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Eric Schlosser – Fast Food NationTo a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the  story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the  fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast  food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm  between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the  juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. That’s a lengthy  list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix  of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.Schlosser’s  myth-shattering survey stretches from the California subdivisions where  the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey  Turnpike where many of fast food’s flavors are concocted. He hangs out  with the teenagers who make the restaurants run and communes with those  unlucky enough to hold America’s most dangerous job – meatpacker. He  travels to Las Vegas for a giddily surreal franchisers’ convention where  Mikhail Gorbachev delivers the keynote address. He even ventures to  England and Germany to clock the rate at which those countries are  becoming fast food nations.Fast Food Nation is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.