hey can to minimize the already-modest skill requirements, and thus training needed, for its largely minimum-wage workforce
(Schlosser 72-73). Although not mentioned in Schlosser's book, the fast food industry has in fact entered the popular culture as the symbol of dead-end work, with such terms as McJobs, and the joke that liberal arts graduates will end up saying "Do you want fries with that?"
At the same time, however, Schlosser sometimes bends the interpretation of the very facts he exhaustively catalogues. For example, near the start of the book we read that "a hamburger and french fries became the quintessential American meal in the 1950s, thanks to the promotional efforts of the fast food chains" (Schlosser 6). Yet not too many pages further on, we learn that while the major fast-food chains did largely come into being around the 1950s, their growth into major corporations took place some years later. McDonald's for example, went from a modest 250 outlets in 1960, mostly in Southern California, to 3000 by 1973 (Schlosser 24).
The distortion here may seem trivial, but it has significant implications. Americans' taste for junk food meals û burgers and fries, tacos, fried chicken, and the like û was not the creation of a sophisticated industry, armed with multibillion-dollar advertising budgets and social scientists conducting studies of how children goad their parents. The fast-food industry of the 1950s era was not a corporate industry but a small-business industry, m
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