Sinclair’s work, as Schlosser notes in his book, went on to spur Theodore Roosevelt and the Congress to enact regulation in support of hygienic meatpacking practices, and of worker safety in those plants. This, coupled with major changes in America’s relationship to other countries (notably China, Russia, and many nations of the Middle East), has only underscored the corporate influence and worldwide economic interconnectedness Schlosser first traced at the close of the 20th century.įast Food Nation takes up, in some sense, the path-breaking writings of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle first detailed-exquisitely and, to some, repugnantly-the terrible conditions of Chicago meatpacking plants. The successive collapses of the first tech bubble, in 1999, of the real estate bubble in 2007, and the financial bubble in 2008, led to a serious and sustained economic decline across the globe.

But the phantom of deregulation, which was raised by Reagan and the first President Bush in the 1980s and 1990s, and which continued in large part under Clinton’s Administration, contributed to an atmosphere of loose oversight and “bubble economies,” especially in the real estate, finance, and tech sectors. Bill Clinton’s presidency was one of, largely, economic growth, of the signing of the NAFTA treaty with Mexico and Canada, encouraging free trade in North America, and of relative peace, with only small US-led skirmishes in the Middle East and Africa. Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation at the close of the 1990s, a time of great upheaval in America-although the results of that upheaval were not to impact large portions of the American public until the first decade of the 21st century.

Fast food nation synopsis