I've had this book sitting on my shelf ever since I saw Morgan Spurlock'sSupersize Me. After seeing that movie, I vowed I'd quit eating fast food, but like most vows, it didn't last very long. I decided to pull the book off my shelf while reading and contributing to the threadJunk food, poor nutrition and fundamentalist christianity. Even reading the Praise section for the book is interesting: I didn't know Americans spend more money on fast food than higher education. The reviewier fromUSA Todaywho wrote "God strike me dead before I consume another fast food product..." strikes me as rather ironic, seeing how USA Today has been widely criticized as being a kind of fast food restaurant for news. Reading the Introduction, I was surprised to see the enromous growth in fast food spending over the last 30 years: from 6 billion in 1970 to 110 billion in 2001. To me that's amazing, an 18 times increase, only a small part of which can be attributed to population increase. It really does underscore how much our eating habits have changed. And I should include my usual grumble about sloppy statistics: theis number should have been normalized so they're more useful. Another tidbit from the introduction: "The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operationg system of today's retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading idential stores throughout the country like self replicating code." To this I heartily agree. Our urban landscape has become so similar and predictable that it's almost not worth it to travel to other cities anymore: see one, you've seen them all. They all have Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Big Buy, McDonalds, Burger King, and lots and lots of glass and steel office buildings. Everyone lives in a ranch style house in the suburbs. There's nothing new to see anywhere else because everywhere else looks just like here. Another good one: "Much of the taste and aroma of American fast food, for example, is now manufactured at a series of large chemical plants off the New Jersy turnpike." In other words, the smell and taste aren't the real smell and taste of the food. Instead it's added afterward. So what are they covering up with those artificial smells and tastes? It may be that the food is just fine and they're enhancing the flavor, just everyone has been adding spices to food for centuries. But then there may be other less honorable motives... I skimmed the rest of the book as I usually do in order to get a feel for it. After doing that I went to my freezer and threw out all my meat (I had about 20 pounds). Even reading a few pages in the chapter about how meat packing workers are treated is just shocking. Picking up snippets here and there about the problems of having the meat slaughtered in one central location and then distributed was enough to make me realize that it really is a health risk to eat the stuff. Do you realize that because of the clout that McDonald's has, the meat they buy has passed more stringent quality control than the meat you buy in the supermarket? I also read the Afterward about the Mad Cow problem, which is a special interest of mine. Since this book was written, we've started seeing Mad Cow disease appearing in the US just this year. The second edition of the book I have includes a section about the reactions Schlosser received when the first edition was published. The way the meat industry has reacted was quite predictable (they were irate). Of of particular interest to many other Walk Away members is the way they reacted. It was the usual pattern of being furious that anyone would kick the sacred cow, but not having any rebuttals with substance. It was the usual kind of thing we recieve from the trolls that come by on this board. They don't like what we have to say but when we try to engage them in a rational debate, all we get in reply is the same old mindless cant about hellfire and "you just don't want to believe." Just like Christians always seem tell us that "real Christians aren't likethat", McDonalds responded to this book by saying "The real McDonald's bears no resemblance to anything described in Schlosser's book." When I read that I just said to myself, "now where have I heard that before?"