Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, dramatic, well-researched
Review: The best thing about this book is the "light-history" style. It is both chock-full of facts and highly readable.Some of the author's statistics DID seem a bit creative, until I went to the back and looked at his references. Helpfully, he lists all sources by page number. He explains his methods/reasoning in every case, and the facts DO check out. Interesting that he is accused of being biased against fast food. The author states several times how delicious he finds fast food to be! The book is most informative when it concerns the poor labor practices of the fast-food industry and its fanatical disregard for government mandates relating to public safety. A must for the liberal library...and those on the right should be prepared to acknowledge its findings.
Rating:
Summary: What we don't know could kill us!
Review: I am shocked by this book. Reading it has opened my eyes to just what goes on behind the scenes, from the fast food restaurant to the slaughterhouse. My husband and I have been trying to raise our own meat. This year, we butchered our first steer. From now on, we will be butchering one every year. I fully intend to change my eating habits. I'm sure others will, too, after they read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Illuminating
Review: Schlosser creates a vibrant and extremely informative expose' of America through the demon that has become the fast food industry. According to Schlosser, American culture has become defined by the entire concept of fast food. Through stripmalling, anti-labor practices, mass production,and swelling waistlines, America's landscape looks sadly bland, uniform and souless. This is not to suggest that hope has vanished. Schlosser points out businesses that have retained solid and sanitary practices (In and Out Burger)and points to positive results of consumer outrage. Fast Food Nation is a call to action for all Americans to seriously evaluate the origins of our food and our culture. Schlosser's excellent and detailed reporting, along with his expert ability to turn a phrase, illuminates the entire process that produces our nation's (and ultimately the world's) food. He goes great lengths to show how we are all interconnected through food, labor, transit and technology. A must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Cheesburger anyone?
Review: This book put so many things into perspective for me, and made me question more things fast food related, like how many illegal immigrants, or just immigrants, were hurt while making my big mac. Also, how many ranchers are not making enough money to support their families because meat companies are controlling the prices. These are the kind of questions presented and answered in this book. Fast Food Nation, The Jungle of our times, shows how food safety and food health issues are still current issues in this powerful cosmopolitan world of ours. I recommend this to any fast food consumer, not to make them quit eating fast food, unless you want to, but to become more aware of what goes on in the world, especially on the home front, wherever that may be.
Rating:
Summary: More than meets the eye.
Review: I bought this book in a London airport bookstore, as something that looked moderately interesting to kill time on my flight. I found that this book was much more than I expected. Rather than just gross-out facts on why one should avoid fast food, this book is amazingly well-researched and informative. What impressed me the most was Schlosser's ability to weave the human perspective into the overall sociological and economical view. This book is extremely well-worded, and is so much more than just a dryly written collection of pointless facts. This book is educational and informs the reader of the myriad ways that the rise of the fast food industry has completely changed our culture in America and throughout the world.
Rating:
Summary: A *Nation-Changing* Book of Extraordinary Value
Review:
This is an utterly extraordinary book, and I am going to review it not from the point of view of fast food as a vice, like tobacco, with individual health consequences, but rather from a national security point of view, with obesity and the loss of the warrior ethic, of fitness, of the ability to run down and kill terrorists in your neighborhood. Strategically, in both political and economic terms, this book is a *major* contribution to how politicians, corporate chiefs, university and school administrators, religious leaders, and individuals themselves should think about their national diet.
