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Even if mainliners aren't witnessing over their spaghetti dinners, food still plays an important role in shoring up faith. When people eat together, they also talk to each other, they develop relationships. Friends who eat together, Whitebread Protestants suggests, pray together: clever churches, explicitly evangelistic or not, use food to lure people inside. This is especially true when it comes to teenagers; savvy youth group leaders know the secret to a high turnout is free pizza.

Not least, of course, is that the burgers and fries purchased cheap at fast-food outlets are bad for our arteries. That's a familiar story—we know french fries make us fat, we know they lead to heart attacks. We know we should be home eating broccoli and tofu. (Though I didn't know that Chicken McNuggets, which "derive much of their flavor from beef additives," have twice the fat per ounce of beef patties. I imagined that chicken was the health nut's fast food of choice.)

But Schlosser does more in this Upton Sinclair-style exposé than merely scold us for our love of Whoppers. He takes us inside the horrifying side of the beef industry, a business shaped and dominated by fast food. The chapters on workplace conditions will leave readers outraged. That fast-food chains employ more teenagers than any other industry in the country, blatantly disregarding laws that limit how many hours minors can work, is just the beginning. Working conditions at Hardee's and KFC are bad, with low wages and management notoriously hostile to unions, but they look luxurious in contrast to meat-packing plants, where a third of workers are injured on the job every year.

The stories Schlosser tells about the conditions under which meat-plant cleaning crews labor read like muckraking reports from the Progressive era: "At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vicente was pulled into the cogs of a conveyor belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Lorenzo Marin Sr. fell from the top of a skinning machine while cleaning it with a high-pressure hose, struck his head on the concrete floor of an IBP plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, and died." When OSHA fined National Beef for its negligence in the deaths of several employees, the company could easily cover the penalty: $480 for each dead man.

The chapters on food quality will leave readers sick to their stomachs. Again, consider beef—not just the beef at Wendy's and Burger King but, thanks to the power and influence of the fast-food chains, beef everywhere. The problem starts, to oversimplify a tad, when cattle are fed excrement, the corpses of dead cats and dogs, and animal blood. All those substances, which naturally herbivorous, ruminating cows shouldn't be eating in the first place, carry disease. At least 1 percent of U.S. cattle carry E. coli. E. coli makes its way from the feed lots to our hamburgers; it has infected about 500,000 Americans since 1993. Most of those 500,000 are children, and hundreds of them are dead.

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May 21 2001, Vol. 45, No. 7