Houghton Takes on Fast Food Industry

From Publishers Weekly courtesy of AlterNet:

Houghton Mifflin is no friend of Ronald McDonald's. The publisher—which in 2001 released Eric Schlosser's now-definitive polemic on America's love affair with the greasy spoon, Fast Food Nation—was prepared to deal with controversy when it adapted that book for kids. But the house has been overwhelmed, and a little shocked, by the fast food industry's response to Chew on This. Schlosser's kid-friendly deconstruction of the evils of Big Macs, Big Gulps and Supersize fries, which he co-authored with Charles Wilson, has drummed up a healthy interest among kids. Released early last month the book—which will be No. 4 on The New York Times children’s chapter bestseller for June 4—has proven a big enough concern among certain food companies that Web sites have sprung up attempting to discredit the title and its authors. After The Wall Street Journal reported in April about the extreme tactics being used against the book, Houghton has decided to fight back.

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Eric Scholsser's Fast Food Nation is one of the best books I've ever read. With an overall theme about the fast food industry as context, the book successfully indicts shoddy labor law, economic class injustices, consumerism, predatory advertising, mega-agribusiness, the myth of the American dream, and, of course, the wildly unhealthy nature of fast food itself. And Schlosser's writing style is so plain and simple, yet immensely compelling, that it is the perfect vehicle for educating Americans about how so much of what they've been told about "the way things are" is, in fact, quite wrong. It should be required reading for all college freshmen.

Of course, the book's strength also makes it a target. Now that Schosser has adapted it for children it is particularly dangerous to the fast food industry: the grown-up book takes great pains to illustrate how America's massive capitalist PR machine starts to work on Americans while they are very young, instilling corrupt values so early that they are not easily dislodged later in life. The children's book strikes me as being the first real threat that this strategy has faced. That is, the reason they're going after Chew on This is because it's telling the truth to the kids to whom McDonald's and the like are always lying.

It's nice to see that Schlosser's publisher is fighting back--I hope they have the stomach for it.

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