Fast Food Nation: what the all-American meal is doing to the world Eric Schlosser Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 270pp, £9.99 ISBN 0713996021

Every two hours, somewhere in the world, another Burger King, McDonald's, Pizza Hut or KFC opens. These businesses are what Eric Schlosser calls, among other things, "shock troops of sprawl", and his book, a bestseller in the US, is a vivid account of how the fast-food industry has changed our lifestyle, food culture and food production over the past 40 years. Along the way, McDonald's has become one of the world's largest consumers of commercial satellite photography. Why? Well, to predict urban sprawl from outer space - all the better to plan where the Golden Arches should appear next.

A correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, Schlosser knows how to tell a story, and has tapped into a darkly fascinating world that, for most of us, ends at the shiny plastic counters and drinks machines. He thrives on describing fast food's kitsch origins, its penchant for management-speak and its ruthless drive for efficiency. The cover - a stylised carton of chips pictured against a setting sun - may poke fun at the happy, all-American connotations of burgers'n'fries, but his target is altogether darker.

Much of Schlosser's account is worryingly familiar, from the horrors of the big meat-packing plants that regularly flout health and safety regulations, to the rise of obesity, to the ability of big business interests to stifle alarming reports on the growth of deadly bacteria. Britain is the largest consumer of fast food in Europe: between 1984 and 1993, the number of fast-food restaurants in this country doubled, as did the obesity rate.

But whereas here it is the supermarkets that have come under fire for their aggressive dealings with farmers, in the US it is the food-processing industry itself that Schlosser blasts. Companies such as Lamb Weston and McCain have together achieved a virtual chip monopoly by engineering a merciless consolidation of the potato industry. Other anonymous-sounding businesses, such as ConAgra and IBP, have achieved vast profits through the use of reckless tactics in the beef industry. Schlosser's chapter on the abattoirs and meat-packing warehouses is reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's shocker The Jungle (1906), which exposed the appalling conditions of Chicago's slaughterhouses and triggered a wave of new health legislation in the US.

But for all the rigour and polemical energy of Schlosser's book, which will no doubt turn some people off fast food for ever, it fails to address a simple question. Why do we still eat fast food - by the millions - when we know it is so bad for us? One answer may be the price. Fast food is cheap. The big chains have created such economies of scale that it is almost impossible to compete with them; a hot meal for £3.50 is hard to beat. Until that changes, or the public is willing to pay a little more for better food, McDonald's and the rest will continue to open a dozen outlets every day.

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