Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser - Article Example

American Fast food promises desirable images and identities through consumption: "the leading American fast-food chains and their bestselling menu items have become famous worldwide embedded in our popular culture" (121). Schlosser compares fast food with a commodity, thus fast food influences health and economic conditions of people, their lifestyle and tastes. The author gives special attention to McDonald's, its history and its success issues. Schlosser describes modern consumer (fast food) culture and criticizes its impact on school populations and the educational environment.

He includes examples of s Coke's promotion event and segregation of a student who wears a Pepsi T-shirt. Also, he addresses such issues as immigrants' labor and poor working conditions which is a part of the meatpacking industry. As the most important, Schlosser unveils terrible facts about unsanitary working conditions and the rendering of dead animals for the fast-food industry. The last portion of the book is devoted to globalization and the spread of fast food into national cultures. Schlosser criticizes the penetration of fast food into Asian nations which have a great impact on obesity problems in China and Japan.

The most interesting is the comparison of fast food with "a commodity and metaphor". I agree with Schlosser that the identities become a moment of desire realized in commodified forms of signification while amusement became the goal of the 'goods' life. As globalization provided ever more goods and services, consumerism became the basis for its hegemony, notwithstanding that many workers could not buy the products they made for world markets. "The growing popularity of fast food is just one of the many cultural changes that have been brought about by globalization" (242).

Globalization has produced unprecedented wealth both for established corporations that have become global and for new classes of entrepreneurs in computer-related fields, software, e-commerce, the leisure industries, financial investments and so on. But this vast new wealth is ever more unequally distributed. Another interesting idea is the link between fast food and modern capitalism. Capitalism required the domination of rational action over affectivity. The culture of emotional restraint associated with the fast-food becomes dominant.

Schlosser claims "In many respects, the fast-food industry embodies the best and the worst of American capitalism at the start of the twentieth-first century- its coherent stream of new products and innovations" (245). The mass-produced is now an essential feature of consumerism and global fast food. When capitalism moved into its consumer phase, however, it becomes necessary to temper the restraints upon indulgence necessary in the early stages of capitalism. Thus fast food turned to a commodity.

The main weakness of these arguments is a lack of statistical data and comparison between the nations. Schlosser provides a detailed analysis of the social causes of fast food culture often omitted by other researchers. It is possible to say that the arguments are objective and accurate based on historical data.