Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal  - the book:
From Publishers Weekly
Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s.

Fast Food Nation (2006) - the movie: a fictionalized feature film based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling nonfiction expose.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of four stars and added, "Eric Schlosser's nonfiction 2001 best seller, Fast Food Nation, started life at this magazine, but the bucking maverick of a movie he has scripted with director Richard Linklater (A Scanner Darkly) is cut from a different side of beef. It's less an expose of junk-food culture than a human drama, sprinkled with sly, provoking wit, about how that culture defines how we live ...
 If the movie stayed on topic, we'd have a muckraking probe with roots back to Upton Sinclair's seminal 1906 book The Jungle and extending to Morgan Spurlock's 2004 doc Super Size Me. But Schlosser and Linklater are hunting bigger game. The shit in the burger is symptomatic of a larger contamination.
The film is brimming with grand ambitions but trips on many of them as some characters aren't given enough screen time to register and others vanish just when you want to learn more about them."
Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote, "Richard Linklater's rough-hewn tapestry of assorted lives that feed off of and into the American meat industry is both rangy and mangy; it remains appealing for its subversive motives and revelations even as one wishes its knife would have been sharper ... In the end, viewers waiting for an emotional and/or dramatic payoff will be disappointed. As a call-to-arms, it's highly sympathetic but surprisingly mild-mannered."
Trailer-
You can watch the full film here...