http://www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation/
New movie based on the awesome book by Eric Schlosser, ‘Fast Food Nation.’ Comes out Friday. The book is one of my all-time favs. If you liked ‘Supersize Me’ this book was out there first and really hits HARD. I hope the movie does it justice. I’m a little worried by some of the names in the cast that it may not be as gritty as I hope…
Please post reviews if you see it!
so true. i’m over being LIED to by that 16-year old minimum wage earning kid behind the counter at McD’s. Just gimme my big mac value meal already. those bastards, i wish they would stop putting drugs in their food so i wouldn’t have to keep going back for more. it’s all a damn conspiracy.
My mom used to take me to McD’s once in a while when I was little, and sadly, one of my first words was ‘fries.’ No joke… Shows how influenceable little kids are!
Are you blaming McDonald’s or your mom?
I don’t go to McDonalds often, Taco bell, Wendy’s yes but I have not seen a 16 yr old working at any of them in a long time.
Try 25, 65 or anywhere in between.
My mom used to take me to McD’s once in a while when I was little, and sadly, one of my first words was ‘fries.’ No joke… Shows how influenceable little kids are!
They’d probably love to hear that story at a McD’s marketing meeting 
I don’t go to McDonalds often, Taco bell, Wendy’s yes but I have not seen a 16 yr old working at any of them in a long time.
Try 25, 65 or anywhere in between.
nope…where i’m from, lots of teens working at fast food joints.
LOL
That’s the same story of my then 2 yo daughter. We had told her babysitter, ‘No fast food’. We had Stephanie on a real good, healthy diet. We picked her up one day and drove through Carl’s Jr. (yeah, our diet wasn’t too healthy, then) and upon her seeing where we were (she had never been there with us), Stephanie (little girl of not too many words, yet) says, “Fry?”
A little of both… I can’t believe my mom ever took us there… She probably hasn’t been in a McD’s since then except for emergency bathroom stops!
saw it last night as a screener, I wasn’t impressed or disappointed by it. Definitely predictable and a bit slow (probably not something to see after a hard workout). My gf hated it (she grew up on a farm, so different pov)
I guess I was expecting something more, something I didn’t know, but overall the movie didn’t affect me except gross me out of beef for the day. I think its an ok movie for idealists and students (giving them some affirmation) but I’ve become too much a cynic over the years to care.
no problems with the cast, except Bruce Willis (slightly) but most of the roles are low key.
Did you read this book first?
nope. but I have to admit that this intro is really good: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/schlosser-fast.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
As my gf told me last night, a problem with the movie is accountability. The movie revolves around a fictional fast-food outlet, and for her she can’t accept that some of the atrocious behaviour that corporations engage in could be real. As the NY times reviewer notes, it seems Schlosser has exaggerated certain facts and without my ability to separate fact from fiction, I’m not fully engaged into the debate. (I’m not naive, I just prefer to have all the facts before being outcast as a heretic.)
But I will admit that after seeing the movie I have a strong desire to get more meat from my gf’s family farm than at the supermarket now…
Read the book. It’s outstanding.
I think I will be disappointed by the movie from what you’ve said.
You should really read the book.
I think the problem is this, as Schlosser details: the American public has made an economic trade it is not entirely cognizant of. In exchange for cheap protein, it has traded food safety (lack of inspections, e-coli in the meat, lack of accountability) and food quality (hormone injected beef, corn meal and waste feed, etc). On top of this is the fact that the American public believes its food is safe because the government inspects it judiciously, which is in fact less and less true in successive regimes of less regulation. In addition, you also have a situation where food-borne illness is very difficult to trace (think of the times you’ve gotten sick but not badly sick, and think how many times it could have been caused by unclean food) and the attendant inability to hold companies responsible for their lack of quality.
The question is whether the American public is better off if its meat is slightly more expensive, but better and safer. It’s not clear that it’s been given a choice, or that it knows the facts, often because those facts are deliberately obfuscated. And that’s the problem. I think its a difficult trade, and as much as I like burgers, I give a lot of thought to how much I care about my health vs. cost.
just saw the movie and it was somewhat scary…not sure I can ever eat meat again.
I use to go once every two years or so grab something in a fast food…now, it’s never again.
just gross.
