Food for Thought: Hunger, Health, Human Rights

Featured for Book Discussion Group

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. (Schlosser 2001).

Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s.

Publishers Weekly, Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Similar Titles Featured on Library Display

Just click on the title to go to the book's record--if someone already has it checked out, you can click on OhioLINK to borrow it from other libraries in Ohio.

• Food, Inc: how industrial food is making us sicker, fatter, and poorer--and what you can do about it
• The way we eat: why our food choices matter
• The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of our four meals
• What to eat
• Food matters: a guide to conscious eating with more than 75 recipes
• The conscious kitchen : the new way to buy and cook food-- to protect the Earth, improve your health, and eat deliciously
• Enough: why the world's poorest starve in an age of plenty
• Food and fuel : solutions for the future
• Eating agendas : food and nutrition as social problems
• Food politics : what everyone needs to know
• The revolution will not be microwaved : inside America's underground food movements
• Let them eat junk : how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
• All you can eat : how hungry is America?
• Free for all : fixing school food in America
• Meals to come : a history of the future of food
• An edible history of humanity
• The food wars
• Stuffed : an insider's look at who's (really) making America fat
• A nation of farmers : defeating the food crisis on American soil
• The economics of food : how feeding and fueling the planet affects food prices
• Closing the food gap : resetting the table in the land of plenty
• The end of food
• The town that food saved : how one community found vitality in local food
• Stuffed and starved : the hidden battle for the world food system
• Organic, Inc. : natural foods and how they grew
• World Hunger
• Animal, vegetable, miracle : a year of food life