Eric Schlosser's best-selling Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, narratively maps the post-World War II demographic pattern of US food production, interstate highways, and ubiquitous fast-food outlets from McDonald's to Subway and Taco Bell. Schlosser, a contributor to Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly and a former student of the acclaimed nonfiction writer John McPhee, exposes the treacherous working conditions and abysmal pay of meat-processing workers and the growing labor peonage of ranchers enfeoffed to the meat-packing oligopoly. He juxtaposes individual entrepreneurship in the food industry to the incursions of corporate food and agribusiness into schools and other public places. Schlosser's is a narrative that is dense with facts, stylistically elegant, and narratively cunning. The problematic position of Fast Food Nation and complementary texts in literary studies, however, can be traced to its generic lineage. Because Schlosser's book describes dire c. 2000 meat-processing conditions (call it Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times meets Hieronymus Bosch), it invites comparison to The Jungle (1906). It links itself, thereby, to the narrative tradition of early-twentieth-century writers who called theirs a literature of expose or disclosure. These writers-including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida M. Tarbell-lost the naming rights to their projects when, in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed them muckrakers. Modifying an image from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Roosevelt acknowledged the prevalent filth of corruption in business and public life in the US and asserted the need to remove it with a Bunyanesque muck-rake (226). Warning, however, that those writers who relentlessly plied that rake threatened the social order and were agents of evil, he