Fast Food Nation: the Movie

By Judith Siers-Poisson

John Stauber and I attended a special pre-release campus screening in Berkeley, CA of "Fast Food Nation," the film based on Eric Schlosser's groundbreaking 2001 bestseller. In the book, Schlosser documented the links between exploitation of migrant workers, the meatpacking industry, fast food consumption, and the manipulation and outright toxicity of much mass-produced food.

In adapting Fast Food Nation for the big screen, Schlosser and director and co-writer Richard Linklater created a narrative screenplay, rather than a documentary, that would widen the audience for the original non-fiction book.

With an impressive cast that includes Academy Award nominee (for her role in Maria Full of Grace) Catalina Sandino Moreno, Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette, Wilmer Valderrama (cast very differently than his comic role in That 70s Show), singer Avril Lavigne, Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Kris Kristofferson, and Bruce Willis, "Fast Food Nation" presents a fictionalized but all too recognizable industry of dirty secrets and cynical marketing.

One hundred years after the publication of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which revealed the horrors of the meat trade in Chicago's stockyards, "Fast Food Nation" shows that while the immigrants' ethnicity may have changed and the locations may be different, much of the worker abuse and consumer deception has stayed the same in the last century.

In 2000, Publishers' Weekly described the book this way: "Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy." The same can be said about the movie. Grab a friend who needs to know what's between those seeded buns and go see the show.