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A conversation with Eric Schlosser.
The first serious, adult book I can remember reading was Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. Ironically, I read it in high school while working at a fast-food sandwich shop. As a 16-year-old in Iowa, I was captivated by its deconstruction of systems I had taken for granted. I read it in chunks during slow periods, sitting atop a stack of pop machine syrups in the back.
Page by page, Schlosser lifted the veil on the world around me. He also planted a seed, a way of seeing the world that would forever shape me and countless others who could never see their food the same way again. In 2024, I published my own book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. It felt fitting that Schlosser wrote the foreword, because the book would not exist without him.
On September 22, Mariner Books published the 25th-anniversary edition of Fast Food Nation. Reading the book again, it’s impossible not to see this bestselling exposé of how the fast-food industry has reshaped America and the world as a modern classic. This anniversary edition includes an excellent new afterword in which Schlosser extends his indictment of industrial food and corporate power into the present. I recently spoke with Schlosser about the new edition. Here is an edited, condensed version of our conversation.
—Austin Frerick
Austin Frerick: After rereading Fast Food Nation, I was struck by how much traveling you did for this book. What was your most memorable moment or person during these reporting trips?
Eric Schlosser: Kenny Dobbins, whom I wrote about, just had one injury after another, stayed loyal to the company, and was then completely discarded. I stayed in touch with him after the book’s publication, and I tried to help in different ways, and he’s gone. His wife is gone. His two children that I got to know are gone, and it’s a story of poverty in America because they all had health issues and poor healthcare. I deliberately structured the book so all roads lead to the slaughterhouse, borrowing from Upton Sinclair the idea of the slaughterhouse as a metaphor for monopoly capitalism.
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I went in as a worker. But none of that stayed with me or haunted me the way the injury of these meatpacking workers has. These are basically manual laborers who get injured and discarded and will never be able to do manual labor again. And the whole system is so rigged against them that I think it’s a misnomer to call these industrial accidents. If you’re walking down the street, slip on a banana peel, and break your coccyx, that’s an accident. If people in a factory are injured again and again, in exactly the same way over the course of years, that’s not an accident. That’s a business decision.
AF: The Obama and Biden administrations talked a lot about reforming the meat industry. What did you make of their efforts?
ES: In terms of OSHA, I think Obama and Biden both really tried through OSHA to hold these companies accountable, and there were efforts to strengthen regulations. But OSHA has just been so gutted and underfunded for decades now. I think the food industry’s power in Washington and Congress severely limited what Obama and Biden could do, and they weren’t ultimately willing to spend the political capital to get it done. And I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a truly despicable human being, but he had the nerve to speak out about the industrial food system, and I think that really helped Trump get elected.
I would urge politicians in both parties to look at opinion polls on what Americans think about their food and support for healthy, unprocessed food in schools, et cetera. I think it’s a potent political issue that most politicians in both parties won’t go near because they take so much money from the Big Ag companies. It certainly worked for Teddy Roosevelt, and it’s an issue that’s just waiting for someone with the courage to really take it on.
AF: You discuss the emergence of MAHA in the new afterword. Why do you think it became such a powerful force?
ES: I think people care about their food, and they care about their children’s food. It’s encouraging that political capital awaits someone willing to use it in a real, disciplined way, as opposed to the MAHA movement, whose leadership is just a way to get votes for Trump. The idea that Bobby Kennedy is going to achieve anything on food other than getting the food coloring out of breakfast cereal, which is a nice thing but is not going to help much. The fundamental changes we need won’t happen in the Trump administration, when every single cabinet position has basically been handed over to industry. You’ve got the chemical industry running the EPA. You’ve got the oil industry running the Department of the Interior, and the FDA right now is headed by an attorney who represented an infant formula manufacturer in a major lawsuit over potentially contaminated infant formula. I don’t see the change coming from MAHA, but I think it’s interesting what it’s revealed about public opinion and the opportunity that awaits.
AF: As you prepare to reissue this book, what struck you most when you went back and reread it 25 years later?
