'Fast Food Nation' To Become Textbook at Health High School
By REBECCA TUCKER,
A public school in Manhattan, the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, plans to purchase more than 1,000 copies of "Fast Food Nation," an expose of America's fast-food industry, by muckraker Eric Schlosser.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Margie Feinberg, said the book would be used in addition to more conventional textbooks to enhance the school's health-oriented curriculum. The high school, which has an enrollment of 1,559 students, will probably be using Mr. Schlosser's text in multiple grades.
"Fast Food Nation" has been widely read at colleges and universities since it came out in 2002 and has even been required reading for all incoming freshmen at approximately 10 colleges, but red tape delayed its emergence as a popular high school text, according to the publisher Harper-Collins's director of academic and library marketing, Diane Burrowes.
In the past year, however, dozens of high school teachers, from upstate Connecticut to central Ohio to downtown San Diego, taught Mr. Schlosser's book for the first time, she said.
"It's one of our fastest-growing adoption titles in high schools and colleges," Ms. Burrowes said.
At Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, "Fast Food Nation" was required reading for freshmen in 2002. The college picks a text each year that can be taught in multiple subjects as a way of "getting some glue into the freshman experience so that they can see the connections between subjects," an English professor at the school, Paula Berggren, said.
The national best seller's interdisciplinary nature is what makes it appealing to many high school teachers, who can work together to teach it across courses. Ms. Burrowes said that students may read it as a piece of persuasive nonfiction in English class, study its findings on the growing obesity epidemic in health class, and examine the inner workings of the fast-food franchise industry in a marketing class.
The Department of Education has issued a request for proposals for vendors of the book and expects to open bids Tuesday. According to the Amazon.com Internet site, the hardbound edition designed for schools and libraries has a list price of $23.40.
