Fast Food Nation

Social science

Print length: 362 pagesMariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Description

Eric Schlosser investigates the American fast-food industry from its postwar origins through its modern operations, influence, and globalization. His reporting moves from California suburbs and New Jersey flavor factories to slaughterhouses, packing plants, teenage restaurant workers, and child-targeted advertising. Along the way, he examines fast food’s connections to food production, real estate, Hollywood, popular culture, and the exploitation of young and minority workers. The book argues that the industry has helped homogenize society, reshape landscapes, widen economic inequality, and intensify obesity. Combining investigative reporting, cultural history, wit, and argument, Fast Food Nation challenges familiar assumptions about how America eats.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Journalistic · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Earnest · Irreverent · Unsettling

Structure

Argumentative · Chronological nonfiction

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

ClassInequalityNature and environmentPowerTechnology and societyWork

About Eric Schlosser

Eric Schlosser is an American journalist and author whose reporting examines large systems through the people, workplaces, and failures they often keep out of view. He began his career at The Atlantic Monthly, and his books retain the patient accumulation of evidence associated with long-form investigation. Fast Food Nation follows the fast-food industry across factories, slaughterhouses, restaurants, advertising, and real estate, connecting an everyday product to a network of labor and corporate practices. Reefer Madness turns to marijuana policy, migrant agricultural labor, and pornography, using apparently disparate underground economies to study regulation, exploitation, and cultural contradiction. In Command and Control, Schlosser builds outward from the 1980 Titan II missile accident in Arkansas, combining a tightly observed case study with an archival history of the American nuclear arsenal. Across these subjects, his characteristic method is to begin with concrete institutions and incidents, then trace the policies and incentives that sustain them. His scope is broad, but the writing remains direct, documentary, and attentive to material consequences.

Command and Control Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Language: English
ISBN: 9780547750330

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