- Product Description
Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food are geared towards teens. Give your kid an incentive to read one or both of these books. My 11- and 13-year old kids loved these best-selling exposes and never wanted to set foot in a fast-food establishment again. Okay, they never set foot in fast-food establishments anyway, except to make a bathroom stop on a trip. They inspired my oldest daughter to become a vegetarian, and she later converted her sister. Written for preteens and teens, this is an excellent education in why you want to avoid all fast food. I overheard my daughter after she read Chew On This telling a friend regarding the friend’s sugar habit, “You know that children diagnosed with diabetes by the age of 8 shorten their lives by 25-30 years, don’t you?” (Heh heh, my evil educational plot is working!) Too bad the author states in the introduction that his favorite meal is a fast food burger.
Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That’s a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.
Schlosser’s myth-shattering survey stretches from California’s subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food’s flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths — from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.
