Roadside Dreams, Fast Food Nightmares

If John Jakle, Keith Sculle, and Eric Schlosser ever got together in the same room, I would love to be a fly on the wall. That might indeed be the only safe place to perch, considering their fundamentally different approaches to the same subject. To be sure, Jakle and Sculle, authors of Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Schlosser, whose more recently published Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of The All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) made a noticeable splash in the national media, agree that scholars have slighted their subject for far too long. We Americans spend far more on fast food than we do on new cars, higher education, or personal computers--and perhaps with far greater impact on our minds, not to mention our arteries and waistlines. But after agreeing on the merit of studying fast food these two books diverge sharply, one respectfully praising American ingenuity and hustle, the other mourning the deadly costs of the banquet

Advertising · Art · Art history · Banquet · Business · Economics · Fish · Fish <Actinopterygii> · Fishery · Ingenuity · Library science · Media studies · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History