We've all heard - and most likely dismissed - the adage that we are what we eat. Usually, if we spend any time at all bothering to think about this, we have some vague idea that it means if we eat unhealthy things than our own health will suffer. While that's certainly true as far as it goes, Eric Schlosser argues that there are even greater perils lurking in our food, especially if we have been one of the 25 percent of Americans who that day have bought a meal at a fast-food restaurant. His Fast Food Nation (2002) examines in frightening detail how we are becoming homogenized from the inside out.
Schlosser's analysis of the ways in which McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell have changed our lives includes not just an analysis of the ways in which we eat, because the food itself is in fact of relatively little importance in the book: Schlosser is less intent on exposing the fat content of a Big Mac and more interested on the ways in which homogenization affects all of us and the ways in which the ways that fast food franchises have fundamentally disrupted ancient human rhythms.
One of the strengths of Schlosser's work is that he allows us - indeed makes us - see obvious aspects of the fast-food culture that we might not have thought about. One of the problems of understanding one's own society, one's own culture, is that it is often very difficult to get sufficient perspective to understand how it works. Schlosser provides that perspective.
For example, he reminds us that the entire fast-food industry is predicated on a culture that revolves around the car. Anyone who has ever sat in a line of cars waiting to be served in a drive-through should already have realized this. But the connection between one's own individual actions (Hey, I just want a Diet Coke) and the larger social implications and effects (one out of every four Americans are getting the same meals, sitting in the same drive-throughs) every days are hard to s...