Rating: 
Summary: Pick up this book, but hold the fries
Review: As someone just returning from France and Austria, I was fascinated by the growing emergence and dominance of McDonalds, Burger King, and Pizza Hut in the diets of so many Europeans. Like every other American, I took for granted how commonplace fast food is in this country. I became curious how the fast food industry started, how it grew, and the ways it has spread and is spreading in the world today. I found this book upon muy return and it does a great job of taking the reader step-by-step through fast food's rise in America and the ways it has achieved success. Schlosser keeps the reader eager to move on, as each bit of the fast-food industry is exposed and uncovered. I've found I can add a lot to conversations about food after reading this book. Buy and read it if you've got the time--you'll get a deeper perspective of the industry and the world around you.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth reading
Review: I liked this book better than I had expected to from previewing the reviews here, but did get a little weary of everything being blamed on Republicans. Also I had expected more emphasis on the health aspects of fast food. The book actually focused more on sociological, economic, and political influences of fast food. Heavy emphasis is given to certain geographical areas, especially Colorado and California. The book should make anyone give thought to the amount of fast food they eat. Other reviewers have expressed a belief that the book is biased and distorts the facts, and I wish someone would publish a book with the other side of the story. Overall I learned a lot and think the book is worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: fast food really [stinks]!
Review: I just finished reading fast food nation. Yes, I have eaten at many fast food restaurants (except for kfc where two of my friends have gotten sick from eating their food.) I was in europe this past summer and low and behold the styrofoam boxes that held my royale with cheese. I did notice one thing that the person behind the counter was not completely brain dead and they had mc beer. I went to a local mcdonalds in on a prominant intersection back in the us and the guy behind the counter was brain dead. I had to repeat my order twice and the burger I got was not hot but cold. I personally have given up eating at chain restaurants such as bennigan's, tgi fridays, red lobster(I thoght I was going to die of over butter.) chili's and chi chi's. The food is pretty much the same and it is geared for the general public. I actually worked for a fast food chain and discovered that the corperation held a mighty grip on the franchises. I haven't eaten steak in 7 years and will not eat burgers any more instead opting for boca burgers whch the smell people in nj are willing to put on the product to make your sense beleive that it is meat. I think americans should wake up and see what kind of [junk] they are eating and what it is doing to them.
Rating: 
Summary: Would You Like Some E. Coli With That Order?
Review: Eric Schlosser, doesn't like the fast food industry, and neither do I. In fact I've never eaten a Big Mac or a Chicken MacNugget in my life. I have been quietly and privately vegetarian since my early youth, and thankfully so after reading this. This treatise is generally well written and engaging. We are allowed a fly on the wall purview of the at once Neanderthal and techno-obsessive world of the burger barons.
While I can agree with Schlosser that the industry and its affiliates are pretty scummy and intractably bottom-line focused, the author (a journalist by profession) is predictably and unfortunately a lefty and staunch acolyte of the Nanny State. While assuring us that this industry can be made more decent, more safe and more healthy if only we could shovel enough funds at the variegated governmental regulatory agencies, lost on Schlosser, are the examples of successful free-market checks and balances that he highlights. We learn that Jack In The Box, after poisoning (and killing) a number of customers by serving E. Coli infected burgers, takes extraordinary measures to clean up its act and that of its meat packers. This was done to prevent them from going out of business, not from any special pressure exerted upon them by the State. Absent in entirety is any chastisement of the lack of personal responsibility exercised by parents who raise their kids on this crap (some of it literal, as we come to learn from his visits to slaughterhouses). Not once are parents of teenagers who work behind the counters bought to task by Schlosser. Adult employees of the industry are viewed, with typical liberal paternalism, as victims. At one point we are privy to the tragicomedy travails of Kenny Dobbins, an illiterate slaughterhouse worker and union buster, who accumulates a massive shopping list of work related injuries ranging from broken limbs, to chemical poisonings, yet for some odd reason, never rationalizes that he might be safer in a different line of work.Congress should ban all advertising aimed at kids and "fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power" by the McDonald's of the world concludes Schlosser. He then inadvertently speaks the real truth about how to affect changes within this industry, observing: "Nobody in the United States, is forced to buy fast food. The first step towards meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it."
