Eating and Fast-Food

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.

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rned and self respect, career and job. These workers become dehumanized by a process that demands cheap workers and by the customers who, in their desire for ever-faster fast food, take out their aggressions on counter-people whose attention wanders over the course of hours of high-stress, mind-numbing work. Price is everything in the world of fast food, and this has systematic ramifications for the ways in which the companies work and for the system that we each become a party to when we buy fast food. Because a restaurant's potential clients can in fact supply the basic product - that is, prepared food - for themselves, a restaurant must do two things to bring people in. The first of these is to supply the product (i.e. the food and service) at as cheap a rate as possible. People may well be willing to pay high prices for things that they cannot do themselves (as they have little choice), but they will be much more conscious of the cost of service that they are capable of providing for themselves. Thus a restaurant must always keep its costs in line. People cannot perform surgery on themselves, so they are willing to pay high hospital bills. But they can put together a sandwich. This pressure to reduce cost to the consumer to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1286
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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