Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
Perennial
ISBN 0060938455 $14.95 400 pages
Very Highly Recommended
When a friend called to recommend that I read FAST FOOD NATION, she warned that I would find it virtually impossible to work in the industry again. She was right. Author Eric Schlosser presents an in-depth account of the companies and people who make double cheeseburgers possible. However, readers beware. After reading FAST FOOD NATION, you will never again be able to pull through a drive through with casual oblivion to what you eat or who servers you.
While Schlosser presents an excellent account of the stresses of working in fast food from the slaughter houses to the back line assembly, the one thing he fails to emphasize is the stresses on the managers of fast food. In Hardee's, for example, restaurant managers only get their salary if they work fifty hour weeks. Since managers are required to wear headsets while on duty, that means fifty hours of the drive through dinging in one's ears, even while serving customers at the front counter. Since fast food also makes up its labor out of management, that also means that the restaurant manager is either bagging food or working the drive through in addition to the rest of her responsibilities. Indeed, one manager and one cook (a total of only two employees) can run the entire restaurant for ten hours a day. Nevertheless, Schlosser does mention a pizza manager who makes $22,000 a year for a fifty-hour week. That's about the average pay scale, including bonuses, for restaurant managers (not general managers).
Perhaps the most traumatic accounts of the fast food industry do not lie, however, in the endless drudgery of drive through, but in the slaughterhouses across the Midwest. As independent ranching practices give way to major corporations, the displaced lives seldom find voice. Schlosser does an excellent job of combining the facts with the faces that makes this tragedy real. From men who have given their lives or their health out of company loyalty or the need to feed their families, to the women who have sharpen their carving knives while preparing the family dinner, each account springs vividly from the pages.
FAST FOOD NATION is a must read for everyone. With the mobile lifestyle most of us have adapted, eliminating fast food from one's diet would be virtually impossible. However, if consumers are going to continue to eat those delicious cheeseburgers and calorie defying meals, then they should be aware of what they consume and at what cost. Knowledge is power, and the necessary changes that must come to this industry will only occur if we educate ourselves and make the appropriate demands for ourselves as consumers. Extremely well written, well presented, and impossible to put down, FAST FOOD NATION comes very highly recommended.
Cynthia Penn, Senior Reviewer
http://webpages.charter.net/cindy_penn/
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