ES: I interviewed countless, probably hundreds of meatpacking workers and attorneys representing injured workers and activists campaigning on behalf of meatpacking workers and undocumented workers, and in all that time and in all that immersion in the realm of American meatpacking, I never heard a single story of child labor, and I can guarantee you that if there was child labor going on in those communities, I would have heard about it. Today, not only are there some cases of child labor, but child labor has basically become endemic in the meatpacking industry. There’s a whole section in Fast Food Nation about what the worst job in the slaughterhouse is.
AF: Yes, you called this. It was the most eerie thing to reread.
ES: And to think that the worst, most dangerous job in the slaughterhouse is the one that’s now being performed by 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kids. The mantra is we’re back to The Jungle, and it’s true. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And in the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times, if you go back 40 years, 45 years, the top four meatpacking companies controlled a small share of the beef market; it was a truly competitive market. The jobs were union jobs, well paid. We ate more beef, and we had twice as many ranchers as today. So, none of the changes can be justified based on efficiency or progress.
These changes have occurred for the sake of corporate profits, not for the sake of consumers, not for the sake of workers, not for the sake of ranchers or our landscape. I am hopeful the change can still happen, but at the same time, it’s incredible that 25 years later, I’m still saying the same things. I wish the book were totally out of date, and I’m proud of what I wrote, but I wish it were like a historical document of antiquarian interest. And sadly, it’s not.
AF: Another thing that struck me rereading it was your visit to Plauen in the former East Germany. You wrote then that inequality and stagnation had sown the ground for extremism. I should note that in the most recent city council elections in 2024, the AfD won the most votes. Why did you include that section originally?
ES: Because I needed to show the impact of this fast-food system, this industrial food system, this culture of homogenization, on the rest of the world. The Plauen visit occurs in a chapter on globalization, and I’m so glad I chose Plauen because it wound up resonating on so many levels. I almost went to Tahiti because I was looking for the most unlikely, far-flung McDonald’s you could ever think of. But I’m really glad I didn’t do that, because it would have been clever, but it really wouldn’t be as important or as resonant as this sad little town in East Germany, where you see one ideology after another pass through it, sometimes with horrible, horrible effects.
I drove around East Germany for that reporting, and you could really feel, even 25 years ago, the way that these people had been abandoned. Firstly, the way that they’ve been treated under a totalitarian government, but then also the discrimination against people from the East and the kind of snobbery toward people in East Germany that many West Germans felt. You could just feel that it was a breeding ground for extremism. But they could not have been warmer to me, and it’s just a sad story, and we’re seeing it play out right now with the rise—the return of fascism to Germany.
AF: Notably, you mentioned an event in Tucson where someone assaulted you. Can you talk more about that?
ES: It was just a surreal experience. I was walking back to my rental car in a parking lot when I felt someone grab me from behind. Someone put me in a headlock and yelled at me, “Why do you hate America so much?” Beforehand, I was criticizing the fast-food chains and the meatpacking industry at this food conference. He had seen me, and it must have provoked him, and he just grabbed me. His wife was there, and she started yelling at him, “Let go of him! Let go of him!” I got out of the headlock and confronted him, and it was just crazy. I wasn’t hurt, but it was bizarre.
There was a time when I was speaking at college campuses and making bookstore appearances where I would have armed security with me. When I went to Indiana for a college appearance, state police met me, and an officer accompanied me until I left Indiana. These are very, very, very powerful corporations, and for all their talk about freedom, they don’t want to be criticized. But I guess it goes with the territory. If you’re going to write about these subjects, you should expect some pushback.
AF: On a different note, when did you realize this book had hit a chord with folks?
ES: The first reading I did for the book was at a Barnes and Noble in Maryland. More employees than customers were listening to me. I remember a sea of empty folding chairs and a handful of employees who were either interested in the book or felt bad for me. Then I did an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and NPR stations and independent bookstores picked up the book, and it began to snowball. It really was the independent bookstores. I give enormous credit to Fresh Air and Terry Gross. The book came out in January of 2001, and George W. Bush had just taken power. In my view, he was not elected president, and people were beginning to wonder what was going on. I think the book’s timing contributed a lot to its success.
