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Fast Food Nation at 25

“Fast Food Nation” at 25

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: 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.

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........

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