Read this and you won't want fries  or anything By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY Fast Food Nation God strike me dead before I consume another fast-food product, be it pizza, hamburgers or chicken tenders. My culinary fervor results from reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, who explores how the rise of McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut ad nauseum has affected the nation's waistline, children, farmers, meat packers, environment and landscape. What makes Fast Food Nation so effective is that Schlosser modulates his outrage, fitting it to his various targets. Many books that detail the nation's dreadful diet bray in a tone of strident hysteria about the corporate world's deliberate scheming to deprive children's brains of vital nutrients. No, they make this junk because people buy it. Writes Schlosser, "The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit." Part of the problem is that parents give in to the convenience of fast food and to their children's whining. (Judge me guilty.) Toy companies and Hollywood have forged an alliance with fast food to enhance children's "pester power." According to Fast Food Nation, every month more than 90% of American kids will eat at McDonald's. This is bad, but there is an element of free will. People, Schlosser says, need to boycott fast food, and parents must demand that schools ban fast food, no matter how much corporate money is offered. Schlosser escalates his fury when he describes the plight of poorly paid service workers. "In 1998, more restaurant workers were murdered on the job in the United States than police officers," he writes. The fast-food industry hires the young, the poor and the disabled because it often gains government subsidies for "training." Schlosser tells how the industry has fought unions and how they benefit from hiring teenagers, who are easily cowed. No other industry pays so many employees minimum wage, he says. Overall, Schlosser says, U.S. teens are injured on the job at twice the rate of adult workers. Quite simply, the jobs are kept mechanized because rapidly shuffling bodies through is cheaper than keeping a well-trained workforce that might demand insurance and higher wages. (Schlosser praises In-N-Out Burger, a profitable family-owned chain that pays its starting part-time workers $8 an hour and has reaped excellent reviews over the years.) Fast Food Nation examines the rise of fast food, particularly the career of Ray Kroc and others whom he describes as maverick visionaries. Fast food is convenient, fun and demonstrates trademark American ingenuity and informality. But as Schlosser makes clear, its global explosion has had terrible, unplanned consequences. Schlosser has an excellent chapter on a small town in Saxony, in which he describes the local McDonald's cheerful warmth in contrast to the abandoned East German army buildings that the communists left behind. People like Ronald McDonald for a reason. But few readers will forget the chapters on the meat-packing industry. This stuff reads likes Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle. The blood, the stench, the brutal pace. The workers submit because they have no other way to support their families. The jobs are often performed by poor women, the illiterate and illegal aliens, according to Schlosser, and workers run the risk of terrible injuries. Schlosser also details the contamination of meat with deadly bacteria such as E. coli and details the terrible death of a 6-year-old who ate a tainted hamburger. Fast Food Nation is the kind of book that you hope young people read because it demonstrates far better than any social studies class the need for government regulation, the unchecked power of multinational corporations and the importance of our everyday decisions.