All the New York publishing houses turned it down, and I got pretty much the same reaction: Nobody wants to read a book about food unless it has recipes. But Eamon Dolan, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, one of the last independent publishing houses in Boston, took a real risk on the book when no one else would. It wasn’t a hotly anticipated book that people were competing for, and no one thought it would be a success.
I also feel like I helped open the door for other people who wanted to question the food system. My book’s success made it easier for others to secure book contracts and get attention for their work. If the publishing world’s accepted opinion was that nobody would read a book on food, that was the mentality in 1998 when I was trying to get a book contract. Now there are bookshelves of great books on food, and so many important books, including one called Barons.
Anthony Bourdain, too. His book Kitchen Confidential came out maybe six or eight months before mine, and he wasn’t really critiquing the food system, but he was offering a very iconoclastic vision of what we eat. Bourdain and I even did an event together, and he was terrific. I was invited to speak with him at a fast-food convention. It was Bourdain and me against the fast-food industry, and we took them on. It was a really enjoyable experience. And then we went out to a bar afterward and just hung out. I gave Bourdain a lot of shit, and he gave me shit because he thought I was too much of a do-gooder. I gave him shit because I thought he was just a hipster foodie, and it was affectionate. I really liked him a lot, and we really got along.
I never spoke to him again, and what’s interesting is that I was giving him shit for basically not knowing the world beyond Manhattan and for being too focused on foodie stuff, and he wound up being amazing. He wound up traveling the world. He wound up really creating enormous empathy for food workers and for protecting indigenous foodways and food cultures.
AF: We recently lost Wendell Berry. I know you interviewed him at Johns Hopkins University a few years ago. How has his work shaped you and this book?
ES: I think Wendell is one of our greatest writers, and what’s even more impressive about him is that he was not only a great writer but also a great man. Those two qualities so rarely coexist. He was just funny, self-deprecating, and profound. I had the great privilege not only of reading his work and benefiting from it, but also of sitting at the table with him and seeing in him a role model not only for how to write but also for how to be and how to treat the people around you.
AF: In a May 2011 interview at the 92nd Street Y, you compared the fast-food industry to the British Empire just before World War I, describing it as powerful yet rife with contradictions that would lead to its undoing. How would you describe it now?
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ES: Gosh, I have absolutely no memory of saying that or of that analogy. But damn, it’s pretty good. It’s kind of playing out in the data. I would say the fast-food industry is like the British Empire right before World War II. Why? It’s still holding on to all that territory, and the British Empire got bigger after World War I. It got all this territory in the Middle East, and yet its foundation was really weak. We’re now seeing the enormous cost, and the next system will be more sustainable.
AF: We know the oligarchs are in full control right now in DC, but what can folks do locally to fight back?
ES: Do not give your money to these fast-food chains or to the industrial meat system. To the degree that you can, buy local and buy from smaller companies, and you’re supporting a different system. It’s easier for me to do this along the central coast of California than it is in Minnesota, where, in the winter, it’s tough to buy fruits and vegetables locally. But I think that every dollar is a vote for a certain company, a certain system. However, I really don’t think we can shop our way out of this situation. I think you have to be an enlightened consumer, but you also have to be a citizen involved in the political process. And I just mentioned Minnesota. The way the people of Minnesota stood up to ICE was profoundly inspiring, and I think that’s a model of how ordinary people can defy authoritarian and totalitarian systems.
AF: Finally, could you tell us about your next book?
ES: My next book has been in the works for decades. I’ve been visiting prisons throughout the United States since the early 1990s, and my next book is about what we’ve chosen to do to the poor, people of color, and people with mental health issues.
I think what I’ve been doing is writing America’s history in my lifetime. The fast-food industry rose to power in my lifetime, and so did the prison system. When I was a kid, we were closing prisons throughout the United States. Ronald Reagan, as the governor of California, not only proudly closed prisons but was also responsible for the first prisoners’ Bill of Rights. You just need to go back to the 1980s, when all these authoritarian systems were renewed.
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