'Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior,' he writes. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry 'both feeds and feeds off the young,' insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease.

coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and 'what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns.' Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is-literally-feces in your meat. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought.

The fast food nation