My image of a fast food executive's office includes a mahogany desk, a sprawling view over the city, and a well-used dart board with a picture of Eric Schlosser.
Schlosser's Fast Food Nation came from nowhere and launched a broadside salvo from the bestseller list. The book dissected the fast food industry and its sprawling efffects on our country. The industry's soldiers fired back with smear campaigns and health-oriented ads. And they focused anew on their main audience: kids.
Schlosser's latest project, Chew on This, which he wrote with Charles Wilson, targets the young adults who have grown up in a fast food nation. The book's simple sentences hammer points home, and the authors use teenagers'stories for the "people" hooks that introduce each major topic. Chew on This paints the same grim picture as its big brother, and I hope it finds its way into junior high health classes and into the hands of parents who didn't read Fast Food Nation.
Readers learn of sleazy marketers, contaminated meat, and abused slaughterhouse workers. For those who read Fast Food Nation, the new book offers a refresher course—though Chew on This has a new section on the health effects of fast food. When I went to a book signing with Schlosser and Wilson, Berkeley parents lined up to buy the book for their children or young relatives. I don't know how it will fare in the rest of America, but I can dream of a new world where schools around the country add this book to their curriculum, and teenagers learn the truth about this giant industry.
The book ends with a plea. Every time you visit a fast food restaurant, it says, you support the industry and everything it represents. The "vote with your wallet" battle cry will hit many of the book's readers just as they come into their own disposable income, either through allowances or summer jobs. What better time to teach them that a consumer's money is a consumer's power?
I did have some issues with the book. The kids in the pages provide examples that seem too pat, and I thought that the chapters took too long to get to the point. Another sin in the book comes in the section on French fries, when Schlosser describes frites abroad, "but they're not as gross as some of the fries made in France. At restaurants over there...they're sometimes cooked with horse fat. Bon appétit!" Do we need to instill Francophobia and intolerance of other cultures with a distrust of fast food?
But these minor flaws don't change my mind: Every young adult should get the chance to read this book and make informed choices about his or her food.
