This book made my toes curl.
That happens with excellent writing. Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson use engaging language to explore the sources of food for most Americans. It is more than a nature book for student readers. Schlosser and Wilson are right up there with Howard and Margery Facklam as authors who make complex issues easy to understand.
Food is one of my favorite subjects. I even have a recipe page on this site. This book drives home the point that we are what we eat. It uses plain language with a snappy rhythm to explain the process of feeding billions of people worldwide. It illustrates the foundations, the history and the changes in our economic and political climate for a clear picture of how we have managed to produce and distribute such tasty, but toxic fare.
We’re all busy, so the idea of having food that tastes good quickly available in a place where the kids can romp is downright irresistible. Remove obstacles. Find a problem and solve it. Corporate America does that better than anyone else.
Making things easy is great. But all great ideas have a down side. The down side here is that healthy food that takes a bit of skill and work to harvest is being replaced by chemical derivatives of organic food.
My skin crawled as I read about how companies target third-graders to establish life-long consumer relationships. They have actually succeeded in making artificial products more desireable than natural ones - the predictability factor. The parents, teachers and other adult nurturers are also seduced. It’s just so much easier to plop some bills down on a counter for a meal than to shop, prepare, cook, serve and clean up food that might or might not taste wonderful.
I’m all for making things easier. I’m lazy. But this is not easier. It’s different - and in the long run, really harmful to the physical and mental health of the human body. We’ve traded farm work for work behind a desk, but we are still engaged in work. The difference is that on a farm, we worked with our backs as well as our brains. Strictly speaking, we were exercising physically and mentally. It was hard, but so is sitting at a desk for hours on end. Either way, there’s a price to pay.
Adults would benefit from reading this book. Those of us who lived in the days before the rise of fast food get a clear picture of how this situation evolved and how our families have been impacted. Those who never had the opportunity to live close to their food will be able to draw some conclusions about their own physical, mental and emotional health, based on what they believe is food.
As a former farm kid, I never got hooked on fast food. I like the taste of fresh-picked, locally grown or raised plants and animals. The processed alternative is just too sweet and salty for me. I also never really feel either satisfied or energetic after eating the stuff. Now I understand why. It has a lot to do with the fact that fast food was not available until I was in high school. By then my tastes were established. I shudder to think who I might have been if I had been born just 15 years later.
The book ends on a hopeful note with case study examples of successful fast-food restaurants operating ethically and with the most powerful suggestion of all - vote with your pocketbook. If consumers don’t buy products proven to be toxic, eventually corporations will change what they produce.