This week I choose a disturbing yet funny book called Supersized: Strange Tales From a Fast Food Culture written by Morgan Spurlock & Jeremy Barlow (and I won’t lie, I picked it for the awesome cover of a fat Ronald McDonald drawn by Ron English). This small hardcover book from Dark Horse Comics is a sort of companion piece to Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me.
Since the movie was released, Morgan has had many people tell him bucket loads of stories of what really goes on behind the counters of your favorite fast food restaurants. This book collects the best of the best of these stories and as I mentioned before, many of these are pretty disturbing. Like for instance, people eating maggot infested lettuce, swallowing broken pieces of cutlery that was in their food and having it lodge in their windpipe, and a horrifying look at factory farming. This was probably the most disturbing part for me as they take you through how cows and chickens are slaughtered and made into food. Fun fact: a single hamburger can contain parts from more than 1,000 different cows! Yum! In between these hunger-inducing stories are bits from the movie in comic form including the five ways the fast food industry hijacks your brain and a look at some popular fast food items and how they rot and deteriorate after a ten week period. I noted that the French fries look perfectly new after the ten weeks while all the other items have a putrid smell and are just lumps of mold.
As many kids in America, my first full time job was working fast food and as I flipped through this book many stories jumped out at me. However, it was the very first section of the book, Fast Food Fight, that really grabbed me, because it was a story that I and those whom I worked with back in my fast food days could have told. Basically the crew is getting ready to close up the restaurant and one tiny accident leads to a food fight between the employees. The manager, a teenager herself, comes out of the office to see what the fuss is and is ‘attacked’ by the other kids. The food fight comes to a screeching halt when the drive thru bell rings. They have forgotten to turn off the drive thru lights. Instead of turning the customer away they literally scrape his order up from … well everywhere. Pickles from people’s hair, sauce off of employees’ shirts, and lettuce that has fallen into the mop bucket. They get the order together, complete the transaction and turn off the drive thru lights with no one but them knowing the heinous story.
This stuff does happen people. I have been there and I seen some crazy shit go down behind the counters of fast food restaurants. I admit that some of the stories made my stomach a little woozy and considering this is only a comic book, for crying out loud, if you have a weak stomach for this sort of stuff you may want to avoid this book. Honestly, the book really did make me want to avoid fast food (something the actual movie never did for me). So by all means, check this book out and especially all you fast food workers out there! My review on Supersized: Strange Tales From a Fast Food Culture is Funny, Sick, and really Interesting.
Oh, by the way, you can even send in your restaurant stories/experiences to the writers of the book. You may have the luck of being featured in the next volume.