Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002. 383 pages.

This book is a highly-readable mixture of muckraking and historical research, and it's all about the fast food industry in America that emerged in the 1950s in California. McDonald's is a big topic, with its low-wage workers. Other topics are what's in the meat, what life is like for meatpacking employees, and how french fries are made.

In 1906 Upton Sinclair wrote that "the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one -- there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit." Theodore Roosevelt ordered an investigation, and the Beef Trust went into action. A mild Meat Inspection Act was passed that year. A hundred years later, the USDA still has a hard time keeping up with the meatpacking executives.

McDonald's is merely the standard-bearer of the fast food industry. There is also Pizza Hut, Burger King, Carl's Jr., Jack in the Box, Subway, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and many others. Today they're all over the world through the magic of franchises. A 1981 GAO study found that the Small Business Administration had guaranteed 18,000 franchise loans from 1967-1979, and it was still going on as of 1996. Your tax dollars at work!
ISBN 0-06-093845-5

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