"FastFoodNation" news and stories

Troubled by what he had been reading about his dinner, documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner embarked on a 6-year, cross-country journey to expose the nation's agribusiness industry. "Food, Inc." (see the trailer above) features interviews with authors Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and quotes from some of the heads of Big Farming from Walmart to Tyson. Kenner examines recent salmonella scares, chats with organic farmers and calls his film -- which hits the big screen next month -- "entertaining and hard-hitting." We caught up by phone with Kenner in L.A. to chat mutant chicken nuggets, Oprah's legal issues and his quest to leave you "delightfully disturbed."

What made you want to make this film?
We spend less of our paycheck on food now than at any time in our history, which is great, but it also comes at a great cost to us ... I made a film that I hope will leave you delightfully disturbed.

What do you mean by "a great cost to us"?
One out of every three babies born after 2000 will develop early onset diabetes. A lot of that is attributed to corn and corn byproducts. We can't sustain that. There are environmental costs and ultimately it is a cost to the consumer. You might be paying less money, but you are paying additional [health] costs that are becoming very, very expensive.

Men in suits, their strawberries and Oprah after the jump.

Before there was Supersize Me, before Eric Schlosser penned Fast Food Nation, Matt Malmgren was busy acquiring Big Macs for his Burger Museum. According to a video that has spread like wildfire throughout the blogosphere, Malmgren purchased two McDonald's hamburgers on Jan. 1, 1989. He ate one and placed the other in his jacket pocket and forgot about it. A year later the video tells us in large red text "It looked and smelled EXACTLY the same!"

Since nobody believed him, gasp, he proceeded to amass more burgers and now has the world's largest, and probably the only, collection of
Immortal Big Macs, double cheeseburgers and hamburgers. As an ominous soundtrack plays, the video lists the "secret ingredients" that make such immortality possible. Among them are 1,1,1-trichloroethane, chloroform, ethyl benzene, styrene and toluene. In the interest of full disclosure, it also notes that the ingredients were taken from the FDA's report on pesticide residues in fast food. The Web site that hosts the video even has directions on how to make your own Immortal Hamburger. It bears pointing out the Web site, Best Day Ever, is a promotional vehicle for a raw foods guru. [via Neatorama]

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Fast Food Nation, the movie based on Eric Schlosser's book about America's food industry in relation to fast food, is currently in production. I thoroughly enjoyed Schlosser's book, and was captured by the level of detailed research he put into the text. The movie has just been picked up by Fox Searchlight, and it will not be a documentary. Rather, it will be a character study based on facts. I think this will be an interesting movie, and a little more riveting than Super Size Me, which I thought had some biases in its execution. Hopefully they don't mangle a lot of the factual information presented in the book.