Fast Food Nation

About Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) is a book by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry. First serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair's classic "muckraking" novel The Jungle. Schlosser writes as a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and has received a number of journalistic honors, including a National Magazine Award for an Atlantic article about marijuana and the war on drugs. Fast Food Nation, sub-titled The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, is his first book.

Schlosser opens the book with a vignette about a pizza delivery to Cheyenne Mountain, home of a US Air Force base. He describes various high-tech capabilities of the base and its extensive defensive system, speculating that if the worst were to happen and the entire base were entombed in the mountain, anthropologists of the future would discover random fast food wrappers scattered among military hardware. Both, suggests Schlosser, would give important clues about the nature of American society.

The book continues with an account of the evolution of fast food and how it coincided with the advent of the automobile. He explains the transformation from independent restaurants into a few uniform franchises. This shift led to a production-line kitchen prototype, standardization, self-service, and a fundamental change in marketing demographics: from teenager to family-oriented. Regarding the topic of child-targeted marketing, Schlosser explains how the McDonald's Corporation modeled their marketing tactics on The Walt Disney Company, which inspired the creation of advertising icons such as Ronald McDonald and his sidekicks. Marketing executives theorized this shift to market toward children would result not only in attracting children, but their parents and grandparents as well. More importantly, the tactic would instill brand loyalty that would persist through adulthood via nostalgic associations to McDonald's. Schlosser also discusses the tactic's ills: the exploitation of children's naïveté and trusting nature.