Chew On This III

Having finally finished Chew On This, I will never eat at a McDonald's again. As I approached the end of the book, I learned about the horrid practices theough which chicken and beef are slaughtered and processed. Chickens were shackled, electrified, had their throats slit, and then were boiled. Sometimes, a chiken managed to survive the other steps of the procedure and wa boiled alive! Cattle were processed by mainly hand, and I frowned at all the accidents workers suffer, mostly cuts. Also, I learned about the fact that people urinate and defecate right next to meat that people would soon be eating!

The next chapter was about obesity and how one person managed to cure himself of it. This chapter was the story of a boy named Sam Fabrikant. Sam weighed 300 pounds and was only sixteen years old. He decided to take a risk and cure himself by undergoing a gastric bypass surgery. In this surgery, surgeons reduce the size of a person's stomach, from the size of a deflated football to the same size of a golf ball. The book talks about Sam's experiences and about other things that fast food can do to your body.

The last chapter was a grand finale. It was about all the things that were happening now and what we could do to keep ourselves healthy. I was suprised to learn that fast-food chains were so desperate to make money that they would open Burger Kings, McDonald's, and KFCs in war-torn Baghdad, Iraq! Schlosser also talked about one Alice Waters. She was a restaurant owner who turned a nearby rundown school into a beautiful building, where a there was a garden where kids could grow their own food, learn to cook it, then eat it. I admire Alice Waters for her vision of a world where food isn't just a meal that is soon forgotten and is usually made with corporately produced vegetables. She thinks that meals should be atime where everyone gets together and eats fresh, wholesome food. Overall, I loved this book and am thinking about reading his other book, Fast Food Nation. Chew On This is a book to be reckoned with. Its shocking detail has the ability to start a much needed revolution. Everyone needs to read this book.

Chew On This II

I am still learning many disgusting things on my journey through the fast-food world. I have just read through a section concerning French fries and I learned that these fries actually travel hundreds of miles, frozen, to restaurants where they get refried and then sold at twenty times what it cost to make the French fries! Schlosser also discussed the fact that artificial beef flavoring is used to make fries taste better. Then, he talked about all the chemicals that we put in our food to make it taste and look better. I was flabbergasted at the number of different chemicals that go into "artificial strawberry flavor." Cinnamyl isobutyrate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, 4-methylacetophenone, I couldn't pronouce one quarter of them!

Food coloring was another topic. I know everyone has seen crazy yoghurt that is strawberry flavoured, but is blue instead of the normal pink. I came within inches of vomiting when I found that the pink and red coloring of many of my yoghurts and candies was also called carmine, or carminic acid, and is made from the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus costa). Imagine! A bug in your food!

However, one thing I was glad to find was the story of a Jain man, meaning he couldn't eat meat, sued McDonald's for using beef flavoring in its fries. This case caused a newspaper article, which later led to riots in India, including one where angered protesters smeared cow poop on a statue of Ronald McDonald. I loved the fact that the man won the case and McDonald's had to donate $10 million to vegetarian and Hindu groups. Finally, McDonald's gives us money!

Chew On This by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Chew On This is written very well. It continuously attacks McDonald's and other fast food restaurant chains for their practices. I think this book is a triumph for finally telling the public what's goes into their food. The book starts out retelling the humble history of the world-famous hamburger. Then the book discusses how McDonald's got its start. This is where the book starts to get interesting. It talks about how companies advertise and feed off kids. I was disgusted to find that companies are actually using brain research to sell their products to kids!

Another topic Schlosser talks about is the way fast food chains hire teenagers to run the restaurants. I was appalled too see that some teens in fast food work an average of thirty hours a week, and get paid minimum wage (only $5.15 an hour in 2006)! Even managers, who earn only $25,000 a year, work sixty to seventy hours a week.

The way McDonald's treats its workers is ghastly. There is the story of Sadi Lambert, who worked from eight in the morning until half past three the next morning when she was only sixteen! Her manager decided to give her a thank- you gift for working nineteen hours straight. The gift was but a bag of candy. I found these practices to be absolutely moronic. I think that all people should read Chew On This and find out what the real price is of the hamburger you're about to eat.