Fast Food Nation – What the all American meal is doing to the world.(book review)

Title :- Fast Food Nation – What the all American meal is doing to the world.
By :- Eric Schlosser
Published :- Penguin (2002) Paperback (360 pages)
Outline;- How the development and popularity of post war foods has changed our eating habits from the square meal at home to the stand up and take out. Hamburgers have worked back from successful shops to manage and control the beef processing industry, that in turn has worked back into the control and management of the cattle raising industry. The family rancher has essentially gone, from the competition by the company owned and professionally managed farms that drive down the price, and standardize the cattle. All profits are focused at the corporate level. Potato chips have evolved similarly, where very selected potato varieties are grown and mass produced to suit a mechanical process to deliver a “standard” chip. The industrial practices in some parts of the process industry have also been managed to only just comply with the labor laws. The fast food is indeed mass produced, reliable, mostly safe and allows the consumer to enjoy cheap urban living. Easy read and tends to some bias towards the negative aspects of the industry.
Selected extract:
• “ When management determines exactly how every task is to be done…and can impose its own rules about the pace, output, quality and technique”, the sociologist Robin Leidner has noted [it] makes workers increasingly interchangeable. The management no longer depends on the talent or skills of its workers – those things are built into the operating system and machines. Jobs that have been de-skilled can be filled cheaply. The need to retrain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced”.