Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a marketing executive at Mickey's Fast Food Restaurant chain, home of "The Big One", has a problem. Contaminated meat is getting into the frozen patties of the company's best-selling burger. To find out why, he'll have to take a journey to the dark side of the All-American meal.Leaving the cushy confines of the company's Southern California boardroom for the immigrant-staffed slaughterhouses, teeming feedlots and cookie cutter strip malls of Middle America, what Don discovers is a "Fast Food Nation" of consumers who haven't realized it is they who are being consumed by an industry with a seemingly endless appetite for fresh meat.