Fast food even US can't stomach

If your biggest worry about eating at a fast food restaurant is whether to order a burger and fries or barbecue grilled nuggets and a strawberry milkshake, then swallow hard and think again.

According to Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a best-selling new book that is putting millions of Americans off their deep-fried favourites, you are actually making a decision that involves biting into a slab of chemically enhanced beef made from the meat of more than 100 different cows that is probably contaminated with E-coli bacteria and almost certainly containing faeces of some sort.

Alternatively, you may be swallowing a drink containing over 60 artificial colours and flavours and nibbling at chicken that only smells like it's been near a barbecue thanks to being doused in smoke flavoured "aroma chemicals".

In a land where one in four people, from Bill Gates and President Clinton down, eats at McDonald's, Burger King, KFC or other fast food chains every day and more school children recognise Ronald McDonald than the Christian cross, the loss of appetite is stunning. So nauseating are chapters detailing how beef is transformed from cows to burgers that some reviewers admitted to skipping parts of Eric Schlosser's book that is expected to reach Britain next month.

There are stories of old dairy cows being mechanically slaughtered in factories where workers have titles like "first legger, knuckle dropper and navel boner" before their meat is laboratory tested for "mouthfeel" and processed with addictive flavourings and artificial aromas.

Once in the restaurant the food is prepared in a way that makes the stomach of many fast food workers curdle. Schlosser reports: "The safety of the food seemed to be determined more by the personality of the manager on duty than by the written policies of the chain. Many workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they'd made it themselves. One employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. Another employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. "And several employees at the same restaurant in Colorado Springs provided details about a cockroach infestation in the milkshake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw". So huge is the influence of firms like McDonald's that The Economist magazine checks currency fluctuations by comparing the prices of Big Macs across the globe. Schlosser argues that in America the quest for the perfect low-cost burger, served up with the least expense in the shortest possible time, has contributed to the spiralling obesity of the population. He says it has led to the industrialisation of cattle ranching, stopped meat-packing workers from forming unions or demanding safety standards and turned the high school children and desperate adults who serve the food into morons thanks to modern equipment that has rendered any skill or thinking ability obsolete.

However, the author does not believe that the problem is irreversible and deals like McDonald's 33 per cent buyout of healthy eating chain Pret A Manger may signal the way fast food is delivered to us in the future.

As Schlosser put it: "The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit."