Fast Food Recall from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Fast Food Recall . . . . . apr 18 2003 — bookish63.dat

A friend of mine recently read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and observed "You know it looks like a lot of people have been reading Fast Food Nation," referring to the slump in fast food sales.

"This book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year", I joked in return, "which would certainly indicate that a lot of people reading it."

The pervasive effect of the fast food industry on wage earners is so obvious that maybe it's a good thing (for the industry) that a war comes along from time to time to distract everyone from the minimum wage, and what it really means to the economy. Consider this quote from the introduction of the book:

"The restaurant industry is now America's largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages. During the economic boom of the 1990's, when many American workers enjoyed their first pay raises in a generation, the real value of wages in the restaurant industry continued to fall. The roughly 3.5 million fast food workers are by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States.

Actually, to get a flavor of Schlosser's writing style and what he has to say, you might consider reading the entire first chapter online right now.

Fast Food Nation is informative bedtime reading for your kids, but there's a magic window between the time they are old enough not to be affected too much by the sad parts (there are a couple of deaths in the book, and some pretty bad injuries), and still young enough not to be too teenager-savvy to resist it.

We highly recommend Fast Food Nation [buy at amazon] . by Eric Schlosser, which we have previously reviewed on this site.

A quick visit to the Beverly Hills Library has turned up a copy of Sara Paretsky's latest V.I Washawski Novel, Total Recall, 12th in the V.I. series. You may remember Lottie Herschel, a physician friend of V.I.'s from some of the other books. This book begins with her story as a child in Nazi Germany, and how she escaped with her brother, but not the rest of her family, in the Kindertransport program to Britain.

The passage is unavoidably moving, and augurs well for some real issues to be turned up in this detective novel, which I've just started reading. Total Recall [buy at amazon] . by Sara Paretsky.

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