Happier kid meals.

Chew On This: Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food (Houghton Mifflin, $16) is the kid-meal version of Fast Food Nation, the 2001 polemic that woke up burger-imbibers everywhere. Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, Fast Food Nation's author and fact-checker, respectively, wrote Chew On This with middle-school readers in mind. The book is short a few of the gorier horrors of its predecessor, but still tells a compelling tale of agribusiness and its environmental devastation; the mammoth political and economic leverage of the fast-food industry; and the health havoc this industry wreaks. Chew On This focuses on how fast-food giants target and impact young people, from wooing them with toys, playgrounds and characters to plying them with nutritionally void and girth-growing food (often through school contracts), to employing them in low-pay "McJobs" In the book's final chapter, "Your Way," readers are encouraged to engender change by various means, including making healthier choices. Chew On This ought to be on every young consumer's summer reading list.