Journey to the dark side: ... of the U.S. food supply, that is, in 'Fast Food Nation'.

Byline: Gary Thompson

Nov. 17--Willie Nelson joked recently that when police searched his tour bus and found a bag of marijuana, he was relieved. "Thank God it wasn't a bag of spinach," he reportedly told troopers, "or I'd be dead by now." The joke is a reference to the E.coli bacteria scare that temporarily shut down the nation's spinach growers and showed how vulnerable our food supply is to contamination. Eric Schlosser used the same harmful bacteria to make a similar point in his best-selling nonfiction book "Fast Food Nation." His expose of agribusiness and multinational burger chains was built around a galvanizing sentence: There's [poop] in the …