Until that happens, no amount of government tinkering will stop a free people making bad choices about what they and their children eat.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be classified as Fiction
Review: As a senior exec for a large (non-fast food) franchisor, I am well aware of abuses in the industry, and have little love lost for franchising. However, Schlosser's disregard for facts, poor business knowledge, and manipulation of statistics is alarming. How is it possible that a book under the guise of being "non-fiction" can get away with the miseducation of unsuspecting readers? Not out of concern for the fast food industry (don't like it personally), but out of a concern for mass-market misinformation on the scale of Hitler's propaganda machine do I feel I must warn potential readers to treat this book as an allegorical comment on society rather than a balanced account of an industry operating for profit rather than public good. Read Schlosser's notes in the back of the book very closely to understand that his comparative statistics are not always mathematically sound.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging expose on the fast food industry
Review: I read this book in just a few sittings and found it to be a captivating narrative, and one of the least polemic discussions on the issue of the expansive U.S. fast food industry and its effect on diet, politics, the meat packing industry, and the other cogs in the machine: the underpaid, unskilled and voiceless work force. I'm surprised that those who dismiss this book as anti-Republican drivel fail to note one of his key recommendations. Noting that legislative action is difficult at best to enact, he calls for increased pressure on companies like McDonalds to change it ways. It has done so already with surpising speed when faced with bad publicity. I think the financial crisis experienced by McDonalds now is a market-based wake up call for the entire industry. The public no longer wants what the industry is serving up.
Rating:
Summary: Heavy handed... but convincing.
Review: I am by no means a vegetarian, and I think as bad as fast food is, it's a person's choice to eat that slop if they want it. If they don't want to pay attention to their own nutrition, so be it. And anyway, people seem to be catching on. MacDonalds lost a lot of money last year. But after reading Fast Food Nation, I seriously contemplated giving up meat- at least any meat I didn't shoot myself. And I did give up eating factory produced pork and hamburger meat. I don't necessarily buy into all Schlosser's notions of the politics behind the industry, but there's no arguing some of the facts and stories. If you eat meat, and especially if you eat fast food, read this book. It's an eye opener.
Rating:
Summary: A Different Point of View!!!
Review: Here we have Eric Schlosser doing a probe of the fast food industry, and in this book, he depicts that industry as the source of many evils, such as the decline of the family farm, homogenization of the urban landscape, enlargement of the American waistline, and he portrays a fast-food threat and demands a governmental solution. It could be argued that if people don't want to eat at fast food places, let them eat somewhere else. There is the concept of taking personal responsibility for oneself, and letting the people choose. This is a provocative book, however, and it clearly spells out the author's point of view, and one, in fact, which is gaining ground on a national level. McDonald's, incidentally, is really having problems on the stock market, so maybe he's not so far off. People are paying attention to what they are eating.
Rating:
Summary: Changed the way I eat and live
Review: This book had been talked about for quite a while before I finally picked it up, but I am so glad I did. Very interesting and easy to read, it opened my eyes to a whole other world that I didn't really think about existing in America. One of the few books that truly changed my life. I have hardly eaten at a fast food restaurant since I read it, and think twice about buying meat from the supermarket, and even pay more attention to what food I buy for my pet. I recommend this book to anyone willing to learn, and even those who think they shouldn't.
Rating:
Summary: You suspected that fast food was evil. Now you know why!
Review:
In this book, Schlosser describes how fast food chains have transformed our culture in the last half century or so. His interesting writing style weaves statistics, history, personal interest stories and cultural commentary into a quite compelling comment on how industry titans use their power to addict us to their products, trick us into buying them, stamp out unions, grease the political wheels, abuse workers, and avoid regulation and accountability. As bad as that sounds, this book also makes it clear that this couldn't happen without our participation. And in that regard the whole insidious process, although "bad", also seems to be the inevitable manifestation of our societal values - our own chickens coming home to roost, if you will.
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