FAST FOOD NATION: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. Houghton Mifflin, 356 pp.

During the 1999-2000 academic year, 20 million American elementary school students participated in something called the Book It! program. The announced goal of the program, which is sponsored by Pizza Hut, is to encourage reading. Children who demonstrate adequate proficiency are rewarded with Personal Pan Pizzas. As Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Eric Schlosser reports in Fast Food Nation, the target audience is now being expanded to include preschoolers. Should the Harry Potter books prove insufficient incentive, a million kids will be drawn into literacy by the prospect of making their own choice of toppings.

My initial response to learning this was smoldering outrage. Yet another corporate raid on public education! School is being transformed into a concentrated market share, with metal detectors! Unfortunately, my very sincere indignation then succumbed to a daydream about using some book reports from the third grade to claim (retroactively) a Canadian bacon pizza.

The susceptibility of readers to that sort of distraction may be the toughest challenge that Schlosser faces in offering his findings on fast-food culture. The product of three years of research- incorporating interviews and reminiscences with people at all levels of the industry (from corporate founders to teenagers who take your order) as well as some marketing documents that the public was never supposed to see, Fast Food Nation is investigative journalism of a very high order. And the fit between the author's reporting and his narrative style is just about perfect. The prose moves gracefully between vignette and exposition, assembling great quantities of data in small areas without bursting at the seams.

Yet there is a problem. Fast food has worn deep grooves of familiarity in our taste buds and in our brains. And the industry digs those grooves a little deeper all the time-for example, with the Book It! program. So whatever revelations come forth about fast food- its economic impact, its consequences for public health, various unappetizing details about its preparation-the fact is that constant availability has turned it into a fundamental human right under high capitalism. As Schlosser writes, "It has become a social custom as American as a small, rectangular, hand-held, frozen and reheated apple pie."

But it was not always so. Fast food is a very recent phenomenon-a spin-off of Henry Ford's ingenuity. Schlosser quickly sketches how the prototypes of the fast-food joint emerged around the start of World War II, with restaurants by the side of the highway that encouraged motorists to eat and run. A turning point came when one of these operations in Southern California, then called the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar Drive In, cut its menu back to a few items you could consume without utensils. The meal was prepared on a sort of assembly line (another echo of Ford). What Ray Kroc added to the McDonald brothers' streamlined concept was something he borrowed from a personal acquaintance named Walt Disney: the idea of grabbing kids' attention (and holding it) by locating fast food in the universe of total fun. Enter Mayor McCheese and the Hamburgler.

The combination of instantaneous food and family entertainment yielded the single most efficient marketing system in history. Other pioneers from the 1950s were on the same track but didn't quite make it. (There was, for instance, a chain called Tad's 30 Varieties of Meals, which served customers frozen dinners they could cook in the restaurant's microwave ovens.) McDonald's established the basic model: inexpensive food of homogenous quality, tremendous corporate leverage over suppliers, continuous advertising, high-turnover jobs at low wages, a zero-tolerance policy toward unions.

Chapter by chapter, Schlosser traces the economic and social consequence of each dimension of the fast-food system-which its defenders would call the triumph of the market, though the industry is not averse to getting corporate welfare from the government. While accepting tax benefits for offering job training to their workers, for example, companies constantly strive to reduce the skill level of the work and to eliminate employees before they qualify for benefits.

Meanwhile, the profits help fortify the consumer's brand loyalty. Market researchers "send cultural anthropologists into homes, stores, fast-food restaurants and other places where kids like to gather, quietly and surreptitiously observing the behavior of prospective customers...They study the fantasy lives of young children, then apply the findings in advertisements and jingles." And chemical researchers work to synthesize the taste we associate with French fries and milk shakes.

Schlosser's account of a visit to the snack laboratories was the single most disturbing part of Fast Food Nation -- or so I figured, anyway, until reaching a chapter called "What's in the Meat." My professional responsibility as a book reviewer obliges the confession that I skipped most of this section; it was just too nauseating. Even overlooking the impact on obesity rates in the United States -- and, increasingly, the rest of the world, since it is now sold every place except maybe North Korea -- it's clear that fast-food presents a major danger to public health.

Can anything be done about it? Schlosser's epilogue is a somewhat plaintive cry for government activism to curb the market. "If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell," he writes, "tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next to elementary schools and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money." Which sounds, come to think of it, like Dubya's campaign platform. The call for state intervention could not be worse timed.

But consider this. Deciding to eat a fast-food hamburger means you have a pretty good chance of ingesting some fecal matter. Which is just not something you, the consumer, want to consider. Most fast- food purchases are made impulsively. And technologists are working in the flavor labs to keep the burgers almost addictively delicious. But anyway, now you know. There is the occasional chunk of bovine excrement mixed in there, along with the Special Sauce.

So deal with it. Or else change how you live. It really does come down to that.