I’d been recommended to watch Fast Food Nation by a few different people now, and these are people I trust who are close to me. So this weekend, Mr. W and I did just that. I thought it’d be similar to Supersize Me, a documentary about one man’s health deterioration as he put himself through a month-long McDonald’s-only diet experiment. Instead, it’s a mock documentary about a hypothetical fast-food chain called “Mickey’s”, has characters played by real actors like Ethan Hawke and Bruce Willis, and seems more like a socio-political commentary on illegal immigration and big industries. I thought it like a modern-day version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle“, down to the details of the ankle-deep blood swept across the floors of the slaughterhouse. The plot opens with a marketing executive of Mickey’s being sent to investigate a Colorado meat processing plant, to figure out why some meat patties of their burgers are contaminated with manure. The movie audience is stripped of their American naivete along with the executive on his eye-opening journey.

At the gym today, I spent a good hour at the end of my weight-lifting training by watching the news as I pedaled away on the elliptical trainer. Coincidentally (or not), there is a current recall on ground beef that was packaged between a certain recent time frame, due to e.coli contamination. My mind went back to the movie, how the big meat-packing industry has untrained illegal immigrants from Mexico working as cheap labor on their meat processing line, and how these workers don’t understand the instructions given to them, and don’t work fast enough to keep up with the conveyor belt of meat, how they sometimes don’t pull out the intestines as completely or cleanly as they should when the meat glides by them, how intestines burst and drop manure all over the meat. How, in the movie, the executive was told that this happens “every day.” I’m glad I haven’t had ground beef for months, and haven’t had fast food in years. It’s enough to turn a girl vegetarian.