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May 08, 2003
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
An insightful read about the history and current state of the fast-food industry.
Three sections stood out to me:
1) kids. Not so much the focus of marketers to reach out to kids via mass media (although a little creepy), but the invasion of marketing into the school systems. BIllboards on school busses, classrooms, halls etc. Most disturbing is when companies provide learning materials that are used which skew the truth to make the company look good. I can deal with companies bombarding with ads because they can be avoided, but when teachers use materials provided by companies to teach the "truth" I start to feel pretty upset.
2) Treatment of Employees - the book focuses on the meatpacking industry, but also in fast food restaurants the trend is to develop "zero training" practices where everything is so automated the industry can hire the cheapest labor and interchange them at will. The slaughterhouses turn over almost all the employees every year, avoiding health insurance costs etc.
3) Slaughterhouse practices - this section is disgusting, discussions of how unsanitary the conditions are make the thought of eating beef from a major slaughterhouse sickening. In one study 75% of the sampled beef contained traces of feces. How gross is that.
Overall a good read. Eric does a good job of documenting where his information comes from in a notes section. At some points it seems like the author is only telling the most shocking parts of the story, to get the most dramatic response from the reader. Sometimes I was suspicious that the stories or facts were worst-case scenario and that in many other instances the facts would have been less dramatic.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
2001 Houghton Mifflin
Posted by mike at 04:11 PM
May 21, 2003
What's in Beef
Of samples taken at processing plants:
7.5% contaminated with Salmonella
11.7% contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes
30% contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus
53.3% contaminated with Clostridium perfringens
78.6% contained microbes of fecal materials
From Nationwide Federal Plant Raw Ground Beef Microbiological Survey, August 1993-March 1994 - USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, April 1996
Posted by mike at 08:18 AM
Chicken Nuggets 2x more Fat than Burgers
Chicken Nuggets at McDonalds contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
Posted by mike at 08:22 AM