Arctangential

I finished Fast Food Nation today. Overall I enjoyed it, although it kind of felt like more of the same after having read the very similar (and much larger) They Made America so recently. The author makes some interesting observations about the effects that big business have on the food industry, and the public perception of those things.

Some of the book felt like filler — for example, in the chapter about Ray Kroc and the founding of McDonald’s, he spends almost as much time discussing Walt Disney and the founding of his empire as he does the putative topic of the book. He then ends the section by explaining that Disneyland declined to host a McDonald’s when it first opened. Generally, however, the book is well-written: concise and direct, making the author’s point with statistics, personal observation, and interviews.

I think my main issue with the book is not in the book itself, but rather the impression of the book that I got from so many people before actually reading it. So many people told me how it affected them, how they stopped eating fast food after reading it, how it galvanized them to do something about the state of the country, etc. However, I didn’t really find anything that astonishing in this book — it’s not really news to me that the agriculture business is dirty and disgusting, that multinational companies are amoral and push governments to do things that are directly damaging to their citizens just for a few cents on the bottom line. It really shouldn’t be news to anybody — I’m not sure why so many people took this book as a revelation.

Anyways.

I’m now reading Thomas A. Easton’s Woodsman, the third Organic Future novel.