Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

by Eric Schlosser

A scary, but very compelling, examination at the fast food industry. Highly recommended, especially if you do eat fast food or ground beef, because this is a case of what you don't know can hurt you. Or your kids.

What I found most shocking — because it was all new to me — are the appalling conditions under which meat-packing plant employees work at “The most dangerous jobs in the world.”

Almost as stunning was the meat industry's callous disregard for the health of anyone buying their products, from selling the lowest quality meat (“most likely to be contaminated with pathogens... and to contain spinal cords, bone, and gristle”) to schools, to their refusal to track their products such that, if a food poisoning outbreak does occur, there is no way to trace who else might be infected.

While I clung to a tiny hope that maybe things are different in Canada, the few Canadian mentions in this American book were not reassuring. It left me with a desire to do something, the first of which is to encourage others to read this. Knowledge is power.