Fast Food Nation

Film adaptation delivers some meat if you can get past the gristle.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


“When you eat meat, you should know that it is going to be bloody,” author Eric Schlosser told an enthusiastic Berkeley audience after an advance screening of the film Fast Food Nation. In that regard the movie is a success, but in trying to adapt one of the decade’s most influential works of investigative journalism into a dramatic feature film, Schlosser and director Richard Linklater may have bitten off more than they could chew.

Imitating the social-realist-pastiche style made popular by films such as Traffic, Syriana, and Crash, the movie Fast Food Nation interweaves three narratives in an attempt to show how the burger industry affects all strata of society. Near the top of the food chain, we are introduced to Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a marketing executive at the burger franchise Mickeys. A newcomer to the dirty politics of the drive-thru, Henderson receives a rude awakening when he’s sent from headquarters to Cody, Colorado to investigate worrisome levels of E.coli showing up in the meat.

Also arriving in Cody is a group of young Mexican immigrants (Catalina Sandino Moreno and That ’70s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama) fresh from an illegal border crossing. They quickly find themselves working the graveyard shift in the town’s meat-packing plant. The third plot thread focuses on the small fry working behind the fast-food counter. It follows Amber, an overqualified teenager working at Mickeys to pay for car insurance. Unsatisfied with the job, she quits after joining the ranks of well-informed but ineffectual college activists.

Readers often criticize book-to-screen adaptations for what they leave out, but in Fast Food Nation, Linklater and Schlosser have erred in the other direction, stuffing too much into a single film. The strength of Schlosser’s book was its populist critique that went beyond the usual liberal harangue against the fast food industry as a minimum-wage paying purveyor of unhealthy meals. It exposed the national proclivity for fast food as both a cause and symptom of much deeper social and environmental ills.

It is difficult to fault the film for attempting to do the same, yet as it tries to touch on the dangers of border crossings, methamphetamine addiction, animal cruelty, super-sized portions, political corruption, artificial flavors and urban sprawl it inevitably stretches its characters thin. The ensemble cast, including cameos by Bruce Willis, Ethan Hawke, and Avril Lavigne, makes matters worse. Good performances by Kinnear and Sandino Moreno notwithstanding, the intrusions of so many famous faces detract from a film already running low on authenticity.

Despite its overt politics and witty script, the movie may disappoint progressively-minded audiences as its central themes of immigrant exploitation and corporate greed rehash points made with more nuance in others films. The plight of illegal immigrants feels over-wrought and lacks the kind of realism found in more patient films like the 1983 El Norte and the more recent Maria Full of Grace. The film’s satire of corporate executives echoes the wry humor of Thank You for Smoking, but swings Fast Food Nation jarringly back and forth between the realm of reality and caricature.

To its credit, the plot shows glimmers of the grace with which Schlosser’s book used the way we eat as a metaphor for how we live. And Linklater adds some visual finesse from long flyovers of crowded stockyards to uncompromisingly gruesome sequences of cows going through the slaughterhouse. Simply gaining access to film such scenes, in the wake of Schlosser’s muckraking, should not be taken for granted. In fact, the crew had to travel to Mexico in order to find a facility that would permit them inside. According to Schlosser, the factory’s management agreed to participate in the film in large part because of the systematic abuse of Mexican immigrants in the United States—a reminder that although Fast Food Nation is an imperfect film, it is impassioned and deeply relevant.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate