The American Way” and “Meat and Potatoes.” Part I contains four chapters and Part II contains five. Schlosser opens the body of the text at the origin point of fast food and examines the favorability of the conditions of post-WWII America, specifically those of California at the time. With a booming postwar economy coinciding with the growth of the automobile industry, the time was ripe for fast food to take off. With the entrepreneurial vision of the likes of Carl Karcher and Ray Kroc (of Carl’s Jr. and McDonald’s, respectively), the industry soon became a staple in American culture. Schlosser finds points of similarity between Karcher and Kroc, in addition to other chain founders; for most of them, their stories are those of successful, self-made men from humble origins who struck it big. Ironically, their stories do not at all resemble those who now lead the corporations they founded.

Schlosser attributes the exponential growth of the industry to two important developments: the industrialization of food and advertising to children. For the former, Kroc and Karcher both borrowed manufacturing methods from the automobile industry, specifically the assembly line, and applied them to fast food. For the latter, the source of inspiration was the Walt Disney company, which had eschewed traditional norms against advertising to children and founded strategies to directly target them as consumers. Much of the second chapter details the influence that Disney had on Kroc and McDonald’s in the middle of the 20th century and how McDonald’s targeted children directly.

One of the intended consequences of the growth of the fast food industry was the replacement of skilled labor, such as cooks and chefs, with unskilled and unspecialized laborers. As the industry began to employ more and more people, they looked to teenagers to fill the positions, a perfect demographic in many respects, as teenagers do not command a lot of money on the market, and they are relatively transient. This discovery enabled fast food giants to keep wages low, thereby helping to maximize their profits. Additionally, the increasing market demands created pressure on American agriculture to meet them. New technological innovations in food production spawned an entirely new kind of approach to the way food was harvested, processed, prepared, and consumed. Traditional farm-to-table methods of delivering food were quickly replaced by mass-produced food products, often frozen or artificially preserved, within a generation.

The fast food industry influenced American agriculture in astonishing ways. Frozen vegetables, specifically frozen potatoes (french fries) replaced fresh food. Slaughterhouses, where thousands of cattle are processed daily, came to resemble manufacturing plants. As agribusinesses grew, the larger companies either absorbed the smaller ones or simply put them out of business. The meatpacking monopolies of the early 1900s that were broken up by antitrust litigation made a comeback. This time, they had gained the favor and protection of those who otherwise would be forced to break them apart: politicians. At the time Schlosser wrote the book, close to 80 percent of meat sold in the United States came from plants owned by four large corporations. This evolution was devastating for the American rancher and the family farm, and the larger the corporations became and the more they gobbled up their competition, the more independent ranchers and farmers went by the wayside. Particularly for the American Midwest and West, this changed the culture dramatically.

While Schlosser does not spend a great deal of time examining the negative health consequences associated with fast food consumption, he does investigate the health ramifications of food poisoning, specifically from E. coli. Schlosser maintains that modern methods of meat processing, in which production speed takes priority over safety measures, provide the perfect environment for bacteria like E. coli to thrive and evolve. In a rather gruesome portrait of a modern slaughterhouse, the point is driven home.

As Schlosser nears the end of the book, he describes and gives a historical account of Plauen, Germany. A once sleepy, depressed outpost of communist East Germany, Plauen became Americanized once the Berlin Wall came down. The first step in this process was the building of a McDonald’s in the city. Schlosser uses this anecdote to discuss other places around the world that have brought in McDonald’s. The results are generally negative, at least on the overall health of these populations. Schlosser chronicles the increase in obesity rates among the Chinese and Japanese that corresponds to the growth of the McDonald’s chain in these countries.

In his Epilogue, Schlosser presents the stories of a few people who have bucked the trend. These include an independent Texas rancher who prefers the old ways of raising grass-fed, free-ranging cattle to the modern method with grain-fed, feedlot cattle. Schlosser also discusses a family from Colorado named the Conways, owners of a small chain restaurant that resists the temptation to go big; instead, they have decided to keep their operation what it is, a small place where authentic, fresh food is served. In these anecdotes, Schlosser shows proof that people do not have to continually be subjects of the fast food empire.