The transcript follows. In the book, I write about a little town in East Germany, where the McDonald's was the first new business to open after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I tried to give a balanced and complex portrait of the fast food industry. I met a lot of well-intentioned, good people in the industry. The industry employs millions of people, often giving them their first jobs.
Fast food is inexpensive and convenient and it tastes really good.
So there are many positive things about fast food in the book. The most shocking thing was what's going on in modern slaughterhouses and hamburger grinders, the huge factories now producing beef for the fast food chains. I was appalled by how the workers are being treated, the dangers of the job. And I was appalled by some of the stuff that's being ground up into the meat. They obviously have emulated the fast food chains, in the way they spread identical stores to multipe locations.