McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and more...they all have the friendly, bright exterior, with the fast, cheap, addictive food. But behind the bright colors, the mascots, and the friendly clerk smile is a whole different world of fast food. Eric Schlosser peels back that wrapper to show the real world of fast food - big corporations using people and people's ignorance to rise in power, drive out the little guy, and make more and more money for themselves. Oh, yeah, and the food is gross too.

I think by this point most people have heard of this book or the "Super Size Me" movie or many of the other pieces that have swarmed the media mind in the past decade. (Yes, decade. God, I feel old.) That was what drove me to buy this book years ago - that, and it was used.

This year has been the year of non-fiction reads for me. Finally, almost five years after graduating college, I can read non-fiction again without tensing up and going into melt-down mode. One of the many non-fiction topics that has interested me is the fast food industry and the America meal. That is why I took this book off my shelf and finally read it.

I didn't really expect to learn much that was new. I had read the news articles about how bad fast food is for you. I saw "Super Size Me" and the McDonald's hamburger and fries that looked good after weeks of sitting out on a counter exposed to the elements. And I've experienced first hand the affects of fast food - how it makes you gain weight, become lethargic, etc. So I figured this book would be pretty much more of the same.

If you open this book expecting only to hear about how bad and unhealthy the fast food itself is, you will be surprised to find out that is only a small portion of what Schlosser focuses on. Sure, he does bring up the quality of food (SPOILERS: It's gross), but he focuses a lot more on other areas: how these seemingly cheery companies treat their workers, their competitors, and the food industry itself.

One of the images that stays with me is the life of a worker in a slaughterhouse - not because of seeing a cow gutted (though, admittedly, that sounds absolutely disgusting). But how these companies drive their employees like draft horses. Pushing through 40+ cattle an hour. Forcing employees to lie about injuries. Refusing to pay worker's comp. Letting employees work in terrible conditions, exposed to dangerous chemicals and gases. Not training the employees enough to do the job well. And then paying these employees the absolute lowest amount they can get away with.

All the while, these companies tightly grasp the curtain and shout to the government, "Nothing to see here! Everything's all good!" Even as employee after employee dies in a tragic, mostly preventable manner. Even as meat is exposed to dangerous diseases (E.Coli anyone?). You want to know what one company got fined after several people died of hydrogen sulfide poisoning? $480 PER PERSON. For a company making billions in profits per year?! That's absolutely ridiculous!!

There were moments that I found rather dry and pointless. The prologue introduces us to a military compound in Colorado to make us imagine how future explorers may find fast food wrappers in caves and wonder what these weird people from the 1990's are like. And that's pretty much the entire point of bringing up this base in intricate detail. A lot of time is spent detailing the background of Colorado's growth, key fast food giant's backstories, and more. And while a good portion of it does make sense (learning about Ray Kroc or Carl Karcher's background IS important to the "narrative"), sometimes it got long-winded and meandering.

The other "problem" with this book is how dated it already is. This book was written in 2001, with an updated forward in 2002. A lot has happened in the 10 years since this book was written. A lot of fast food companies aren't doing the "Super Size Me" thing anymore. McDonald's has included apples and milk to its Happy Meal menu; most of the fast food companies have hurriedly added coffee drinks to their menus to draw new customers. And that doesn't include how most menus have a lot more salad and chicken options (Okay, so they aren't all that healthy, but it's certainly better than it was before!). I personally would love to see a "sequel" that explores some of the changes that the fast food industry has been forced to make and how much farther they have to go.

A lot has changed in the world since the Mad Cow Disease and E.Coli outbreaks scared many people into reconsidering their food choices. This book lead the forefront into bringing awareness and change. And for that reason, this book has an important place in our history. Even if you think you know what this book says, I recommend picking it up and checking it out. You may learn a thing or two.

Intellectual synchronicity: I recently listened to a Marketplace report on education, economics, and an interview with  Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on augmented reality (although that latter part could have been in a Freakonomics podcast), coincidentally shortly on the heels of finishing Fast Food Nation. Each source resonated strongly with Trevor's synopsis of Global Auction, which conveniently popped up in my email inbox around the same time.

In reviewing the dilemma of higher-ed economics (ever-rising tuition costs, ever-lowering degree utility and value, etc.) Trevor points out that "the whole point of capitalism is to find ways to drive down costs and to simplify work processes to the point of banality for the vast majority of workers." In that vein, I would consider the recent augmented reality enhanced construction helmet referenced in the  Soonish author talk as an example of productivity-accelerating/expertise-displacing new technology. The helmet makes use of graphic how-to overlays to give the worker realtime communication intended to reduce error, minimize injury, and thereby speed the construction process.

Now Schlosser's book has this whole chapter on how the industry custom-built some idiot proof kitchen technology, initially to ensure consistency of its output from one location to the next, but ultimately because doing so resulted in a fabulous side-effect, namely, that it enabled franchisees to eschew training costs in favor of a disposable, and in many cases [English-]illiterate workforce... in turn keeping labor costs low and deterring unionization. In effect, by moving the kitchen expertise from the staff to the equipment, McDonald's and their fast food fellows could reduce the workforce to meat robots.

While the Weinersmiths weren't asked to make the connection with fast-food industry kitchen automation in the interview, I think the implications of the technology to the need for a skilled workforce are clear. The more repetitive and consistent the tasks/problems, the easier it is and more sense it makes to replace people with algorithms to address them. Look, you could use nanorobots to collect nectar and mass-produce honey on an industrial scale, but why would you? Bees are an existing, inexpensive, renewable resource. What's the point at which that becomes true of people? And what becomes of education, then?

This is a practical concern for me right now as my kids are rapidly approaching college age. What's the best use of our collective investment of time, effort, and money to safeguard them from obsolescence? How much should go toward whatever constitutes practical expertise and how much toward signifiers of class and networking to cheat (er... fully participate) in the system?

If Schlosser's work offers any indication, we might start off by steering clear of the fast food industry and those businesses with which it is in vertical alignment. Line workers are overworked, underpaid, and untrained. Managers frequently find themselves in the line of fire of armed robberies. Franchise owners are exploited by greedy, unscrupulous franchisors seeking to milk the most money from each territory. Suppliers scrape for the microprofit residuals of repeated bidding wars and requirements contracts, and their sad sack workers struggle as much for survival as for survival wages -- especially in the slaughterhouse and meat packing industries, whose dysfunctional, unhygienic workplace abuses have barely changed since  the Jungle days of Upton Sinclair. Add to all this the uglification of America contributed by the fast food industry's contributions to the negative feedback loops of urban sprawl, widespread obesity, and rampant, cookie-cutter, consumerist culture, and well… obvious efficiencies aside, left unchecked, highly industrialized, assembly-line practices rarely present a pretty picture.

On the other hand, they have resulted in a darned tasty french fry. The secret? Beef fat flavoring. (Originally, beef fat itself, but the imperatives of market outreach to vegetarians and Hindus lead to more indirect approaches.) The peek inside flavor biochemistry makes a fascinating rest stop along the highway of enterprising depravity the author travels. Schlosser's book is mostly journalistic dynamite, with only thin slices of nonsense. Cherry-picking one exception to his otherwise even-handed text, chew on Schlosser's introduction to the wondrous workings of Willy Wonka's laboratories (author's metaphor, not mine):

The New Jersey Turnpike runs through the heart of the flavor industry, an industrial corridor dotted with refineries and chemical plants…. The [International Flavors & Fragrances] plant in Dayton[, NJ] is a huge pale blue building with a modern office complex attached to the front. It sits in an industrial park, not far from a BASF plastics factory, a Jolly French Toast factory, and a plant that manufactures Liz Claiborne cosmetics. Dozens of tractor-trailers were parked at the IFF loading dock the afternoon I visited, and a thin cloud of steam floated from the chimney. (pages 120-1)

While settings are important to a narrative, this description appears to me to be an attempt at guilt by association, an irrelevancy fallacy. For example, I'm a big fan of the work done at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, notwithstanding that their campus sits just down the road from a shooting range in an industrial park across the street from a strip mall packed with seedy eateries and a dry cleaners.

I consider myself a futurist, a person right at home with the idea that -- as the author is quick to observe -- technology is neutral. The innovation that feeds delicious, ready-to-eat burgers to time- and cash-strapped college students can, but need not also bleed corruption. The author offers a solid 30+ pages of ways forward toward a cleaner, healthier, humane and pathogen-purified product, the entirety worthy of serious consideration (heck, the implementation of only a few helped take down an e-coli outbreak). Schlosser's epilogue alone is a must read for its optimistic, constructive, and practical suggestions to curb the darker aspects and influences of fast food industry and culture. Taking into account the fact that this book has been in print for a full generation, I would not be surprised to learn that some of these reforms are by now well under way. Yet until I can be certain of that, I'll think it best to steer the kids away from all the scary clowns.

Fast Food Nation was an interestingly revealing read. Instead of focusing solely on the food, Schlosser wrote a lot about the fast food industry itself and how people are being consummately sucked into buying their food. Some of the parts pertaining to the business aspects of fast food lost my attention - however, the tidbits on the working conditions and the ingredients of the unhealthy indulgences made me want to read more. I usually do not visit fast food restaurants, so this book has not drastically changed my eating habits. Despite this, I felt like I learned a lot about how the corporations and businesses work.

Another title for this entertaining book could have been "Our disposable society: How our utter disrespect for our selves, each other and our environment created the world we live in today."

The automobile's destructive force on American life was been well documented in other works. But Schlosser extends that work specifically as it relates to the food industry. Not just fast food. But the entire food industry. And it's scary stuff.

Bottom line: we're killing our selves. Yes, fast food is bad for you. But its not just the crap they serve at the chains. The influence of fast food is so pervasive that it effects all aspects of our nation's food supply. And it does so adversely.

Our nation's food supply is now a full blown public health crises. Food poisoning is epidemic. Food supply recalls from corporate farms, meat plants and canneries are a weekly occurrence. Each episode worse than the previous.

Schlosser doesn't offer solutions. He sounds the alarm.