It's kind of a rite of passage.

The first job, behind the counter, $6 an hour to throw a frozen chunk of "meat" into a grease pit and serve it to an impatient caravan filled with grade-school kids. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Not Richard Linklater. No, but he wishes he would have.

"I worked in restaurants that were crappy enough to be fast food, like a little crappy diner," he said. "I was always the bus boy or dishwasher. I think fast food would have been nicer, actually."

Linklater, the man behind films as varied as "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunset" and last summer's "A Scanner Darkly," is now in theaters for the second time this year with "Fast Food Nation," a fictionalized take on Eric Schlosser's muckraking bestseller. From the disaffected teen stuck in a fast-food joint called Mickey's to a group of illegals who travel north for numbing work in a meat factory, the film chronicles the various ills of the American fast-food industry.

Another rite of passage: sitting around in a dorm room, joint optional, teasing out social issues because you can. It's the East Quad archetype - self-consciously long hair, balking at economic disparities while at one of the nation's best schools on your parents' dime, refining your vegan diet.

It happens in "Fast Food Nation," with a high schooler sick of her job heading over to the local university to knock a few back and contemplating the local meat plant. As na've as it might seem, Linklater is quick to point out that it's also an ideal only seditious undergrads could achieve.

"They're specifically talking activist, political talk to some degree. They're planning some kind of action," he said. "(Think about) the freedom of that. It's one of the only times in your life you're unattached from the corporate world, and you can kind of see things clearly, identify injustice as you see it."

The first step, Linklater argues, is recognizing the problem. And the way he sees it, there are a lot of them in the fast-food industry.

"I think you're talking about a fundamentally unhealthy product," he said. "I think it'll shake itself out within a generation when it comes to food."

And it's not just what the industry is peddling. It's how it's peddling it.

"McDonald's is saying 'freedom of (our) menu' right now, because you can order a salad. Which is kind of admitting everything else isn't good for you. But you do have freedom. Not that their marketing dollars go toward that - their marketing dollars go toward lower-income people and their 99-cent burger."

There's also a silent victim here: the workers behind mass-production industries, who work for little pay under dangerous conditions.

"Our culture is now divided," Linklater said. "You're going to have moneyed people and a huge service sector as we kind of split as our culture."

What does Linklater expect his audience to take from this? What's the difference between the independent filmmaker and Joe College Student, stuck in a haze on his dorm-room floor when he could be going straight to the source for change?

There isn't one. But we all have our own vice, Linklater said, and each of us tries to affect change in our own way. Linklater's vice is film, which is why he's taken Schlosser's book and reinvented it in this way.

"I think books (and) documentary films have a better shot at specifically changing the way people think," he said. "But I think what narrative films do quite well is reflect changing times, reflect public sentiments, reflect kind of what's in the air. I don't know if they lead the charge, but they reflect what's going on."

That said, he doesn't think of himself as an activist. Or, for that matter, a political figure.

"I'm not running for office anytime, don't worry," Linklater said.

Most important, he just wants people to think. His film, perhaps more so than the book, is a cross- section of American life filled with people not radical, not polarized, but simply looking at the mechanics of the fast-food industry for the first time.

For the most part, they don't like what they see. And Linklater's betting you won't, either.