A Taste of Bile

Review by Mike Gange
Don't Eat This Book
By Morgan Spurlock
Putnam, $31.00, 309 pages


If, in one sitting, you took in everything Morgan Spurlock says in Don't Eat
This Book, you would get very sick. Even consuming Spurlock's work in small
bites will give you indigestion.  At the very least, it will leave you
feeling queasy, and the reason is more than just ghastly grub.

Spurlock is the New York writer whose 2004 documentary film Super Size Me
chronicled the harm he inflicted upon himself, as he ate at various McDonald's
restaurants every day, three times a day, for a month. The title of the film
came from Spurlock's pledge to always accept the employees' offer to take
the larger size, the Super Size, if they suggested it.

The queasiness Spurlock induces in his book is not just the story of his
month long McDiet. To be sure, Spurlock both enlightens and disgusts us by
showing through charts and statistics how very little real nutrition there
is in any of McDonald's food products (even the salads). Spurlock's
description of his changing physical condition is also educational and
shocking: his weight ballooned up about a pound per day on his month long
McDonald's diet; he damaged his liver to the verge of cirrhosis; and, while
on the diet he developed symptoms of diabetes and painful headaches.  The
most stomach churning part of the book, however,  has to be the massive
efforts put forth by the big corporations and lobbyists who wanted to
silence Spurlock or discredit his attempts to show how bad fast-food can be.
As his film gained notoriety, playing in an increasing number of cinemas,
and generating lots of negative publicity for the McDonald's corporation,
McDonald's spokespeople would appear at the cinemas and hand out pamphlets
containing counter intelligence to movie patrons as they left the building.
In Australia, McDonald's people called radio and television stations to
demand equal time after Spurlock was on the air. In Japan, the corporation
managed to keep him off the air, by threatening to withdraw their
advertising.

Also unsettling is when Spurlock shows the U.S. National Schools Lunch
Program (NSLP), which serves some 26 million school children every school
day, to be an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ensuring that
farmers are paid for their surpluses which would ordinarily be called
spoilage. Spurlock then lists the honchos who work for the USDA and who are
supposedly seeing that students don't go to school hungry: former Secretary
Ann Veneman served on the board of biotech firm Calgene; her chief of staff
had been an executive with the powerful Cattleman's Beef Association, the
corporate lobby for meatpackers; her deputy chief of staff was vice
president of the milk and cheese lobby; another was a consultant with an
agri-business, and another worked for Campbell Soup. All of them worked for
businesses where the profit margin was the most important; not one was an
expert in nutrition.

Throughout the book, Spurlock's tone is lighthearted and sometimes this
overshadows his serious intentions. As he did in the movie, he certainly
takes aim at McDonald's, and while the nutritional information is gruesome,
it is also a bit tiresome. Spurlock's bigger message, however, is left
unsaid and allows for a conclusion that comes out right between Huxley's
Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: not only are we supposed to
unquestionably consume what's available, but we dare not complain or even
discuss our own observations for fear of consequences. Don't Eat This Book,
then, is much more than just a tale of bad food and what it does to us.
This is a look at a state sanctioned drug. And no wonder it leaves us with
more than a bad aftertaste.



Mike Gange is a Fredericton teacher and writer.