Subway Reads: Fast Food Nation

Six years after its publication (and four years after Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me) Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser is another of those books that "everyone" has read that I seemed to have missed. So I was happy to pick it up when my boyfriend set it down last week. His beat-up, besmudged copy feels a bit dirty in the hands, which is just about how the author wants you to feel about our cultural obsession with food whose real price far exceeds the nickels and dimes we exchange at the cash register.
Though I missed the cold-water-splash of Schlosser's research during its initial awakening of America and some of the facts are now, no doubt, slightly out-of-date, the by-now well-known ideas and concepts (advertisers manipulate kids using sophisticated psychological techniques, massive corporations are anti-union, unscrupulous managers exploit vulnerable teenagers and immigrants--there's more, I'm just up to chapter four) in stark black-and-white still shocks the system.

All week, I'll try to post some statistics or quotes from the book that stand out to me. Today, we'll start with words from Ray Kroc himself, one of the founders of the company that in 2002 was responsible for ninety percent of our nation's new jobs--McDonald's.
"We have found out . . . that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry . . . The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization."