‘’Fast food is now so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life. And yet the dominance of the fast food giants was no more preordained than the march of colonial split-levels, golf courses, and man-made lakes across the deserts of the American West.’’
Schlosser points out that for us today, fast-food restaurants are something normal. We no longer wonder why they appear in every city all over the globe and everyone embraces them because it offers the possibility of accessing cheap food anytime and anywhere without having to prepare it or wait for it to be prepared from scratch. But just because they can be found everywhere, that doesn’t mean that it should be considered normal and their presence should seen as intrusive and out of place as a man-made lake in the middle of the dessert.
This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.
In the second chapter, Schlosser talks about the way fast-food restaurants and not only run their businesses. The big companies seem to be at war with one another and they refuse to believe that they can coexist. Instead, they fight each other in the most brutal ways and unfortunately, the ones who suffer are not the CEOs but rather the employees working for the company. Schlosser also identifies this attitude as being the American way of thinking so it doesn’t apply only to the fats-food restaurants but rather to every business in the country.
“. . . have turned one of the nation’s best-paying manufacturing jobs into one of the lowest-paying, created a migrant industrial workforce of poor immigrants, tolerated high injury rates, and spawned rural ghettos in the American heartland.”
In the seventh chapter, Schlosser analyzes how the meat packing industry had to suffer because of the appearance of the big companies. Because the meat industry was also affected by the technological developments, the jobs no longer paid the same amount as before and so one of the best-paying jobs in America turned into the worst paid job. It also implied certain dangers as accidents at the workplace were not uncommon. The companies were not concerned with providing their workers with a safe working environment but because many had no other choice, they were willing to take the risk and put their life on the line. Unsurprisingly, the people who were most of the times willing to take the jobs were migrant workers or people from poor rural areas that had no other choice. This, instead of creating a competitive workforce marked only made the wages to drop even more.
