By 1940, LA had roughly one million cars, more than the vast majority of most of the states. The first is that the “fast-food-ificiation” of eating habits is not simply an American phenomenon, but one that is becoming increasingly popular the world over, in Europe as well as Asia. Fast Food Nation shows us how fast food has exerted a decidedly negative influence on American life. Taylor Arneson He attempts to write a book charting how the rise in the fast-food industry in the United… read analysis of Eric Schlosser For Schlosser, there restaurants are partly to … Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 book written by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry.. First serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. They are often the first international corporations to arrive after a country has made the decision to open its markets to foreign investment. LA’s low-density, detached-home model of growth was ideally suited for the burgeoning fast food industry, as motorists could drive through for a quick meal as they passed by the restaurants (conveniently located off the new freeways). The ranch lies “twenty miles south of town,” and near some of the new developments that have sprung up amid the natural beauty of … It’s not just Ridgemont High anymore – it’s fast times all around the world. This individual’s job is simply to shoot cattle in the head like this as they are herded into the slaughterhouse through a narrow shoot. Ankle-deep pools of blood. Read on the go with our iOS and Android App. The scenery becomes even more violent as one goes further up the production line, where workers interact with live cattle. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”. In the 2002 Afterword, Eric Schlosser examines the "mad cow" epidemic and the changes in the fast food industry since the book's 2001 publication. In 1993, doctors in Seattle noticed a sharp spike in the number of local children being admitted to emergency rooms with bloody diarrhea. They can lead to heart disease, neurological disorders, kidney damage, and even death. Fast Food Nation - Why the Fries Taste So Good Summary & Analysis Eric Schlosser This Study Guide consists of approximately 47 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Fast Food Nation. In the 1950s in San Bernardino, the McDonald brothers implemented a standardized system of food preparation that increased speed, lowered prices, and boosted sales. Their production system was designed, like that of McDonald’s, to eliminate the need for skilled workers. Schlosser believes that this expanding, suburbanized region of the Mountain West is an emblem of late 20th-century economic growth, and the problems … LA’s growth happened precisely at the time when mass-produced cars were becoming affordable to the growing middle class—indeed, from 1920 to 1940, the region welcomed 2 million residents from all across the rest of the US. These health conditions are now increasingly seen in other parts of the world: between 1984 and 1993, fast food locations in the United Kingdom doubled, bringing American-style obesity in its wake. Decapitated cattle carcasses. Read in: 4 minutes Favorite quote from the author: The most serious thing about Fast Food Nation is that it was written 15 years ago and not much has changed. Schlosser writes that most fast-food companies make the bulk of their profits from the “franchise” system, wherein the conglomerate is actually the landlord for the franchisor, who “rents” the brand. But major changes were just around the corner. Chapter Summary for Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, part 2 chapter 9 summary. For indeed, food is one of the defining traits of a culture—it shows how we live, how our economy functions, how our political institutions operate, and what we value and prioritize as a society. Schlosser argues that, although many of the factors and processes he depicts in the book seem bleak and unchangeable—dictated by corporate interests with deep pockets—he notes that consumers don’t have to buy fast food at all. Eric Schlosser est un écrivain et journaliste américain né le 14 août 1959. The fast food industry has standardized, commodified, and homogenized the skillset of the country’s labor force. Because the story of fast food is about much more than the rise of an industry and the success of a few entrepreneurs—it is a story about the fundamental transformation of a society. By mass-producing specialty cuts and shipping them in sealed plastic to the supermarkets, this method of production also enabled the supermarkets to fire most of their skilled butchers. Ground beef is particularly prone to contamination, because the package that’s sold in the supermarket does not come from a single animal. The British consume more fast food than any other Western European country; they also claim the continent’s highest rate of obesity. From the view of the fast food executives and franchisees, teenagers are the ideal candidates for these jobs. Schlosser describes his first meeting with Hank, a rancher in Colorado Springs, who takes Schlosser on a tour of his property. They believed that they could succeed as an upstart by taking a radical approach to cutting costs. They aggressively market to children, through television advertisements featuring bright and colorful mascots, on-site playgrounds, and cross-promotional campaigns with toy companies and film studios. Do you think fast food chains should be held responsible for the violations committed by the meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses that supply them? 3:31. As the reach of major fast food chains like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell has extended across the planet, the same can increasingly be said of most people around the world. The author of the book Fast Food Nation, Schlosser is a journalist based in New York City. If so, describe the situation in a few sentences. Get a full book summary of Fast Food Nation by signing up for Shortform. Eric Schlosser wrote the book “Fast Food Nation” to prove that the fast food industry is solely responsible for many