I just discovered that one of my favorite books, Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" is being made into a movie! Schlosser's exposé on the fast food industry is less about what you already know — that fast food is really bad for you — and more about how the fast food industry has fundamentally changed the economic and cultural landscape of not just America, but the world. The book reveals disturbing secrets about how the fast food industry both feeds and feeds off of the young, uses and discards workers, and contorts the government against its own people for the sake of ever-increasing profits.

One of the many nuggets (pun intended) of info revealed in "Fast Food Nation" is that the meat produced at packing plants for shipment to fast food restaurants in other countries has 3 times better the quality control than that of the meat that feeds our military personnel or public-school children. So there's a good chance that the burgers at the McDonald's in Kuwait (there are actually 42 there) is of better quality than the food provided to our armed forces.

The film by Texas director Richard Linklater (whose previous films include "Before Sunrise" and "School of Rock") will be a star-studded character study adaptation of Schlosser's nonfiction best-seller book. The film's ensemble cast includes Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Avril Lavigne, & Esai Morales.

Linklater's other highly-anticipated new project, the rotoscope-animated retelling of Phillip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" is due out this summer.

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