Eric Schlosser - Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal Is Doing to the World

PENGUIN BOOKS

FAST FOOD NATION

What makes Fast Food Nation different is that it is not the predictable anti-meat, anti-fat, anti-additives, anti-non-dairy creamer, anti-have-any-fun rant against McDonalds it is meticulously researched and powerfully argued Observer

Schlosser could do for the fast food industry what Rachel Carsons Silent Spring did for producers of pesticides The Times

Eric Schlosser may be the Upton Sinclair for this age of mad cow disease [He has] a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts Fast Food Nation points the way, but, to resurrect an old fast-food slogan, the choice is yours Los Angeles Times

An elegiac expos of how burgers, fries and sodas came to symbolize America The New York Times Book Review

Required reading Express

One of the best reasons to read Eric Schlossers blazing critique of the American fast-food industry is his bleak portrayal of the alienation of millions of low-paid employees It would be wrong to portray Schlossers book as just another anti-McDonalds diatribe. It is deeper and broader than that London Review of Books

A frightening investigation into Americas fast food industry Independent

Compelling Fast Food Nation will not only make you think twice before eating your next hamburger it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on Americas social and cultural landscape The New York Times

Our fast food executives are in for some sleepless nights Food Magazine

Makes for very unsettling reading. A brilliant, access-all-areas dissection of the McDonaldization of society Metro London

His eye is sharp, his profiles perceptive, his prose thoughtful but spare. This is John McPhee behind the counter Washington Post

A damning critique of the junk-food business Vogue

Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done Daily Telegraph

Skilful and persuasive Economist

If the idea of a three-storey, illuminated Ronald McDonald strikes you as a blight on the landscape, this book is for you Globe and Mail

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly . He has received a number of journalistic honours, including a National Magazine Award for an Atlantic article he wrote about marijuana and the war on drugs. This is his first book.

what the all-american meal is
doing to the world

ERIC SCHLOSSER

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in the USA by Houghton Mifflin Company 2001

First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2001

Published with a new afterword in Penguin Books 2002

Copyright Eric Schlosser, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194421-0

for Red

A savage servility

slides by on grease.

ROBERT LOWELL

C HEYENNE MOUNTAIN SITS on the eastern slope of Colorados Front Range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs. From a distance, the mountain appears beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub oak, and ponderosa pine. It looks like the backdrop of an old Hollywood western, just another gorgeous Rocky Mountain vista. And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. One of the nations most important military installations lies deep within it, housing units of the North American Aerospace Command, the Air Force Space Command, and the United States Space Command. During the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that Americas air defenses had become vulnerable to sabotage and attack. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top-secret, underground combat operations center. The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteen buildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each; they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. The base is closed to the public, and a heavily armed quick response team guards against intruders. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout and biological weapons. The buildings are mounted on gigantic steel springs to ride out an earthquake or the blast wave of a thermonuclear strike. The hallways and staircases are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low, and there are combination locks on many of the doors. A narrow escape tunnel, entered through a metal hatch, twists and turns its way out of the mountain through solid rock. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vans from one brightly lit cavern to another.

Fifteen hundred people work inside the mountain, maintaining the facility and collecting information from a worldwide network of radars, spy satellites, ground-based sensors, airplanes, and blimps. The Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center tracks every manmade object that enters North American airspace or that orbits the earth. It is the heart of the nations early warning system. It can detect the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that missile has left the launch pad.

This futuristic military base inside a mountain has the capability to be self-sustaining for at least one month. Its generators can produce enough electricity to power a city the size of Tampa, Florida. Its underground reservoirs hold millions of gallons of water; workers sometimes traverse them in rowboats. The complex has its own underground fitness center, a medical clinic, a dentists office, a barbershop, a chapel, and a cafeteria. When the men and women stationed at Cheyenne Mountain get tired of the food in the cafeteria, they often send somebody over to the Burger King at Fort Carson, a nearby army base. Or they call Dominos.