Rating: 
Summary: Fast Food Nation by Schlosser
Review: The author warns of the potential dangers in eating large
quantities of fast food preparations. He decries the numerous
ads that seek to capture children as life-long clients of the
junk food diet. The author is seeking to establish accountability
from food manufacturers and suppliers. He seeks to control
fast food consumption from fries to almost every imaginable
preparation by a wide constituency of food chains. He critiques
the dangers in eating red meat and the move toward irradiation
by the USDA. This book is an important work for consumers
of fast food and junk food. It provides a very ambitious
public agenda of awareness of junk foods and consumer strategies
to limit large quantities of these foods in the daily diet.
The author provides readers with the badly needed disclosure
of food preparation protocols and areas where improvement is
needed in order to protect children.
Rating: 
Summary: more wide sight needed
Review: I can't agree with usual criteria I see. I think the USA is one of the most clean countries in the world, but to be aware of this, it's necessary to know another places and another times. In Europe, Descartes, Rousseau and many great thinkers and writers worked and lived in rooms plenty of dirt and garbage, rats, mosquitoes etc. Fish were uneatable in interior cities as Paris during centuries excepting salted cod. The custom today can seen even refined as drinking wine with meals come from the infestation of water with typhus. Great King Louis XIV of France had his scarce hair plenty of louses under his powdered wig and used a gold pin to kill someone.
Not, I ask myself another type of questions, and the first is, why have people to eat so fast? I think this book has the point of view of the USA, a country very modern, but with a more wide sight, management of hamburgers have as all in life, failures and abuses, but I think nobody can pretend to nourish every day of his life with these. Hamburgers and fried potatoes are a meal very old and by nothing strange in any country of western world. Problems of big corporations dealing with food, electronics, cars, etc are another question. Perhaps the author has made a puzzle with this. As it were, this book is curious and very complete referring to facts and numbers, but minced meat isn't a novelty. Cleanliness is, by first time in history of mankind.
Rating:
Summary: It's what we always knew about fast food
Review: Garbage is garbage. People don't go to MacDonald's in search of nutrition. They do, however, expect their food to be devoid of feces and bacteria and viruses and human body parts--it's not asking much. Fast Food Nation is a much-needed update to The Jungle. Schlosser documents his book nearly every step of the way, and the times when he appears to stray, one senses that he's not far off.I won't quote any of the extraordinary facts from the book. Please read it for yourself. In the first part of the book, you'll get to know the history of the fast food industry as well as the commercialization of the United States in general. Then, you'll find out how the food you most often eat is made, processed, and grown. The book should anger and frustrate you and compel you to write to your local and state congressional members. One complaint I have about the book concerns its distractedness. In extended efforts to tie seemingly unrelated ideas--for example, the complex relationship between General Motors, fast food, California, and the interstate and highway systems--Schlosser sometimes leaves his ideas for far too long and returns to them out of breath and laboring to rally the point. All in all, there's no reason why I should not recommend this book. It's the truth about Happy Meals and most of the food that people in this country consume.
Rating:
Summary: A Wake Up Call
Review: It doesn't take a genius to realize on some level that fast food is not good for you or that massproducing food in such quantities will lead to shady practices in the food production. But just sort of knowing it in the back of your head doesn't really affect you all that much when you are hungry and can smell the french fries cooking from down the block. Schlosser exposes every effect that the fast food industry has on the animals, the environment, and on people at all levels of the chain in chilling detail. I haven't eaten at McDonald's in a long time, and now I'm definitely not going back. From unexpected and frightening ingredients in your food (beef in the french fries, fecal matter and e.coli in the beef) to horrible working conditions and shady business practices at fast food restaurants, food processing plants and slaughterhouses. Schlosser brings to light all of the things that people have probably suspected about this industry, but there's a big difference between suspecting a lurking evil and having it laid out in clinical detail before your eyes. Despite the fact that I have not been to a fast food restaurant in a while, I still learned things about food that have made me cautious in other parts of my life. Like the widespread presence of dangerous bacterias in meat sold to consumers as well as fast food restaurants. This book is thoroughly depressing to read, but at the same time I think everyone should read it, so that they know exactly what they are perpetuating everytime they buy a whopper, or a big mac, or a chalupa or a chicken bucket.
Rating:
Summary: Extensive.
Review: The recommendation to read this book was random: I was shopping in the mall with a friend of mine who happened to mention her job at McDonald's, and the cashier told us "Dude, you have to read Fast Food Nation. You'll quit your job." My friend refused, but I decided to.
Fast Food Nation, for me, was not just another book. Never have I been so compelled by a nonfiction work, perhaps because the facts presented were so surreal and shocking to me that it seemed almost fictional. Some of the issues I knew: the high fat content, rising obesity, less-than-perfect corporations. However, the most dangerous issues have occured behind our backs and I never knew.
I don't understand how meat can be contaminated with bacteria and disease yet still find its way to American consumers. How can workers slaughter animals and work in processing factories with low wages and high injury incidents, complete with unskilled and immigrant workers like something out of the early twentieth century and receive little or no punishment? I know becoming a vegetarian and refusing to work in fast food wouldn't help all the victims of the fast food takeover, but I'd love to find a way, for reading this book outraged me and put things in perspective.
Rating:
Summary: A muckraking masterpiece
Review: Would you so enthusiastically bring a hamburger to your lips if you knew that your meal could be tainted with fecal bacteria, bone fragments, or industrial solvents? In his muckraking style that aims to tell all about the fast food industry, Eric Schlosser uses Fast Food Nation as a vehicle to expose the atrocities that occur on all levels of the fast food industry.
Schlosser begins the novel with the beginnings of the forceful fast food industry, telling the tale of the humble beginnings of such entrepreneurs as Ray Kroc and J.R. Simplot. The segue is clear but abrupt as the focus changes from the corporate schemes of the current executives of companies such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds to the lives of the individuals who work at the individual fast food chains. This perspective is one which Schlosser maintains throughout much of the book, as he depicts in this section the ways with which the workers are exploited by being paid very little, given only minor training skills, and are not allowed to join unions so that the executives can benefit from having total control over the workers.
The next main focus of the book is of the industrial aspect of the fast food industry, including how agribusiness has made fast food companies world-wide phenomena due to size and how quality control has become lost in the shuffle. Schlosser attains an extreme level of detail by obtaining anecdotes from individual farmers who have worked with or have been damaged by the combination tactics of the fast food industry and its desire to control as many farms as possible while paying exceedingly low prices.
One of the final and most harrowing portions of the book is his description of the factories in which the meat and potatoes for the fast food companies are produced. The conditions which he describes and the process which he uncovers provides a fitting summary of the entire goal of the fast food industry, which is to make as much money as possible, disregarding the individuals, including workers and consumers.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Cows
Review: Although this book started out a bit slow I gradually began to find it very interesting. It explored many aspects of the fast food industry that I would have never known. It was interesting how the businessess started off and became a world sensation and such a huge demand.
Rating:
Summary: Good book... a bit scary, though.
Review: Well, I was amazed at the things Schlosser wrote about the fast food industry. I had no idea what they were really doing behind the counter. Feeding it to children and making money off that. Many consumers are still not aware of what's really being served to them. Good book and an eye opener.
Rating:
Summary: shocking!
Review: I knew the fast food industry was bad... but had nooo idea how bad! Schlosser does a wonderful job of depicting what really goes on behind the fast food counters and what the chains do to hide it from you. I will never again touch fast food thanks to this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad
Review: Fast Food Nation is a book that gives so many details on how the most important fast food companies were created. It goes beyond the truth on what really goes on inside the food we think is good and that is most bought by us americans.
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