Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food

April 6th, 2008 Posted in Paperback

Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0618593942
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Average Customer Review: (From 45 total reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description:
In the New York Times bestseller Chew on This, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson unwrap the fast-food industry to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at a business that both feeds and feeds off the young. Find out what really goes on at your favorite restaurants—and what lurks between those sesame seed buns.

Praised for being accessible, honest, humorous, fascinating, and alarming, Chew On This was also repeatedly referred to as a must-read for kids who regularly eat fast food. Having all the facts about fast food helps young people make healthy decisions about what they eat. Chew On This shows them that they can change the world by changing what they eat.

Chew on This also includes action steps, a discussion guide, and a new afterword by the authors.

Customer Reviews

Great for middle grades by C. Bott
I purchased a set of five of these books for my seventh grade class to read in book groups. This has been one of the biggest hits of the class! EVERYONE wants to read it. (In junior high, this is rare.) Every day, a student approaches me to enthusiastically share a fact from the book. Science teachers have been asking me about it because the kids are telling them about it. I have only read parts of the book, but it is fascinating and the sources are well-documented. I would highly recommend this book for all ages.

A whole new opinion of fast food. by Rose Williams
This book is very informative about the fast food industry. It discusses everything from its beginnings to its methods of “brainwashing” its customers to the ingredients of some of the menu items. After reading it you will never look at fast food the same.

This book is not tabloid sensationalism. by Martin R. Goss
Readers with a macabre sense of humor will absolutely LOVE this book.

Even though Schlosser’s intentions are far from humorous, I couldn’t help laughing at the passages of “candy that tastes like barf” and “mountains of burning poop”. As a teenager in the early 1980s, when I ate drumsticks and found any with broken bones, I’d torment my great-grandmother with taunts of “tortured chickens”, based on a story which I’d once read in a popular tabloid magazine; therefore, it couldn’t be true. However, after reading this book, I got a rude awakening: the prevailing method of slaughtering chickens was not just lurid tabloid sensationalism.

Schlosser does an excellent job of creating almost surreal imagery through his descriptions of gigantic cattle feedlots, potato processing factories, flavor-sampling institutes, and the like, and he gives an interesting history of how all this came to be. In that respect, not that much has changed since “the Jungle” was published a century ago.

Unfortunately, I still occasionally enjoy the flavor of McDonald’s food once in a while… *sigh*

This Will Make You Want to Be a Vegetarian! by Marc Axelrod
This is an eye-opening book about the fast food industry. You learn about how the fast food chains got started, and you then you learn about all the nasty chemicals and preservatives that get put into the foods to make them taste good.

You learn about the terrible way we treat chickens in this country, and how dirty and yucky it is inside the slaughterhouses.

You’ll also learn about the fast food industry aims most of its advertising at young children, because studies have shown that children learn what they like to eat very early on in life.

I was also surprised and angry to learn how poorly fast food workers (”crew members”) are treated. They rarely get good wages, and managers of fast food restaurants make $11,000 a year less than the average American worker.

The reader will also learn about how fast food is destroying the health of young people around the world.

I used to think that fast food was something you could eat in moderation and still be healthy. Now I wonder …..

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Tags: advertising, american culture, corporation, eric schlosser, fast food, food, health, healthful eating, meat, nutrition, pop culture

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