In combination with "Pandora's Poison" by Joe Thorton (a book about how chlorine-based chemistry is killing both America and the Earth), this book cuts to the very innermost corners of the national soul. It is also more timely, in 2003, than when first published in 2001 to such acclaim, because a book called "Why People Hate America" has ably documented the Islamic and general foreign perception of how McDonald's embodies the "hamburger virus" of capitalism run amok, and Kraft Food, among others, had just recently (July 2003) announced that it is completely revisiting its edibles, now that folks are realizing that Oreo's kill kids and sodas have ten tea-spoons of sugar in every can. Food has become a fighting matter! Food has become a cultural litmus test, and America is failing the test. We have also seen SARS, monkeypox, and multiple re-emerging infectuous diseases since this book was published. Infected fast food is a clear and present danger to the American nation. What I find so dazzling about this work is its thoughtful integration and explanation of how fast food not only increases the gap between the rich and the poor by killing family farms and skilled labor as fast food corporations take over both farms and animal food chains so as to de-skill them and extract every penny of profit possible, but it is increasing the prospects for deadly disease entering the national bloodstream. If Microsoft is a "Dutch Elm disease" threat to national security in cyberspace (a view published in ComputerWorld by Paul Strassman recently after leaving his post as Director of Defense Information), then McDonalds and the other fast food companies are a threat to national security in multiple ways--by destroying diversity among farms and in eating habits that support unique food chains, by increasing the numbers of people in poverty, by creating massive means by which several different nation-wide epidemics could occur. Obesity is actually the least threatening outcome of a political economy that permits fast food (and still does not regulate and enforce healthy meat processing). At every level, from the philosophical architecture of the book, with its concern about the targeting of children as both direct clients and intermediaries in getting parents to accept bad food for their whining children, to the selection of the topics to be covered by the individual chapters, to the earnest and richly-developed sources that are quoted, this is one of the finest books among the 375 plus that I have reviewed here on Amazon. This book is beyond five stars. In relation to poverty, corporate corruption, government ineffectiveness, fast food as a disease vector, and in relation to obesity as a symbol of a nation in decline, this book is about as important as a book can get. Totally, totally awesome. It's not about diet--its about the health of the American Republic in every way conceivable.
Rating:
Summary: Very insightful....
Review: Well written - Schlosser keeps your attention easily by bringing his research on the beginnings of fast food companies, (you will consider some of them "empires" after reading the book!) to the slaughterhouses, fast food workers, food preparation, security, and the lobbyists for the industry that have sucessfully lowered wages for workers, among many other things. Some of the findings the author brings to the table not only affects the burgers you buy in the drive thru, but also the meat you buy at the local supermarket! And it's not just beef to be concerned about. Definetly will make you study that menu a lot harder next time you visit a fast food restaurant!
Rating:
Summary: An informative read that is a page-turner
Review: I found this book to be very informative and enjoyable. Eric Schlosser's writing style is easy to follow, yet highly stimulating. I would recommend this book to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected- Better!
Review: I read this book hoping for some "[sick]" stories to convince me to stop eating fast food. What I found, however, were facts and real-life stories about the sociological problems we face as a result of the greedy practices of the fast food industry. I have not eaten fast food in over 2 years because of this book, not because it told me about [foreign materials] in red meat, but because anyone with any compassion for their fellow man could not in good conscience support this industry.
Rating:
Summary: Schlosser is a fiend of the citation
Review: In "Fast Food Nation," Schlosser writes in fluid motion between vignette and statistic insanity creating a good told tale. The common held belief by many a fast food critic "one could possibly get more than they asked for from their fast food" is the main thesis of Schlosser's argument in the 288-page diatribe.
Schlosser begins with the history of the individuals who built the fast food industry, merely overviews, with many aspects of a culture that relies upon instant satisfaction and convenience; thus, over the ideas of health and safety which summarizes the first segment of the investigation. Though Schlosser could have harvested more history of fast food and its' moguls, so could a lot of other writers. Meshing tales of Ray Kroc and Walt Disney provides not only a little entertainment, but also shocking information that presents other arguments within itself.
The second and final points Schlosser discusses, are the way the food is prepared for fast food restaurants and the people this food effects. Whether it is the individual consuming the food, preparing the food, or even selling the food, Schlosser forces statistics into the readers face which simply cannot be ignored. Some so shocking and vile, some so apparently innocent and sweet, the writing makes the reader ask for more in horror.
Quoting muckraker Upton Sinclair more than once, the author Schlosser not only visits a contemporary meat packing plant, but also relates his visit to a modern United States economy that could easily be one of the bovine on the slaughter floor. Schlosser presents the ideas of modern agribusiness conglomerates and fast food corporations, who some, refuse any form of accountability to government regulation. Then presents tales of small independent businesses succeeding in reform of the system in which they originally intended to be convenient, becoming natural and at the pace of Mother Nature. While a good story can be fun and games, Schlosser obviously has a serious form of addiction to citing resources and making sure every fact he presents can be backed through enormous amounts of work. Researching and traveling for over three years to construct this piece of literature, Schlosser could have come away with better quotes from individuals he interviewed; although, some quotes are interestingly damning to the entire industry as a whole.
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