Fast Food Nation

The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

By: Eric Schlosser

Narrated by: Rick Adamson

Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.

Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from the California subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. He hangs out with the teenagers who make the restaurants run and communes with those unlucky enough to hold America's most dangerous job - meatpacker. He travels to Las Vegas for a giddily surreal franchisers' convention where Mikhail Gorbachev delivers the keynote address. He even ventures to England and Germany to clock the rate at which those countries are becoming fast food nations.

Fast Food Nation is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.

©2001 by Eric Schlosser
(P)2001 Random House, Inc.
Random House Audible, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Book Sense Book of the Year Award Finalist, Adult Non-Fiction, 2002

"... a fierce indictment of the fast food industry." (The New York Times)