Why the Fries Taste Good: Book Review

Eric Schlosser's chapter "Why the Fries Taste Good" in his book Fast Food Nation, effectively demonstrates the evolution of our food from a natural and unadulterated element of every day life meant to provide sustenance to an unnatural creation of chemists and multi-million dollar corporations meant to provide sensory satisfaction. Schlosser explores the origins, processing, and manufacturing of our food for consumption by the masses.

Schlosser makes the point that even from its origins our food has become less natural. The process of farming has been taken over by major corporations turning a huge profit while the independent farmer slowly slips into poverty. Farming has become an unnatural "industrial model of agricultural - one that focuses narrowly on the level of inputs and outputs, that encourages specialization in just one crop, that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, advanced harvesting, and irrigation equipment." (Schlosser 119) It's evident that the recent farming methods are far less than natural. What's a little less evident is that the economic model surrounding farming has also become unnatural. As farmers are forced off of their land due to an inability to turn a profit, they are hired by the huge companies that caused their downfall to manage what was once their land. In essence, it is a return to sharecropping. These major corporations are creating a land and market monopoly. Not only is this an unnatural state of affairs in a country where capitalism and competition reign, but it's also illegal.

The second unnatural aspect of our new food involves the mechanized processing. This process takes a potato straight from the ground and sends it through an assembly line where it is cleaned, skinned, sliced, shaped, fried, flavored, and freeze- dried in record time. What about that process sounds natural? Beyond the high-powered slicing and dicing machines and the speediness with which this processing takes place is the issue of conformity standards. Every french fry must meet certain conformity standards in order to pass inspection. Indeed Schlosser recounts that, "four video security cameras scrutinized them [french fries] from different angles, looking for flaws. When a french fry with a blemish was detected... a machine with tiny automated knives... precisely removed the blemish." (131) After processing, these potatoes have not a remnant of natural about them.

After all that processing, the potatoes hardly have any of their natural flavor and consumers simply aren't going to pay for something that tastes like cardboard. This lack of post-processing flavor spawned the flavor industry. It's an industry devoted to making you think you're tasting something that's simply not there. For french fries it's a mixture of potato and a slightly meaty quality. However, the flavor industry doesn't limit itself to french fries. No, there is flavoring in everything from barbeque sauce to chicken patties and hamburger buns. The purpose of this flavoring is to provide sensory satisfaction rather than actual nutrition. Schlosser notes that "taste is supposed to help us differentiate food that's good for us from food that's not." (122) Now, flavor is flavor for flavor's sake. It gives no implication of nutrition. The problem with this is that while our minds are able to tell the difference between good food and bad food, our instinctive bodies have yet to distinguish between natural flavor that provides nutrition and artificial flavoring that provides little else.

In the end, Schlosser shows quite effectively how unnatural our food has become. Simply looking at the ingredients on the side of a cereal box could make this point as well. The demands for faster, cheaper, and easier food that agriculture could not provide, have been met by food manufactured by man.