problems that affect today’s society. During World War Two and the years immediately following, the US government pumped nearly $20 billion into California, building airplane factories, steel mills, military bases, and naval ports. Leaving the family’s homestead at 15, he went into the potato industry. Eventually, more than 700... Fast food began in Southern California as a quintessentially American product, boosted by US postwar prosperity and powered by the nation’s growing rates of automobile ownership, highway construction, and suburban sprawl. That same year, a new company named IBP came onto the scene. States and the federal government should pass legislation that makes it easier for fast food workers to organize labor unions. His company could now grow its own potatoes, provide its own fertilizer, process them at their own factories, and ship them from their own warehouses and lumber yards, all without ever interacting with an outside supplier. Kroc instituted a philosophy, the core values that would guide McDonald’s—Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value. Chapter Summary for Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, part 2 chapter 5 summary. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is an attempt to describe how American eating and food-production patterns have changed since World War Two. Brendan Carr 8,315 views. The human costs are immense: severely overweight people are four times as likely to die young as people of normal weight. Explain why or why not in a few sentences. Because kids exert a strong influence over what adults purchase, marketers know that kids can be powerful surrogate salespeople for their products—and no one has internalized this lesson better than the fast food industry. It’s hard to tell the story of fast food’s meteoric success without telling the story of the french fry. This is our MonkeyNotes downloadable and printable literature summary / study guide / booknotes / analysis for "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser in Rich Text Format (.RTF). If the old cities of the East Coast were shaped by the railroad and the trolley car, then Southern California was defined by the automobile. After they’re knocked out, the animals are shackled to a chain and lifted through the air to the next area of the factory, where they are killed and dismembered. LitCharts Teacher Editions. The author gives us a chance to learn more about the way the fast food industry functions and … Working long hours at fast-food restaurants has a negative effect on their education and takes away from more meaningful opportunities for enrichment. And it’s hard to do that without telling the story of John Richard Simplot, America’s potato king. Through this global conquest, it has reshaped how the entire world eats and lives. Automatic condiment dispensers, robotic sensors at drive-throughs, digitized timers for cooking french fries, and other technological innovations ensure that McDonald’s and other fast food giants get maximum efficiency out of their employees, with paychecks as low as possible. Schlosser describes the lives of small-time, independent ranchers, and the changes in large-scale ranching that have made independent farming so difficult, almost impossible, economically. In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, which shocked the conscience (and turned the stomach) of the nation by exposing audiences to the dangerous and unsanitary conditions in America’s slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. TheBestNotes.com Staff. In 1960, he decided to go into the slaughtering business, opening a small slaughterhouse in the town of Greeley, Colorado. A businessman named Ray Kroc witnessed the success of the McDonald’s system and saw that it could be replicated on a national scale. "TheBestNotes on Fast Food Nation".TheBestNotes.com.. Table of Contents • List of Characters • Short Summary (Synopsis) • Eric Schlosser Biography • Historical Information • Genre Chapter Summaries with Notes / Analysis They also tend to hire the most vulnerable members of society who have the least ability to fight back—teenagers, the elderly, the disabled, and undocumented immigrants. This population explosion was also driven by another stream of federal investment in Southern California—defense spending. Because of how it is processed and shipped, the meat of just one infected cow can find its way into 32,000 pounds of ground beef. As a symbol of his total triumph over them, Kroc opened up a McDonald’s across the street from a new restaurant they opened (called “The Big M”) and ran it out of business. The USDA should be given increased funding and new authority to enforce the strictest possible food safety standards, especially for ground beef that it purchases through the federal school lunch program. The government should eliminate tax breaks and public subsidies for fast food chains that exploit their workers through high turnover, while teaching them minimal job skills. Organs yanked out of dead animals with bare hands. Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by: Here's a preview of the rest of Shortform's Fast Food Nation summary: Most Americans have eaten fast food at some time or another in their lives. In this two-part journey we discover the history behind fast food, the big names who helped create this fast food culture, how this food was created, and what affect it can have on our bodies. They were content being regionally successful restaurant entrepreneurs, making approximately $100,000 per year (by no means a small sum in the mid-1950s). In the last chapter, Schlosser ends by analyzing how the fast-food restaurants became o worldwide phenomenon and how Europe and other continents were seen as a new, more profitable market for the big fast-food restaurants. Since its rise in the postwar United States, fast food has worked its way deep into the fabric of America’s social, economic, educational, and political institutions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. This patient and nurturing strategy paid off and resulted in the successful expansion of McDonald’s. In 1961, Kroc had done well enough in growing the company to secure the financing to buy the brothers out. In Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser examines the rise of the fast food industry in America following World War II. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal shows how the fast food industry has reshaped the American economic system and imprinted itself on the nation’s culture since the 1950s. After the animals are slaughtered, poorly trained workers often handle the carcasses improperly, pulling out the stomach and intestines of the cattle by hand and spilling the contents of the digestive system all over the slaughterhouse floor and into the meat that’s sold to consumers. Fast Food Nation explains the fast food industry as a popular business concept that brought innovation and as well as unhealthy habits into the neighborhoods where they thrive. During the war years alone, federal spending accounted for approximately half of Southern Californians’ personal income. But Schlosser laments, too, the patterns of “deregulation” (often spearheaded by Republican groups in Congress) that have kept government agencies like OSHA and the USDA from adequately keeping track of the dangers to consumers, and plant-workers, in the meat-packing and food-service industries. Struggling with distance learning? Kroc saw that expansion was important to building up the brand: to him, it was more important to have new McDonald’s restaurants opening up than it was to have a uniform set of financial details for each new franchise. The business model was a runaway success, enabling McDonald’s to save labor costs and undercut their competition. Going back to the early days of the McDonald brothers’ “Speedee Service” system, fast food has employed a low-skill, low-wage system of labor that keeps costs—and therefore, consumer prices—to a minimum. Find a summary of this and each chapter of Fast Food Nation! When he first visited the McDonald’s Self-Service Restaurant in 1954, he was already in his fifties, with a largely unremarkable career as a travelling salesman behind him. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation Chapter Summary. The Parents Who Lost 3 Children In A Car Accident Then Had Triplets | … Fast food has contributed to a national and global epidemic of obesity. Il est connu pour son journalisme d'investigation. Eric Schlosser begins his account of the American fast food industry by focusing on one region of the United States in particular: Colorado’s “Front Range,” or a group of cities including Denver, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins, just east of the Rockies. Do you eat fast food? Below are some of the key themes and topics from Fast Food Nation. (Shortform note: Fast Food Nation was originally published in 2001. These teenage fast food workers neglect their schoolwork and eschew after-school sports and activities. All of this is just part of the scenery on a typical business day in America’s meatpacking industry. 22 pages / 11,000+ words Automatic condiment dispensers, robotic sensors at drive-throughs, digitized timers for cooking french fries, and other technological innovations ensure that McDonald’s and other fast food giants get maximum efficiency out of their employees, with paychecks as low as possible. He also provides the results of his research into the current practices of fast … This would provide a real counterweight to the power of the chains, forcing them to address workers’ grievances. And fast times ask for fast food: 1 in 2 Americans eats away from home nowadays, and 1 in 4 eats at a fast food … The by-now-familiar wave of consolidations followed, driven by the market’s new demands for standardized, uniform products. Perhaps most insidiously, fast food chains have even brokered deals with school districts, enabling them to promote their high-fat, high-sugar products directly to children through bus and hallway advertisements, endorsement deals, and even direct provision of school lunches. The US food safety regulatory system needs to be drastically reformed. Born in 1909, his family moved to Idaho shortly after he was born to establish a farm (made possible thanks to government-funded irrigation projects and free public land). Explore the main ideas in Fast Food Nation. (Shortform note: According to The Atlantic, over 60 percent of the fast-food workforce is under 24). In this video you will learn the 3 key ideas from the book fast food nation by Eric SchlosserFast Food Nation Summary | Eric Schlosser | 3 Key Ideas By minimizing the level of human skill that goes into food preparation, fast food chains have at their disposal a workforce that is cheap, easy to replace, and easily controlled. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation to reveal the dark truth about the food that Americans consume on a daily basis. Fast Food Nation, a non-fiction written by journalist Eric Schlosser, is that rare kind of a story, which turns the world upside down, for the facts enumerated in it are shocking. Much of this was fueled by federally funded highways, which amounted to a public subsidy of the major automakers. That year turned out to be a momentous one for the country and for Simplot, as the US entered World War Two. As cattle enter the slaughterhouse from the pen, they are greeted by a worker known as the “knocker,” who shoots them in the head with a stun gun that knocks them unconscious. The industry wants a workforce that is unskilled and willing to accept low pay. Scenes that depicted tubercular hogs being led to slaughter and workers being maimed and killed on the job (and then packed into sausages) revolted and outraged readers at the dawn of the 20th century. But most Americans are unaware of the story behind the growth of fast food, and of social consequences that have resulted from the rise of the fast food industry. He is a contributor to ... Fast Food Nation shows how the fast food industry has massive consequences on many other aspects of our lives, including our education, health and working conditions. 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