NRO Weekend, January 27-28, 2001
McGarbage
The author wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word “dunce.”

By Douglas Kern, a writer and lawyer in Dayton, Ohio.
During one summer of his youth he worked for a fast-food restaurant. Hence, he is a corporate shill. Don't believe him.

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 356 pp.

n page nine of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Schlosser writes the truth, and the truth does not set him free: "During the two years spent researching this book, I ate an enormous amount of fast food. Most of it tasted pretty good. …It's also inexpensive and convenient."

What else is there to say?

Fast Food Nation is the chronicle of a reporter shocked — shocked! — to learn that fast food is unhealthy; that big businesses extort favors from local governments; that fast-food chains direct advertisements at children. What next? Will Schlosser discover that cigarettes cause cancer? Will he unlock the connection between sex and pregnancy?

Fast Food Nation canvasses history, science, investigative journalism, sociology, economics, and paranoid anti-corporate leftism to examine every facet of the fast-food experience. During this examination, Schlosser wears many hats, a few of which are conical and contain the word "dunce":

Schlosser as capable historian: Admittedly, Fast Food Nation deftly chronicles the colorful history of fast food in America. Schlossel praises visionaries like Ray Kroc and Carl Karcher, who built their fast-food empires by their own idiosyncratic lights.

Schlosser as economics ignoramus: Schlosser propounds the indefensible thesis that the modern fast-food industry arose due to social manipulation, not entrepreneurial effort: "…America's fast food industry in its present form is the logical outcome of certain political and economic choices." Nonsense! The ferocious post-World War II desire for cheap restaurant fare guaranteed the creation of a fast-food industry, geared towards the appetites and budgets of a growing middle class. Such an industry would surely prefer machines, low-skilled workers, and franchising to ensure the maximum volume of sales at the lowest possible prices — thus creating maximum profits. No fast-food conspiracy there.

Schlosser claims that the fast-food industry manufactured the labor conditions for its success by lobbying for a low minimum wage and tax credits for job training. But how did the industry acquire the clout to lobby successfully for those measures in the first place? Obviously, the fast-food industry made a fortune and then endorsed measures to keep that fortune — just like every other business.

Fast Food Nation struggles mightily to cast the fast-food industry as exploiters of poor, helpless workers. Too bad for Schlosser that the teenage fast-food workers he interviewed didn't consider themselves exploited. Conceding that fast food gives entry-level jobs to the otherwise unemployable, Schlosser complains that the motives of the industry in hiring such undesirables "are hardly altruistic." Perhaps they'll lose their tax-exempt status as charities consequently.

By accident, Schlosser proves the inevitability of the fast-food industry in its current state. He's a better reporter than analyst.

Schlosser as banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid: Fast Food Nation repeatedly lapses into elegy for the small farmer or rancher, decimated by rapacious agribusiness. Imagine: a left-leaning journalist discovering something other than gay-bashers and racists in the blue parts of the national map! But Schlosser's pastoral hymns to Old MacDonald (the farmer, not Ronald) read like the romanticized visions of a city boy with the first whiff of fresh air in his nose. No doubt we'll read about the sorrows of the lonely buggy-whip manufacturer in Fast Car Nation.

Schlosser as health fascist: Fast food will kill you. It's just awful, brimming with fat and additives and squid eyeballs. We know, Eric, we know. We knew before we read your interminable chapters on flavorings and fat kids and what not. We don't care.

Schlosser as Upton Sinclair: Fast Food Nation describes the meat industry in terms that make The Jungle read like a puff piece from the National Beef Council. He's probably right. Schlosser depicts a powerful industry benefiting from unfair laws and the shocking exploitation of desperate illegal immigrants. My solution: End corporate welfare and crack down on illegal immigrants. Schlossel's solution: Throw money at OSHA. It makes sense that OSHA should heal the beef industry, given its demonstrated skill at comforting cows.

Schlosser as hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state: In the last chapter of Fast Food Nation, Schlosser solves all the world's problems, mostly by stamping the boot of federal bureaucracy on the neck of the fast-food industry. This chapter does to your brain what a Double Whopper with Cheese does to your arteries. Do something healthier, like slamming your head in a door repeatedly.

"The first step towards meaningful change," Schlosser observes at the merciful end of Fast Food Nation, "is by far the easiest: stop buying it." No chance. A prosperous nation strives to be 1) fat, 2) dumb, and 3) happy. Fast food takes care of 1) and 3) while books like Fast Food Nation take care of 2). And in one sentence, Schossel inadvertently explains the wisdom behind all three: "Most of it tasted pretty good."