For those interested in a more sustainable food system, fast food has long been a bogeyman, thanks to its reliance on industrial food production and its negative impacts on human health — and for how it has created a template for American eating that is then reflected back to us everywhere, from restaurants to homes to school cafeterias.
Fast food has shaped this country in so many ways. As Eric Schlosser deftly laid out in his 2001 book "Fast Food Nation," the fast food industry "helped transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture" — and not for the better, most would agree. Schlosser described fast food's ubiquity as "so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life."
