People might think of fast food as a benign convenience of modern times. The food is good, cheap, plentiful, easily accessible, filling, and the restaurants are clean. What could be wrong? Reading Eric Schlosser’s groundbreaking study Fast Food Nation, one learns that just about everything is. Schlosser uncovers a history of corruption, greed, and disregard for the welfare of workers and customers in franchises such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and Jack in the Box, to name a few. His study takes on the industry from all angles, uncovering a bloated business empire grown insensitive to anything but the bottom line, and he discusses all of this in an effectively quiet, informative way without overwhelming the reader with forced rhetoric. Since
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The faster the slaughterhouse functions, the more money it makes, but after a certain point, workers are increasingly likely to hurt themselves and others with knives, and also to pollute the meat when they fail to cleanly cut the intestines out of each cow. After the disclosures of The Jungle caused reform in government regulations of the slaughterhouses, meat workers became fairly skilled and well-paid in such areas as the cattle yards of Chicago. This all changed when competition led some companies to slaughter cattle in the West, with less skilled workers packaging the meat and delivering it directly to the supermarket, thus cutting out any need for a butcher. As companies like IBP sped up …show more content…
He consistently returns to Colorado, because the white flight of Californians there give the state its “land of the future” quality. He begins the book with a description of a top-secret combat operations center located underneath the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado that allows fast food delivery into a zone protected from nuclear strike. In other chapters, he describes the crime-ridden urban blight of slaughterhouse towns such as Greeley, Colorado. Colorado works well for Schlosser in two ways: first, because it holds large parts of the fast food agribusiness, and secondly, because recent housing developments show the effects of the expansion of fast food franchises on the prairie
The faster the slaughterhouse functions, the more money it makes, but after a certain point, workers are increasingly likely to hurt themselves and others with knives, and also to pollute the meat when they fail to cleanly cut the intestines out of each cow. After the disclosures of The Jungle caused reform in government regulations of the slaughterhouses, meat workers became fairly skilled and well-paid in such areas as the cattle yards of Chicago. This all changed when competition led some companies to slaughter cattle in the West, with less skilled workers packaging the meat and delivering it directly to the supermarket, thus cutting out any need for a butcher. As companies like IBP sped up …show more content…
He consistently returns to Colorado, because the white flight of Californians there give the state its “land of the future” quality. He begins the book with a description of a top-secret combat operations center located underneath the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado that allows fast food delivery into a zone protected from nuclear strike. In other chapters, he describes the crime-ridden urban blight of slaughterhouse towns such as Greeley, Colorado. Colorado works well for Schlosser in two ways: first, because it holds large parts of the fast food agribusiness, and secondly, because recent housing developments show the effects of the expansion of fast food franchises on the prairie