ABSTRACT
Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifi cations of their purchases. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off the counter, fi nd a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper, and dig in … They should know what really lurks behind those sesame-seed buns. As the old saying goes: You are what you eat. (From the introduction to Fast Food Nation , Schlosser 2001 : 10)
The Slow Food movement is different from ecological movements and from gastronomy movements. Gastronomical movements don’t defend the small producers and their products, and ecological movements fi ght the battles, but can’t cook. You have to have both at the same time. (Spoken by Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement at a ‘convivium’ held at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse; Brennan 1999 )
The recently published Fast Food Nation (Schlosser 2001 ) is an exposé of an industrialized food system in extremis . Deliberately building on the legacy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle , Schlosser seeks to enrage people’s hearts as well as their stomachs by describing both the social and the public health/environmental costs of a food sector gone awry. Hence, not only does he recount the epidemiology of E. coli 0157:H7, he drives home the point that the rise of fast food was inextricable from the de-skilling, racializing, and youthening of restaurant and food-processing work, making such work mindless at best and extraordinarily hazardous at worst. 1 Curiously, though, the desire for fast food is treated as somewhat of a given. Indeed, Schlosser treats taste as a purely biological phenomenon, unmediated by cultural and economic factors, claiming at several junctures that fast food simply tastes good. As but one consequence, he says, the USA has the highest rate of obesity in the industrialized world (Schlosser 2001 : 240). The success of fast foods, he insinuates, depends on compulsive gluttony and unrefi ned taste, both of which are manifest in fat bodies.
