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f00c747
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The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.
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Eric Schlosser |
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f8a5f31
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The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.
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Eric Schlosser |
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865e3a8
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Did somebody say McUnion? [...] Not if they want to keep their McJob.
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Eric Schlosser |
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042aa45
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A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.
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social-commentary
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Eric Schlosser |
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beeafed
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The spread of BSE [mad cow disease] in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health ..
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Eric Schlosser |
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2aa63f0
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Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.
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Eric Schlosser |
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1d5f008
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Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.
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Eric Schlosser |
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72d472d
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The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.
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Eric Schlosser |
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bf4b809
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When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once workers sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment - for life. Under the program's t..
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Eric Schlosser |
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b00403f
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Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.
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Eric Schlosser |
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ab4681d
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A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants--mainly at fast food restaurants.
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Eric Schlosser |
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435e2dc
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Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.
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Eric Schlosser |
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5cfa4ad
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The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.
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ray-kroc
successful-franchising
walt-disney
fast-food
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Eric Schlosser |
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df10567
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Lowe has broken from the Christianity of his parents, a faith that now seems hopelessly out of date. The meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, really had no marketing savvy. He has been transfigured into a latter-day entrepreneur, the greatest superstar sales person of all time, who buil..
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jesus
entrepreneur
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Eric Schlosser |
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a5f6f68
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And workers who needed to go to the bathroom weren't allowed to take a break. They were forced to pee right on the slaughterhouse floor, near meat that people would soon be eating.
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Eric Schlosser |
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58baf39
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Again and again workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of crating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations and amputated limbs are difficult to co..
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slaughterhouse
meat
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Eric Schlosser |
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d01aa60
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A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that [...] 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal matter. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating hamburger meat makes you sick: There is shit in the ..
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coliform
feces
food-poisoning
usda
fast-food
meat
shit
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Eric Schlosser |
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8476ddc
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About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes--the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle--until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters.
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Eric Schlosser |
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0f556ff
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Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card. Once the officers showed him how to do it, Green requested permission to stage a black hat operation at 4-7--an unannounced demonstration of how someone could sneak into the launch control center undetected. SAC had a long history of black hatting to test the security at its facilities. Black hat teams would plant phony explosives on b..
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Eric Schlosser |
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98a617b
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The birth of the fast food industry coincided with Eisenhower-era glorifications of technology, with optimistic slogans like "Better Living through Chemistry" and "Our Friend the Atom." The sort of technological wizardry that Walt Disney promoted on television and at Disneyland eventually reached its fulfillment in the kitchens of fast food restaurants. Indeed, the corporate culture of McDonald's seems inextricably linked to that of the Dis..
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Eric Schlosser |
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34e964c
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Non a McMerde.
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Eric Schlosser |
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79ec6fd
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By 1940, there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more cars than in forty-one states.
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Eric Schlosser |
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f9a4b27
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Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food gian..
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Eric Schlosser |
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cde71ce
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The war on foodborne pathogens deserves the sort of national attention and resources that has been devoted to the war on drugs. Far more Americans are severely harmed every year by food poisoning than by illegal drug use. And the harms caused by food poisoning are usually inadvertent and unanticipated. People who smoke crack know the potential dangers; most people who eat hamburgers don't. Eating in the United States should no longer be a f..
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Eric Schlosser |
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1b77d05
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When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account. He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched..
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Eric Schlosser |
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57688f1
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Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial - and they work.
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Eric Schlosser |
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7312bd0
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In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music--combined.
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Eric Schlosser |
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6b728e0
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Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it. ..
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Eric Schlosser |
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195c2cc
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Beslenme bicimi, bir ulus hakkinda sanati veya edebiyatindan daha cok bilgi verebilir. ABD'de herhangi bir gunde yetiskin nufusun yaklasik dortte biri bir fast food restoranina gidiyor. Fast food sektoru oldukca kisa bir sure icinde, beslenme bicimimizin otesinde cografyamizi, ekonomimizi, isgucumuzu ve populer kulturumuzu de donusturdu. Ister gunde iki kere yiyin, ister uzak durun, hatta hic agziniza surmemis olun; artik fast food'dan ve s..
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Eric Schlosser |
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812a035
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The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald's should feel daunted; they're outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you.
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Eric Schlosser |
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6c55836
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As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow--dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job..
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Eric Schlosser |
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4c77b91
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What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.
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Eric Schlosser |
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91113c0
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Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea.
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Eric Schlosser |
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e368470
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Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century -- a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more..
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Eric Schlosser |
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2844b8b
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see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. We wade through blood that's ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the st..
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Eric Schlosser |
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5cfcf76
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The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines.
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Eric Schlosser |
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3dcb0de
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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year.
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Eric Schlosser |
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04e5449
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When Elisa arrives at McDonald's, the manager unlocks the door and lets her in. Sometimes the husband-and-wife cleaning crew are just finishing up. More often, it's just Elisa and the manager in the restaurant, surrounded by an empty parking lot. For the next hour or so, the two of them get everything ready. They turn on the ovens and grills. They go downstairs into the basement and get food and supplies for the morning shift. They get the ..
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Eric Schlosser |
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78ac114
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Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren't programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was..
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Eric Schlosser |
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942311b
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Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.
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Eric Schlosser |
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40e451e
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And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become "a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States."
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Eric Schlosser |
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bdafe1c
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The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.
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Eric Schlosser |
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a731adc
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Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music--combined.
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Eric Schlosser |
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23a72e2
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The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.
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Eric Schlosser |