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Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation:
One Small Bite for Man,
One Giant Problem for Mankind
by Edward Helmore and John Arlidge

The jostling lunchtime queue at McDonald's in Manhattan's Union Square last week resembled the countless others that line up under the Golden Arches at the same time every day in almost every city in the world. The comfortably familiar menu, of Big Mac, the Big'n'Tasty meal and the Chicken McSandwich, was also the same. Only a Robert Mapplethorpe print of flowers revealed that this was New York, not Edinburgh, Cairo or Beijing.
Hungry diners knew what they wanted and wanted what they got. 'It's garbage but it's tasty,' said June Darine wolfing down a cheeseburger and fries with a chocolate milkshake for which she had paid £2.20. 'McDonald's has the best fries, Burger King has the best burgers, Wendy's has the best chicken nuggets, the burritos at Taco Bell are good, and I like the spicy barbecue chicken wings at KFC,' she added.

Her friend, a large African-American woman called Carmen, agreed. 'It's a quick fix, but it's junk. It's not real food. I'll be feeling hungry again in a couple of hours.'

America, which invented the hamburger by accident when Richard and Maurice McDonald got so fed up with diners stealing cutlery from their cafe they came up with a hot sandwich customers could eat with their fingers, is the world's number one consumer of fast food. Diners want their food cheap and they want it to taste the same everywhere.

But, for the first time, Americans' appetite for fast food is being questioned. A new book - Fast Food Nation , by American journalist Eric Schlosser - has lifted the polystyrene lid on the global fast food industry and the effect it has on the diet, health, work practices and rural life of America. The global food giants are used to being taken to task in print; many publishers are still paying the libel bills.

What makes Fast Food Nation different is that it is not the predictable anti-meat, anti-fat,...