Posted by Andrew Martin at 9:36 am CDT
The author of the best-selling “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” has a new book out for kids that covers some of the same stomach-churning ground.
This time, the agriculture and food industry is attempting to fight back.
In a response to Eric Schlosser’s new book, “Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food,” the food and farm industry has sponsored a web site, www.BestFoodNation.com, that attempts to refute many of the claims in Schlosser’s books.
“Some of the information contained in this book is inaccurate and misleading,” says Janet Riley of the American Meat Institute in a press release launching the web site.The site-sponsored by 18 groups, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Snack Food Association-includes testimonials from farmers and a list of the advantages of America’s industrialized farming system, including the fact that American food is cheap and safe.
The web site also argues that American farmers handle their animals humanely and treat the environment with care, an assertion many environmental groups dispute. It also contends that the American food and restaurant industry pays its workers fair and competitive wages, including those that work in the notoriously grim world of meatpacking.
“If Upton Sinclair were alive today, he’d be AMAZED by the U.S. meat industry!” the web site boasts, referring to the author of “The Jungle” who detailed horrors in the meatpacking industry 100 years ago.
In a brief interview before his cell phone cut off, Schlosser said the web site is part of a larger campaign by the restaurant and food industry to discredit him, including protesters who routinely show up at readings. Schlosser regularly says Sinclair would be appalled by today’s meat industry because workers and animals continue to be mistreated and a handful of packers continue to control the market.
“Fast Food Nation,” published in 2001, is an expose of fast food that describes, in often-graphic detail, how the industry mistreats animals and workers, homogenizes the American landscape and its culture and makes people sick or obese.
“Chew On This,” which Schlosser wrote with Charles Wilson, was published this month and recounts some of the same details for middle-school-age students. The results will “surprise and scare readers,” the publisher says in a press release.
“Chew On This” shows them that they can change the world by changing what they eat,” the release says.