Oh, I’m sure you will eventually. “Organic” beef and chicken represent a fairly small business, and thus don’t have the scale yet to reduce costs enough, so like most people, you’ll make that compromise. But I agree, it’s scary. If you read the book, I suspect it offers a somewhat more specific and detailed version of chain of possession of food before it reaches your mouth.
As I said, its an economic trade, but not entirely fair - if people had all the facts, they could make the trade knowing the risks they take versus the benefits. But I strongly suspect its not fair - parties who make efforts to reduce inspections and standards or block information to consumers want to slant the game in their favor, so you’ll either not know, or not care.
If you read the book, I suspect it offers a somewhat more specific and detailed version of chain of possession of food before it reaches your mouth.
The part that stuck with me from the book is where they talked about the automation of the chicken processing plants. They cannot automate the beef processing b/c cows vary a lot in size, but with all the genetic modifications that have been made to chickens, they are basically the same size, weight, shape, etc and can be fed through a machine to process them without any manual labor required. DISGUSTING!
my mom, who grew up in a meat (except on Fridays) and potatoes family, completely stopped eating beef after i recommended the book to her. it took her two years to finally eat beef again but now she grinds her own. the book is awesome; i’m hoping the movie is even 1/2 that good.
This stuff scares me. The NYT is running an article about how China is destroying the Yellow River, and is slowly but surely running out of freshwater supplies, as I believe we are as well. Climate change is aggravating this significantly as well.
I think we are stuck in a quandary. Capitalism has improved the lives of millions, if not billions of people, as every aspect of our lives is now cheaper and more efficiently produced. The problem is that capitalism is not perfect, and in a vacuum requires certain conditions which cannot be met, the largest being perfect distribution and flow of information. And our inability to criticize capitalism and acknowledge its shortcomings makes it even more difficult to solve what is rapidly becoming a resource depletion problem and inability to recognize market failures.
Cheap protein is generally a good thing. Cheap protein produced through cutting serious corners in safety and quality, with active obfuscation of this fact, is a public menace. Do people want cheap meat if it means e.coli and salmonella outbreaks that are extremely impossible to trace and do measurable damage to your health? Do we want our meat to be cheap if it means employing illegal immigrants who routinely get injured and killed on the job? I don’t know. What I do know is that meat producers aren’t taking any chances and letting you make that explicit choice. And I think this is part of the problem.
You combine this with market externalities that visited upon consumers by a whole host of producers using unsustainable methods, resulting in both resource depletion and potentially catastrophic environmental damage, and you have a deadly serious policy problem which very few have had the stomach to even acknowledge, much less propose solutions for. And this is certainly even more likely under administrations whose ideology demands that they protect the status quo and the strong.
Or one could fall into the school of thought of the objectivists, or what I like to call, the “let them eat cake” political ideology. They suggest that man and technology can overcome any obstacle. What they fail to mention is that this comes at great cost and as a result subdivides societies into groups who have and those who have not, at least when it comes to particular issues. For instance, why should I worry about global climate change, because man will come up with better air conditioners, high priced water, power, food, and security? What they fail to mention is that not everybody will be able to afford these things, and it will almost certainly be a smaller and more select group than had these privileges before. But distributional and equity issues are beyond the scope of the mighty objectivist.
Sorry for the rant. Just using this as a jumping off point for something I’ve been thinking about.
On the other hand, we could all just eat In-n-Out.
nope, that’s a perfectly good rant!
With all the cancers they are linking to meat consumption (most recently, breast cancer and red meat), it’s downright scary. I eat very little meat, and what i do eat I get at Whole Foods b/c I’m scared of ‘regular’ meat. I think someday they will realize how bad all this sh*t is for you, but it will be too late b/c everyone will have crazy kinds of cancer. ok, i’m sounding paranoid now.
Funny thing is that I ate ‘paleo’ for 6 weeks 2 years ago or so. I only ate unprocessed food from organic stores.
I’m not sure this is because it was paleo. However, seeing the movie and reading a bit more I’m wondering if this
hasn’t more to do that I was eating food of a much higher quality. for 6 weeks, no allergies, asthma, energy levels
much higher, felt great overall. Issue was that it was really expensive and not very convenient…but maybe it’s time
to go back to that.