We were a nation of drunkards for many years. And few thought much about it.

Now comes Eric Schlosser and his book, Fast Food Nation, subtitled, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Much like Rorabaugh, Schlosser uses extensive reporting and analysis to explain the ramifications of our reliance on and obsession with fast food. We drive up to our favorite grease pit, place an order, and drive off while balancing a hamburger or taco on our laps and trying not to hit another car.

But do we ever think about the hidden pyramid that lies below that neon-tipped summit? Do we ever think about what weíre eating, who produced it, who prepared it, and what this has come to mean for us as a society?

Heck, no. We just grab the food and run. But this reliance on fast food has created circumstances as profound as those which Rorabaugh described in his book. We are a nation of fast-food drunkards, and we hardly give it a second thought.

We all know about the deleterious effect fast food is having on Americaís health. Obesity, particularly among the young, is at an all-time high. There are several reasons for this, but the massive consumption of high-fat, high-calorie fast food certainly is a major one. In recent years, fast food restaurants (to use the term loosely; they are more like factories) have introduced the concept of increasing portion sizes for a few cents more. We forget these portions also increase calories by significant amounts.

In addition, these foods and their new larger portions are marketed strongly toward young people. Schlosser would argue that we are allowing a few corporations to maximize their profits at the expense of our childrenís health.

Is it surprising that a McDonaldsí or a Burger King restaurant spends just a few pennies on the ingredients for pop and French fries, and then sells them at huge profits? When you pay six cents for the syrup in a $1.29 Coke, and can sell another pennyís worth for $1.49, and do it all day around the world, you are either very smart or very greedy. Probably both.

An order of Super Size fries at McDonaldís has 540 calories and 25 grams of fat, or more than three times what a typical order had 30 years ago. Through careful marketing, McDonaldís has trained us to eat what is tasty, but rather bad for us. Now, even when fast food chains introduce healthier, lower fat foods, these foods inevitably fail with consumers. We have been trained to enjoy the taste of fat at an early age, and that preference now is almost impossible for most of us to give up.

Schlosser does not stop at the impossibly high fat and caloric content of what we love to stuff into our faces. He describes what this carefully crafted national appetite has done to the meat-packing industry, for example, taking an already dangerous job and turning it into a nightmare of danger and exhaustion for, usually, poorly paid, non-English speaking workers, who are forced to work at breakneck speed to process the beef used in huge quantities by the fast-food chains. Ronald Reagan weakened an already weak OSHA inspection process, and now people are regularly injured while trying to keep up with the insatiable demand for hamburgers. Bon appetite.

Meanwhile, fast-food companies are among the biggest opponents of minimum wage increases, because they want to pay as little as possible, with few benefits, to the youngest, most easily manipulated workers they can. Hmm. Sounds like a certain newspaper I once worked for. And donít get Schlosser started on the parasitic relationship between Ronald McDonald and the marketing of products to two- and three-year-olds.

In the movie, The Matrix, people didnít realize they were living their lives in a sort of dream state, while all the time their bodies were being used to feed their masters. Maybe the next time you feel you deserve a break today, you should imagine those golden arches actually belong to a restaurant called, McMatrix.