Chew On This is a book written by Eric Schlosser and Chris Wilson.  It is the pre-teen/young adult version of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a book about fast food and where it comes from, what's in it and what it can do to you.  It is a book that I wholeheartedly recommend for children either as a family reading activity or a really special impromptu gift.  Let's be real, teenagers probably want that cell phone or iPod more as a birthday gift!  I have read both books and I was very impressed with how the authors rewrote the original book in a way that will make a strong impression on children without being inappropriate.

The book covers how fast food companies design their advertising campaigns, have changed the way chickens are bred, slaughterhouses hire, potatoes are grown, Americans eat and much more.  It also exposes what has happened to this country's cattle ranchers and chicken farmers and most importantly how much power fast food corporations exert over the United States Congress.  The bottom line is once you read either version of this book, you should realize that as individuals we can wrestle that power away from these companies in order to make changes in our food supply.  We have the power and it rests in our pockets and with our feet!

I would like to share with you one passage from the book about how potatoes become French fries for McDonald's.  While a long passage it gingerly introduces you to the book and it should make you realize how little respect these companies have for the decent public they serve and the land itself.  I'm sure even the Jetsons would be stunned:

"The Lamb Weston factory in American Falls, Idaho, makes French fries for McDonald's and other fast food chains.  Its the sort of place that Walt Disney would have adored.  It uses the latest science and technology to achieve better living through frozen food.  You can hardly believe how many fries this one factory produces.  It goes through about 4 million pounds of potatoes every day."

"Lamb Weston was founded in 1950 by F. Gilbert Lamb, the inventor of a crucial piece of French fry-making technology.  The Lamb Water Gun-Knife uses a high pressure hose to shoot potatoes at a speed of 117 feet per second through a grid of sharpened steel blades, thereby creating perfectly sliced French fries.  After coming up with the idea, Gil Lamb tested the first Water Gun knife in a company parking lot, shooting potatoes out  of a fire hose.  Lamb Weston now manufactures more than 130 different kinds of French fries..."

"In order to make many fries, the Lamb Weston factory keeps potatoes in seven gigantic storage buildings.  Each building can hold a mound of potatoes that's 20 feet deep, 100 feet wide, and almost as long as two football fields.  the buildings are cool and dark, kept year-round at a steady 46 degrees."

"Outside, tractor-trailers arrive from the fields, carrying potatoes that have just been harvested.  The trucks dump their loads onto spinning rods that take the larger potatoes into the building and let the small potatoes, dirt and rocks fall to the ground.  The rods lead to a rock trap, a tank of water in which the potatoes float and the remaining rocks sink to the bottom.  The plant uses streams of water to float potatoes gently this way and that, guiding different sizes out of different containers, then flushing them into a three-foot-deep stream that runs underneath the cement floor.  The inside of the factory is gray, massive, and well lit, with huge pipes running along walls, steel catwalks, workers in hard hats, and plenty of loud machinery.  If little potatoes weren't bobbing and floating past, you might think this was a place that manufactured jet engines or automobiles."

"Conveyor belts take the wet, clean potatoes into a machine that blasts them with steam for 12 seconds, boils the water under their skins, and explodes the skins off.  Then the potatoes are pumped into a tank and shot through a Lamb Water Gun Knife.  They emerge as shoestring fries.  Four video cameras scrutinize them from different angles, looking for flaws.  When a French fry with a dark spot is detected, an optical sorting machine shoots a single burst of compressed air that knocks the bad fry off the production line.  The fry drops onto a separate conveyor belt, which carries it to a machine with tiny automated knives that precisely remove the dark spot.  And then the fry is returned to the main production line.'

"Sprays of hot water cook the fries, gusts of hot air dry them, and 25,000 pounds of boiling oil fry them to a slight crisp.  Air cooled by compressed ammonia gas quickly freezes them, a computerized sorting machine divides them into six-pound batches, and a device that spins like a merry-go-round aligns the French fries so they all point in the same direction.  The fries are sealed in brown bags, then the bags are loaded by machines into cardboard boxes and the boxes are stacked by machines onto wooden pallets.  Forklifts driven by human beings carry the pallets to a freezer for storage.  Inside that freezer there are millions of pounds of French fries, most of them destined for McDonald's, the boxes stacked as high as a three-story building, the stacks extending for roughly 40 yards...."

Editor's Note--Lamb Weston is a member of the ConAgra Foods family.  If you would like to learn more about efforts to stop McDonald's you can start at McSpotlight, a web site that began in 1996 with volunteers from 16 countries.  The site gets a million hits a month.