Lies with everything

You may never eat a hamburger again after seeing Fast Food Nation. You may even become a vegetarian.

This film, based on award winning journalist Eric Schlosser's eponymous bestseller (BMJ 2002;324:1461 doi: 10.1136/bmj.324.7351.1461), is far more than an exposé of the fast food chains that have spread across the world, oozing like ketchup from their American birthplace and providing standardised hamburgers and fries (chips) to millions. It describes the fast food industry's influence on what we eat, on illegal immigration to the United States, on agriculture, on globalisation, on environmental impact, on dead-end and sometimes dangerous jobs, on real estate interests, and on how middle America thinks about work.

The film's subtitle is “You want lies with that?”-a pun on McDonald's “You want fries with that”-whereas Schlosser's book was subtitled “The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.” His opening chapter described a man who most days delivered pizza to the well guarded North American Aerospace Command inside Cheyenne …